America is more Brave New World than 1984; people can protest the government, but if that protest rarely overcomes the inertia of the status quo, does it even matter?
Yeap. The current state of affairs is no secret to anybody. The problem is a complete lack of realistic solutions.
We won't get out in the streets. We're not hungry enough, and we don't have a culture of protesting. We pretty much think the French are uncivilized when they burn cars in the street - civilized peoples solve their problems otherwise. But how?
It's be easier if the press was somehow keeping silent, but they're not. They're scathingly vocal, if somehow distracting. The future definitely looks a lot more like Brave New World then 1984...
Would this work in a different way? 3.5% changing themselves?
Protesting to me has always felt like you are forcing things to happen, but the same bureaucracy that controls the decisions at the very top is still there.
Could 12 million Americans (3.5%) who are selfless and self-aware change the entire country around them? I would love a study on something like this, even if it is for a relatively small city/country.
Watching common Americans being abused by their government and corporations for a decade now, with very little that came out of it, except a few protests / shows / petitions - I highly doubt a serious uprising is possible.
Americans seemed to have lost their free spirit. Back in the 60s - that was a real movement. Real actions. Real spirit. Right now, most people, especially young (what's saddening), are conformists and as long as they feel relatively safe and well fed, they won't go far than writing a comment on HN... like this one :)
People will only rise up and get upset when they're denied their status quos.
Let's talk about it economically. To effect real change, there would have to be a huge shift in the number of upset and angry people. So one or two of a few things would have to happen:
1) right now, most people are working from paycheck to paycheck. They have no buffer, no savings, no freedom from their day job. In fact, they are sacrificing more and more basics just to have the privilege of a job. How do you expect them to find the time to rally?
2) Probably near half the people in the US believe they have nothing to hide and thus shouldn't care about these issues. Something very significant would have to happen to many of them to get them to take action on it. Just by the nature of intelligence, this is likely outside the realm of reality.
3) what's left after throwing all your time and energy at your work and dealing with torturous bureaucracies? Whatever it is that makes life worth living. Your family, entertainment, food; whatever it is, a person just wants to enjoy these things for the little time they have on this planet. When trying to wrangle an entrenched insititution like the US government seems like it would take an entire lifetime to make happen, people evaluate their lives and make that calculus. Most find its just not worth it.
I don't really know what the answer is except to say that for anything to happen, probably at least two of those three things have to affect most people in a negative way.
Perhaps. Protests aren't exactly revolts, and revolts aren't exactly revolutions. Until people start banding together in distinct geographical locations and drawing up alternative systems of government (or skipping straight to direct, but loosely organized, physical opposition to the existing government) it seems likely it can be contained and ideally, addressed.
That said, the current connected world has probably reduced the available reaction time between each stage of escalation, so getting complacent wouldn't be advisable.
Just a thought for those trying to figure out what's going on: If you find what the protest movements are doing to be challenging, that's the idea.
Much social change begins this way; it's like disruption in tech. People find the whole idea of it challenging to their worldview and comfortable status quo, and they (we) respond predictably - angry, scared, dimissive. It's heresy. But if the status quo worked so well, we wouldn't need social change. In some cases, people get the idea and come around and what was heresy becomes the new status quo (for the next generation to up end, upsetting the current protestors when they are older and settled). It's similar to early adoption of disruptive technology.
That doesn't make every disruptive idea, socially or in tech, good, but the fact that it disrupts your social ideas is not, in itself, problematic.
For myself, when I feel myself responding that way, I try to take it as a sign that there's something beyond my perspective that I don't understand.
I liked your post a lot, it captures a lot of the issues that frustrate me.
I don't think that violent revolution is inevitable, though-- too many American minds have been killed by patriotism or passive-ism for such a thing to happen.
I do think that there is substantial unrest and instability in our near future-- unrest and instability that could be avoided, but it would require concessions from a government content to try to fight its people before the people even show up.
Humans don't get to "change the world" to meet our imagination. All actions are contingent upon things we cannot understand. We are constantly acting into an unknowable future. The man-made world (which is a much thinner veneer than we tend to think) is the result of a roiling, chaotic process.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to "make the world better". It only means we have to think about what we are doing and stop believing that we know the solutions (or even the problems). Guess-and-check is the only way to learn things and all parts of that process (the guessing, the implementation, and the checking) are unreliable because of the unlimited contingency of the world. How can you measure the current if you can't step into the same river twice?
Anyway, the kind of utopian protest culture you're talking about is the exact opposite of what is called for. That culture is creating a generation of people who are shockingly easy to manipulate. And they will be manipulated.
Don't underestimate the US population's apathy. Until something directly affects us (as in, costs me money, or keeps me from angrily driving an SUV around, or keeps me from buying tons of crap I don't need) it's very difficult to enact change.
That said, I'm still going to the RestoreThe4th protests tomorrow. I believe in what this country used to stand for, and it's worth the fight to get it back, even if the rest of the country drowns in lethargy.
> So what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to happen?
