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Sometimes people say that the fix is unionizing workers -- which, yeah, probably, eventually -- but I suspect the first step is just organizing their thoughts,
by ajkjk 2y ago
Sometimes people say that the fix is unionizing workers -- which, yeah, probably, eventually -- but I suspect the first step is just organizing their thoughts, so that people can get collectively outraged. It's way too easy at the moment for everyone to go along with injustices (like the CEO getting a double bonus while laying a bunch of other people off, like one of the top comments atm describes) just because it's hard to coordinate frustrations around them.
Society needs new morals for this new age. Even though capitalistically this kind of behavior is incentivized / almost required, humanistically it is not. Giving one person money for fucking over a lot of other people is actually NOT okay. But if the only metric by which it is judged is economic, then it seems fine. Organizing to fix things like this requires, basically, a collective consciousness (something like the "class consciousness" of yore, but that feels like an antiquated phrase from an antique age).
It is the same role that "freedom of the press" is supposed to fill (in a world where press is less dominated by strategic PR campaigns/subliminal advertisements like it is today). If people can't align their thoughts together, they can't rebel, or revolt, and the way things are today definitely merits a revolution -- hence the entrenched powers are very interested in suppressing the alignment of thoughts. (Certainly China's censorship is the best example of this, but it happens on Western internet too, in a more subtle way. Keeping everyone outraged over the other villainous political party is a great way to keep them from realizing that the daily apparatus of their life is designed to loot them.)
The other way people align their thoughts is finding a leader willing to voice them. That is, basically, what Trump has been doing, for a class of folks who are pissed about some other stuff (some of it real, but much of it deeply contorted by tricks of propaganda). Well, there are a lot of other folks without those kinds of leaders right now. Most of the people on here for instance. If anyone reading is thinking about dropping the follow-the-rules mentality and becoming an outspoken revolutionary, please do, but be sure you're attacking the real problem, not just the least-likable people who it's easiest to bandwagon against.
- yoyohello13 2y agoThis is really it. It gets so frustrating reading HN sometimes because such a huge swath of commenters just seem ok with this stuff. You have companies doing evil shit and the sentiment is basically if it's not illegal, then it's fine. There seems to be a large subset of people in this world that are still on the Medieval moral framework of "Might makes Right." With the modern definition of "Might" being money. And unfortunately, those are the people that seem to make it into power.
- 9rx 2y ago> You have companies doing evil shit and the sentiment is basically if it's not illegal, then it's fine. Stands to reason, assuming a democratic nation. The law is to the will of the people so when something is deemed not fine, they do make it illegal. There will always be outliers who hold different views, but when randomly meeting other people the chances are you will most likely meet those who fit within the majority.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoThere’s a plethora of temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who lack the imagination to see how to build real solutions to real problems without being slightly evil. This is not surprising. We’ve devalued character development in the west for quite some time.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoIt's like we need a hero to rally around or something.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoNot sure if serious or not but this impulse is very dangerous collectively. One person cannot get us out of this. Putting that on a hero absolves us from having to actually do the hard work of deciding what would be better and implementing it.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoBut that's not where stasis is. We're not even trying to get together and do the hard work because we're not convinced that we're a "we". The hero need not do anything besides be the referent of "I'm with that person," as uttered by many different kinds of people. Hashing out the consequences of "so transitively, I suppose I'm aligned with you now"... that's where the hard work is (solidarity, etc) but most of us aren't even considering that stage yet. We're still a bunch of smaller us's squabbling amongst ourselves--just how the powerful like it.
- ajkjk 2y agoLots of heroes, maybe, doing pieces of the work.