I remember reading something once, that the reason so many people didn’t believe in the threat of Global Warming was because there have been so many other threats they heard about that didn’t come to be.
Except, they didn’t just, not happen.
Overpopulation? Mass starvation? Scientists dedicated their lives to increasing agricultural production.
Y2K? Computer scientists put more man hours than some factories did during WWII to eliminate the potential bugs.
Hole in the Ozone? We eliminated the chemicals causing that particular one.
But none of that work was in the public eye for 99.9% of people. So, their lives went on as if there was never any threat. Thus, people slowly got it into their heads, consciously or not, that all predictions of destructions wrecking our way of life were bullshit.
This is the (exclusively) political version of that. Most Americans have lived in a largely functioning democracy for so long they don’t really comprehend that it’s possible for America to not be as it is. Sure, plenty of people wring their hands about encroaching authoritarianism, but they don’t see America just turning into a state where voting and free speech don’t exist.
I don’t think this is strictly accurate. The 20th century was rife with problems we failed to address (in part or in total).
- Lead and Asbestos were rolled out despite their known hazards and were never properly cleaned up
- Our nuclear weapons stockpile is as big a threat as its ever been. We never really solved the problem of nuclear waste disposal, either, so we’ve just got these cesspools congealing in spots around the country.
- Aggressive industrial agriculture has drained a number of major aquifiers, while industrial fishing and ocean dumping has obliterating the native marine population
- Oil spills plague us to this day, utterly despoiling major riverways and polluting the Gulf of
MexicoAmerica at record rates. - De-industrialization has stripped much of the Midwestern interior of economic activity, plunging the region into poverty
- The Oxycontin/Heroin/Fentanyl epidemic only gets worse with every passing decade and the only response we seem capable of initiating is “more cops!”
What we’ve seen over the last 40 years hasn’t been a steady series of policy wins nearly so much as a consolidation of media into the hands of a small corporately controlled cartel. It isn’t that computer bugs and food shortfalls and environmental catastrophes and even outright genocides aren’t happening. Its just that we’ve decided to stop talking about each of them in turn, as the public loses control of its independent information streams.
Most Americans have lived in a largely functioning democracy for so long they don’t really comprehend that it’s possible for America to not be as it is.
Point to the decade in which America had a “largely functioning democracy”.
Was it during the 60s, when it was open season on civil rights leaders and populist presidents? Was it the 70s, when the Nixonian War on Crime/Drugs stripped millions of Americans from the voting rolls through felony disenfranchisement? Was it the Reagan Era, of brutal police violence and race riots and MOVE bombings and the FBI/CIA in open war with anyone to the left of Tip O’Neale? Was it Clinton’s 90s and the disaster capitalism that forced a wildly unpopular series of international trade deals with the intent of dismantling trade unions? Was it the Bush War On Terror, with its blacksites and misinformation campaigns and endless wars? How about Obama’s bank bailouts followed by the GOP spearheaded 2010 gerrymanders that packed and cracked state and federal legislatures nationwide?
Where’s this democracy I keep hearing all about? I’m 40 years old and I struggle to point to a moment in my life when this country ever felt like more than a White Dude’s Caliphate.
Yep. If I may recommend a book, the violence of organized forgetting by henry giroax critiques this disinformation machine which has normalized even the worst disasters, atrocities, and social injustices perpetrated by this country especially by laundering it via campaigns like the war on terror. Really compelling read, I can’t do it justice here.
Starting to become time for people to understand that there’s not going to be a democratic way to fix this. Sometimes you need that tree of Liberty refreshed. We should be talking about Revolution.
Honestly yeah, civil war 2025 baby!!! There’s already AltGov organizations popping out… We need to organize better, to learn from Hong Kong and its residents.
