I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.
In Marx's own idea the point were class warfare is no more is when our civilization can satisfy any needs of anyone.
It would be the ultimate goal of communism, perfect equity through infinite automation of all resources.
Then they would only be art, philosophy, science and social activities.
Except, as long as there's limited resources, fighting for it is our nature. To the point of having to much if may be.
Considering how little we actually know, how much we are still figuring out today, how wrong we once were, and most definitely still are on many things, about said nature, the naturalistic argument is IMHO rather weak. The argument silently assumes too many things, at least with our current knowledge - that human beings do actually have an inherent nature, that said nature is uniform enough across the whole species to make that generalization, that said nature is inevitable and can't be evolved past or rationalized against, that it always was the case and will always be, etc.
Greed.
America is a great example of this.
In the US and Canada?
Car dependency / Car centrism.
Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.
But uh, in general, we've got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.
The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.
Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.
Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don't matter if you don't own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.
Wait til the petro dollar crashes. It's going to be hilarious
EVs are coming, no matter how expensive/wasteful, you'd always have a car option.
Greed.
Similar to this, I've got a real beef with our unresolved insecuritues we have as a people (in principle. Obviously in practise this is hard).
I feel like the insecurities that essentially, drive us, are really holding us back from meaningful progress on our legitimately hard problems with climate, energy/food distribution, etc...
We're still drawn into BS distractions and opposing teams and whatnot like a bunch of monkeys with sticks (which is apt, to be fair)
In sweden they raised the price of alcohol 10 fold making it a luxury good and not something to drain your sorrows with. I think the hardest problem to solve is human greed.
Greed is the biggest issue we have in this world right now.
It should be made to be a mental health disorder that must be treated professionally and by taking away the money not needed to operate their business.
Kill tax breaks and strip the rich with 90% taxes on everything over 5 million dollars of any money they make even capital gains and investment income.
Own one home pay regular taxes, own two double the tax, own three triple the tax and so on until no one wants to own more homes. Same goes for corpos that rent to people at above market rates using software to drive rental prices up.
Greed must be made to be shameful and punishable not accepted and desired. Robber barons like Musk and Bezos should taxed into non existence.
There's no problem in society that can't be fixed. But the problem is there's too much conclusion without proper understanding
Getting consent to creating life from a unborn child. Every humam being was raped into existence by their parents.
Rent is due in 7 days.
I don't know if that's a problem with society so much as it is a problem with reality.
...or a problem with time and sequences of events.
It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.
“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.
Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.
But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).
This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.
Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.
When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.
And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.
For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.
That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.
Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.
Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.
And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.
But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.
We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.
This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.
This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.
We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.
But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.
These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.
alcohol is especially hard to ban because it's just sugar and yeast, and you can even use natural yeast if it gets banned, and you can use fruit if sugar gets banned. While with drugs some tyrannical empire might be able to ban every single lab-related equipment and chemical (and even then, you would be surprised what people can make by themselves without anything else other then natural resources, I mean that's how we got here as a species), alcohol is such a simple recipe that it's just plain impossible to regulate effectively, and the current way of having it cheap enough that people don't brew their own but expensive enough that the 99% of the population doesn't turn into alcoholics is good enough
Populism
This is as old as the democracy itself, and we still don't know how to fix it. People are so easily driven by their emotions and stubborn about their political opinions that you only have to exploit cynically their low instincts to take the power, especially in a crisis context. And once populists are in the power, they hardly give it back.
Nearly every societal problem has a solution, but you need a medical / buddhist / marxist / approach (probably a lot of other disciplines / lenses use this approach too, those are just some ones that more or less follow this).
The only problems that aren't solvable, are things that would break the laws of physics.
As for drugs / alcohol use, lemmygrad and hexbear have a lot of good threads on drug / alcohol use, and how to view it, and handle it collectively. The USA is probably the worst example of a country to look at for alleviating the societal ills brought about by alcohol and drug mis-use, so its good to look at how socialist countries have tackled it throughout history. If you can't find a thread I'd recommend asking over there, because you'll get a lot of good answers.
Our inability to trust anyone foreign or unfamiliar. This legacy of our evolution used to be the safest way to live. No it just holds us all back.
I understand the point in OPs post, but I disagree with it based upon evidence we have available to us. I think first and foremost it is important to mention (I dont have the studies linked but it shouldnt be hard to find) that teenage drug use overall is trending downward, with that including underage alcohol use/abuse. If younger generations use it less, the problems caused by alcoholism will be less prevalent as time goes on. Secondly, weve been putting up with drunk drivers for a while but (as our younger generations have been told for about 20 years now) the consequences for drunk or impaired operation of a motor vehicle have become more and more severe. I do believe alcoholism is something that can and will be phased out given enough time. The only thing that is still a mystery is what vice is going to replace it, and whether it is going to be better or worse.
anything harder than wearing masks
Guns in America. The need to act inspires fear on part of enthusiasts to buy more guns, ammo, support politicians that bolster stonewalls to any legislation that could make the country safer from irresponsible gun owners. The lack of meaningful action while this is happening shows how screwed the nation is as a gun cult continues to grow and grow.
