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I had hoped that things under trump would have been much worse, so as to shock the public into re-evaluating their civic values.

ksdale 7y ago
I've always been rather suspicious of this way of reasoning. It basically goes, "Things aren't as bad as they need to be for people to change their ways, so hopefully they get worse so people change their ways." And it is implicit in this line of reasoning that there is some terrible and inevitable catastrophe waiting to befall the people who don't change their ways. (Because why would a catastrophe be worth it, unless it prevented another, worse, catastrophe?) An alternate response to "Things aren't bad enough for people to change their ways," is to revise our predictions of the likelihood of catastrophe, and eventually decide that perhaps things aren't quite as doomed as we think. For things like climate change, where we have scientific evidence of the necessity of change, it seems like it needs to get worse before the change will happen, though I still don't hope for things to get worse. But for something as subjective as civic values, it seems especially wrong to me to hope for disaster just for the sake of shaking things up. After all, there's no guarantee that a disaster under Trump would move civic values in the right direction anyway.
- runedog 7y ago
  The issue is that those in power can seize power from the people without the people knowing as long as there isn't some huge mistake. Once there's a mistake/catastrophe/whatever, those in power come under scrutiny of the public, and changes get made. So my fear would be that everyone continues on in complacency, and one day we wake up and realize we live in an authoritarian state, where mass catastrophies can occur and no one can do anything about it. I don't want people to get hurt or die, but I also don't want power to be quietly seized by the few.

ksdale 7y ago

I've always been rather suspicious of this way of reasoning. It basically goes, "Things aren't as bad as they need to be for people to change their ways, so hopefully they get worse so people change their ways." And it is implicit in this line of reasoning that there is some terrible and inevitable catastrophe waiting to befall the people who don't change their ways. (Because why would a catastrophe be worth it, unless it prevented another, worse, catastrophe?) An alternate response to "Things aren't bad enough for people to change their ways," is to revise our predictions of the likelihood of catastrophe, and eventually decide that perhaps things aren't quite as doomed as we think. For things like climate change, where we have scientific evidence of the necessity of change, it seems like it needs to get worse before the change will happen, though I still don't hope for things to get worse. But for something as subjective as civic values, it seems especially wrong to me to hope for disaster just for the sake of shaking things up. After all, there's no guarantee that a disaster under Trump would move civic values in the right direction anyway.

runedog 7y ago
The issue is that those in power can seize power from the people without the people knowing as long as there isn't some huge mistake. Once there's a mistake/catastrophe/whatever, those in power come under scrutiny of the public, and changes get made. So my fear would be that everyone continues on in complacency, and one day we wake up and realize we live in an authoritarian state, where mass catastrophies can occur and no one can do anything about it. I don't want people to get hurt or die, but I also don't want power to be quietly seized by the few.