Talking to Normal students in high school and in university in Australia (considered to be an imperial core country). I realised these people just really don’t give a fuck.
Most people don’t want to gain class consciousness, they think the current system is the best they can ever have and they wouldn’t want to risk it. Or they just refuse to reconise capitalism as the root problem.
Most people are too buzy with what ever that is happening near them that tragedy someone else are suffering on the other side of the world is just not important enough for them to take any action to try and change it.
Unless capitalism serious affects their ability to feed themselves or ablity to distract them from their misery (religion, social media, hobby etc), they won’t be bothered to do anything.
That UN Climate Change but-don’t-touch-our-oil-business conference a few days ago.
It’s all getting worse and I can’t see any way to stop it.
Well, not all of it but many parts that will unfortunately affect me.
Most people are complete idiots and will rather burn the world for a bigger flatscreen TV than to save it for their children.
Catharsis. As on the individual level of “get it out of the system”, the angst and anger also needs to be let out in societal level. Seeing as where the world is heading, the Pandora’s box has already opened and there is no way of putting back the angry genie. It will become worse before it gets better.
No amount of peaceful protests and organizing peacefully will result in any amount of meaningful change. The only way to get this rat fucked world to be not ratfucked is to fix it by force in a very violent and bloody way.
Why do you think the super wealthy are so keen on robots and AI? When even the police officers can’t “have had enough” there is no rebellion possible, ever again.
This. Our President (allegedly) playing “catch me if you can”
Capitalism at its core.
Evil is inherent to the world. All light casts a shadow.
I think there’s not that much actual evil, as in pure intent to inflict pain and suffering. There is a lot of focus on short term, personal gain though. Sounds the same, but the latter has a purpose and can be controlled using that purpose.
I think evil is an underlayment, not mere will to harm, but the force that moves towards destruction. The distinction of actual evil against some psudo-evil is false, a way that it hides itself. When we deny it it’s because we fear its nearness, as we should, because it is even within us, and good doesn’t always win.
But OP was asking for cynical takes.
- The most meaningful reforms, like large-scale climate action, won’t happen until citizens present a credible threat to the owning class’s dominance, making reform the appealing compromise.
- The owning class, at least a large section of it, along with loyal reactionaries will wage violent open war before ceding power leftward. They have the option to decide if a peaceful road forward exists, and historically, then tend to mass murder citizens instead.
The boot of capitalism is on our necks, but I’m not sure my countrymen are worth fighting for. Americans may be too far gone. Maybe I should just leave.
Many of us are doing in secret and in public. Help us out where you can, and take action. If you leave then please drum up support wherever you move to and help from there. It takes us all. Have hope we are winning together!!
Capitalism made almost everything the same big pile of shit. No matter the language and culture, in the end, it’s the same shit.
The desire of intelligent, hardworking people to just live their lives and be left alone means we’re eternally condemned to be ruled by those who are absolutely unfit for the job. Anybody smart enough to be a good leader wouldn’t have the job.
If I had access to all of the televisions and radios in Imperial America, I would get somebody famous like Zohran Mamdani to read a paper detailing how the upper classes not only facilitated the rise of Fascism in Europe, but also profited from the Axis’s war crimes and survived the twentieth century almost completely unpunished. At the end, he would say something like ‘As I speak, hundreds of thousands of workers are going to seek and despoil the upper classes with the understanding that there is no other way to make them pay for their crimes, and that this course of action is far more preferable to leaving them unpunished.’
I suspect that few people, if any, would take action.
Cynics are dupes who are easily utilized by the forces which deliberately made them cynical. The foundation of conservative politics.
Meta 🤌
There’s a well-known quote about how capitalism seems inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings. The problem I have with it is that we didn’t get rid of kings. If anything, men like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, they have more wealth and power than kings could ever even dream of. All that’s really happened is that royalty has been obfuscated; they no longer need to be the face of the kingdom. They can buy elected leaders to achieve their goals, purchase media companies in order to control the narrative of the peasantry, and they never need to step in the spotlight. It makes me think that humanity will ultimately never be able to rid ourselves of these parasites; there will always be dragons.
The problem I have with it is that we didn’t get rid of kings.
Moreso that we replaced kings with a new form of ownership, and therefore new owners. And, in every era, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas - the idea of the divine right of kings seems to have been replaced with the divine right to profit, and to use “earned” money however one wants, with no regard for society.
Obligatory: everyone should read The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. (The aforementioned quote is hers.) Science fiction anarcho-comminist community depicted as having tangible benefits/detriments.
Climate change will kill q huge part of the world population within the next 50 years and we’ve known about it being a thing for over a hundred years and yes nobody could be arsed to stop it.
And stop it was literally what they could do. Cars could have gone for electric much sooner. Public transportation should have been much, much bigger. Bicycle first cities
So much that could have been done but wasn’t done because that would not make a select view anti social rich
Soon most of us will.doe from climate change effects
Humans as a whole can’t be ask to do even the smallest changes. What if you ate less meat? I’LL EAT ONLY MEAT NOW.
You think electric cars are some sort of solution? They are part of the problem, not the solution. Making things worse but not quite as quickly is not making things better.
Truth is we could never stop it without radical global abolition of high energy activities. That’s impossible given the short term gains of breaking ranks and the unpopularity of that level of denial. We didn’t have to destroy ourselves as quickly, but the path was set when we had the industrial revolution.
Are electric cars a net improvement?
I’ve heard that they are, because electricity can ve produced more efficiently and pollution can be better handled than individual car exhaustsThat’s less bad, that’s not fixing anything. There is no universe when using energy to move 1.5-3 tonne private vehicles around for transportation is sustainable. I’ve heard numbers typically in the 40-60% region for the lifetime energy use of electric vs ICE. That is not fixing any problem, that’s making the problem worse less quickly.
Less bad is good, right?
Obviously, stuff like better public transportation will be good
Electric buses, trains etcHave been hearing about China’s solar adoption and them looking into thorium reactors.
My country, India, seems to be looking more into solar too.I think it’s a correct direction. Though, the pace needs to be a bit faster
