this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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I think most of us are resigned to this situation.
We're not good at popular organizing. We're very good at finding ways of othering factions, which the elite are glad to utilize.
We're good at consolidating power. We're not good at utilizing that power to serve the public. Hence billionaires don't even think of charity work except as a means to preserve power.
The human species may be doomed to extinction or a cap on technological progress. We may just be tribal hunters too attached to dominance hierarchy to reach into space and colonize other worlds.
Or we may be stuck in a perpetual cycle where we just form feudal empires that poison the world for another epoch.
The solution — if there is one — is sociological. We figure out a way to diffuse political power so it can't be consolidated. We fix dominance hierarchy and tragedy of the commons. We figure out a way to teach people that everybody (even the ones that disgust us) are part of the community and deserve regard.
Until we find it, we'll continue to let elites hold all the resources and poison the earth with impunity.
This is the final jeopardy question... We need to focus on how to shape society to be resistant to power consolidation. Otherwise any progress is temporary at best
From an evolutionary perspective, only the ones who survive matter.
So in that spirit, the only way to create a society resistant to power consolidations is one that actively recognizes, seeks out and annihilates said power consolidations.
As otherwise, they will annihilate everything opposing them -- as history tells us.
There are gentler social traditions to distribute wealth and power so as to avoid consolidation. Probably the post-colonial world is beyond that point.
A scary prospect, to be sure, but in the grand scheme of things.. "The secrets of evolution are time and death" as Carl Sagan said in Cosmos.
Addressing fundamental flaws in the human psyche is absolutely a worthwhile endeavor.
I get the impression that, millennia from now, it might be possible for a person to look back on what humanity was before such technology was discovered. But, I'm a product of my time. I cannot fathom how that would be practical and ethical to achieve. That said, I am absolutely open to the discussion.
Mother Anarchy loves her sons.