Alcohol abuse is a symptom of trauma. Trauma begets trauma. That's the thing never solved. Take away alcohol, it'll find another avenue.
Not to mention it occurs naturally in rotting fruit. It would be like attempting to ban photosynthesis.
Are we gonna outlaw yeast, too?
Stay away from my bread.
During prohibition in the US, there was inoculated fruit juice being sold with the warning like: "do not leave unattended for 2 weeks at room temperature, as it may ferment".
Weed is illegal in many parts of the world, as are psychedelic mushrooms.
And those are even harder to make consumable than fruit literally fermenting on a tree, or yeast getting into some sugary drink.
So unless we’re gonna get rid of leavened bread and cut down every Marula tree we’re not getting rid of alcohol.
Sometimes alcohol abuse is just addiction. Trauma soon follows, though.
Crime. There'll never be a world without it and at some point society will have to realize that there's an "acceptable level of crime", beyond which any further measures to reduce it would be unacceptably authoritarian.
Fix poverty and you fix crime. I mean there will always be people with severe mental disorders that make them violent or deadly, but this could also be potentially handled by making complete mental health check ups part of universal healthcare. People who are likely to become violent could be separated from the population and potentially cured.
I remember the case of a 6 year old girl who was adopted from a situation of severe abuse, violent, sexual, and neglect. She became a violence obsessed psychopath. She kept trying to stick needles in herself along with other self harm behaviors. She attacked her adoptive parents with a knife. After this they locked her in her room at night and put a lock on their bedroom door. She attempted to kill her brother, and tortured and killed animals.
There is a documentary about her called Child of Rage. Warning - this is extremely disturbing.
Eventually, as no progress was being made, she went to live with a therapist for intense behavior modification therapy. She was cured without the use of drugs. Now she is a successful RN and author.
I went way off track here but I wanted to reemphasize that poverty is the source of the vast majority of crime, and even the most broken psychopaths can be cured.
End poverty, end child abuse, end crime. End capitalism.
Ending poverty would certainly help, but I disagree that crime would be fixed. People commit crimes for many reason that aren't related to poverty. Envy, hatred, love, sexual desire, religious fanaticism, political extremism etc. Crimes like murder and rape often have motives completely unrelated to financial status. Not all perpetrators have severe mental disorders either.
In terms of "fixing" people who are violent, I agree in so far that the justice system should focus on rehabilitation and helping people. In many but not all cases, that can be achieved. But generally those people commit crimes first before they're identified. You propose mental health checkups to prevent that in the first place, but many people who are in a bad mental place would not voluntarily go to those. So would you make them mandatory for everyone? That would be quite dystopian, especially with the possibility of being locked up without even having committed a crime. That's exactly the kind of thing I mean by measures that are unacceptably authoritarian. And even then, people would definitely slip through the cracks.
Religion amd the fighting it causes in it's name
Probably that many people are like exclusively emotion driven. I don't think we should all be like purely logical Vulcans. Emotions are very fast and can be a good survival tool. Like if you're waiting for the train and a bear wanders onto the platform, you don't need to wait to logically evaluate if it's a threat. Just run.
But people rely on emotions for everything. We all do this. So you have like someone telling you something factual and uncomfortable, and you just reject it.
"Eating meat is bad for the environment and is cruel to animals. We should all eat a lot less meat" makes a lot of people's emotions flare up. The facts don't matter. They feel like they're being insulted, that the other person is a blowhard, blah blah blah.
The oatmeal did a comic about this, actually: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
I think this is why we can't have nice things.
I think there are plenty of things that can't be solved, but nothing that can't be improved.
Homelessness, there are just some people who don't fit into modern life - maybe they can't be housed, but conditions could be improved.
Poverty, there is no complete solution that won't be worse than the problem (yet) but things could be so much better than they are with the means we do have.
Pollution, there is probably no way we can live with our current technology without causing pollution but again - we could make substantial improvements with the tech we do have now.
I don't really agree anything is impossible to fix. Maybe I'm optimistic but I think with enough time things can get better. As far as I know alcohol is much less common among younger people and there are more people avoiding it entirely now. Or maybe by impossible you meant really difficult.
“Random” events of “evil”. Basically I think we’ll never reach something like 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 stealing for little greed and so on. Or even 0 addiction (edit: i'm not including addiction to the previous list of crimes, i wanted to add it as another class of issues for we will never reach a true 0)
We are very very far from the ideal situation tho, there is a looot of margin of improvement
Like your alcohol thing in the post: ban only makes it worse and still now you (as US, not you OP) have a very weird relationship with alcohol with the thing that minors cannot touch it and people have to drink from a paper bag lol. Let’s say that you are not really trying hard to improve the situation. We’ll never reach 0 alcoholists but society is not in a good shape and alcohol is cheap so ye
Addiction is often people trying to escape from pain using anything they have available. It's not evil.
yes, hence why i used a dot before it. i guess it's not clear and i should edit
tell me if it's better now :)
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