It's not so much an "allow" as it is a "what's the alternative?" The problem at this point is so deeply rooted (in the form of life-long politicians and bureaucrats), the only solution is a full-blown reset. Unfortunately, there's no way to do that without violent revolution. Considering the scale and diversity of thought in the U.S., doing that effectively with the least amount of damage is next to impossible (too many loose cannons with mental issues). It also requires violence, which, if you take a non-aggression stance on problem solving (my own POV) then it's a stalemate.
At this point, the only "fix" seems to be atrophy and circumvention. Atrophy in the sense that you just let it all run its course and meet its eventual demise (anticipating pain and suffering as the system collapses) and circumvention in the sense that you look for ways to excuse yourself from it.
Earlier revolutions happened as part of much smaller civilizations (exactly why the American Revolution was possible—far less variables and far more homogenous thinking among the dissenting class). In a country of 300M+ people, any "revolution" is likely to dissolve into chaos no matter how well-organized or how principled its ideology.
According to studies, it only takes 3.5% of a population revolting to foment a successful revolution. I'd argue we're approaching that figure. Might take a few more years, but I could see it in the US in our lifetimes.
You're arguing a different point than I made. Legal systems are as averse to change as the large masses of society (ie very averse). They do move eventually btw, but it's more on the scale of decades than months.
What I was getting at is that protesting is not a very reliable way to effect change either. The "other side" of any protest is also trying to change the narrative and can often just wait out the protests. Look at how the various Occupy movements eventually dissolved after a few months because they weren't getting anywhere. Even the "main" camp (if one can talk about such a thing with Occupy) was eventually cleared by the police and didn't bother reforming somewhere else anymore. The gilets jaunes in France are currently experiencing the same problem.
I'd be quite interested in a way to reliably bring about societal change in a reasonable amount of time and in a morally defensible way, but I have not found any yet. Since philosophers have been debating this since the days of the ancient Greeks I'm a bit doubtful that this is the time when we'll finally figure it out.
The problem seems to be that people are very bad at what the stoics prescribed: do what you can and accept the rest.
I mean there's a very steep diminishing returns curve for most kinds of activism. You can't protest 0-24, because eventually you will run out of food, water, money, etc. Of course social networks and the constant breaking news media pours napalm on everything continuously, just because. (And yes, Trump is going to be Trump every day, just as China will be run by a paranoid oppressive power-hungry regime for the foreseeable future.)
And this kind of overdoing things, not backing down, not compromising, not accepting incremental change even if it costs people a lot what seems to be the problem. (Eg. see how some people unironically think that a big collapse is an acceptable way to get to whatever next glorious stage the world will get to. See also how most far-anything ideologies all operate as very simple recipes and try to derive "solutions" - or maybe they are better called proposals - for every problem they see. And this ideological purism is what SP seems to ridicule with contrived situations, that are allegorical - usually to an almost direct correspondence - to the complexities of reality. )
If one million people don't care about changing the status quo and 50 do, the status quo will won't change. If one person doesn't care and 50 do, it's much more likely. The status quo exists in everyone who does nothing to change it, even if they don't move to actively affect things.
It's hard to say. I'm getting closer and closer to my breaking point with every passing day. The problem is, not enough people care (yet) about what's going on. So if if a few of us drop the non-violent approach, we probably only get to be martyrs for the cause. But maybe that's OK.
The other problem is, even if we had enough people who were totally fed up with our corrupt, evil government, and if we pulled an Egypt and took down the existing state, the question remains "what would replace it?" And, more to the point, "how do you know it would be better?"
What we really need in this country is an intellectual / cultural revolution, a fundamental change in the way people thing about things...a renewed emphasis on the idea that individuals have rights and a deep-rooted commitment to the idea of inalienable rights. Until that happens, I'm afraid that if we did replace the current State, it would be - at best - a wash. And things might even get worse.
That said, one situation that I know would get me arrested, would be if I were present at an event like the infamous UC Davis "pepper spray ordeal." Or, really, any situation where cops are beating somebody down or abusing their power and hurting somebody unnecessarily. I don't think I could stand back and watch... I'm pretty sure I'd grab the first pipe or tree branch I could find, or go in empty handed if I had to, and just start wailing on one of them.
I tend to be a bit of a hot-head at times, and those situations piss me off to a degree that I can't even put into words.
I think you're right. Most people are reactive rather than proactive. In the case of long-term existential threats like climate change, this isn't an option and requires top-down, unpopular mandates that only get necessarily more draconian as the hole gets dug deeper.
Hyper individualists who don't care about anything outside their lifestyle vs. collective community participants for sustainability; easily pigeonholed with pejoratives like conspiracy nuts/deplorables vs. socialists/communists/antifa.
The related issue of power structures excessively dominated by the hubris of the rent seekers refusing to change because of self-serving greed: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK They're asking for it, and will only placate with crumbs, but will never cede power without a fight.
But that's the thing, the government has strayed so far from the people that a) it's obvious they aren't going to seriously consider the people's will other than window dressing, and therefore b) the only way this kind of thing will change is through revolution. And we're far from revolution, if ever. The gap is there.
None at all any more, but it would force everyone to a revolutionary project of re-thinking half of how our societies work - and there are a lot of people with deep pockets and heavy interest in keeping the status quo.
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