A country that’s known for pillaging/genociding the native, using slavery and ravaging other countries for profit is now pillaging the one’s they convinced are living in the “greatest country in the world”.
shocked_pikachu_face.jpg. -People in the US
My blackest blackpill moment in my adult life was the realization that we ALL hold a strange little belief somewhere in the back of our minds that someone, somewhere is serious enough that they will step in if our life or the whole world starts to go off the rails.
We hold this belief, this feeling about more than politics, we think this way about our whole lives. We always carry an unconscious sensation of sorts that there’s some safety net that will catch us if we screw up too badly. That if the world gets too chaotic the “army” or someone is going to deploy and restore order.
Then there’s the people who have projected this feeling into superstition and conspiracy and believe aliens are watching us, or that lizard people are actually in control, that there’s some shadowy cabal of people with all the real power who are pulling all the strings and everything is going according to their plan even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s funny how that sounds exactly like religion if you change the characters around.
But truly, finally, realistically internalizing that there is nobody coming, that you are utterly alone, even if you have people close to you, that NOBODY is going to help you in the worst case, that NOBODY is going to lock the country down and restore order, that NOBODY will give you fair hearing and let you plead your special case if your life falls down too far, that God isn’t there, there are no angels or demons, there is no cabal. Everyone is dumb. Everyone is insecure and looking at each other for acceptance and cues what to do. We’re all children… this is a painful thing to accept and understand but it’s massively liberating. It’s like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and there’s no ground. It’s weightless falling through the cosmos.
But it’s your fall. Yours alone.
You feel this way because you’ve been intentionally individualized.
There is strength in community, but community threatens the capitalist class so they’ve done everything they possibly could to drive wedges between us.
You’re absolutely right that nobody is coming to save us. That means it’s up to us to save each other. It’s not too late.
If there’s a “they” who made me feel this way, then I owe them a lot of gratitude and gestures of thankfulness for helping me wake up and gain control over my own brain.
See, I’m not talking about economically, but I do agree that there has been an effort, if not overt then implicit, to make people feel that money will always be out of their reach. I get that and it’s not what I’m talking about, I mean on a higher level, this is a child-like belief we all carry in our lives, we just tend to project it outward into the world of sociology and politics because we tend to stay the same in life. We’re all children, we’re the same people we were when we were kids, we just have more layers of complexity piled up around that inner child.
Wicked people exploit this. Again, whether or not they consciously understand the principle doesn’t even matter, this is something we’re wired to do as social creatures, either seek protection from outside sources or exploit those looking for it.
When you start embracing the reality that at least on an interpersonal and existential level, you ARE alone and always will be, I think that gives you great strength to push back against toxic rumination and unwise social influence. It clears your mind and at least after you finish mourning something you didn’t know you were hoping for, you start finding what your real powers are, you start thinking about actually taking control over your life.
If we could impart this feeling to everyone, everywhere, we would see an overnight turn in our species. But that’s impossible. Too many people are too different and no two people would understand the message the same way. We are all the main characters of the story standing around waiting for the show to start, not knowing it’s already running and we can write the story at any time.
Decades ago I walked out of a play and had the very blackest black pill moment you describe… I was shuddering in an alleyway in a large city, weeping uncontrollably. We walk around thinking… surely there is someone who can solve it. Solve this problem or that puzzle. And then for the big issues that plague humanity, you realize… if there was such a person, they would have done this. And then the abyss opens.
The biggest and most truthful conspiracy is not that there’s some shadowy cabal puppet masters pulling all the string, but nobody has any fucking clue what’s going on and the world lives in a constant state of anarchy and our notions of “government” or “the state” is just a coping mechanism to help us believe that “somone is in control.” We feel like we need to believe in it like we used to believe in the church, until the Enlightenment of course (and we all know what that entailed.)
PS Edit - Give people bread and they will realize they hold all the power, and won’t need that sense of someone else being in control.
I do hold some hope that the Joint Cheifs have a “fuckin NO!” Line they wont cross. Like invading Canada.
I think everyone has a “fuckin NO! Line”, but for some people it’s just when they personally start to suffer.
What baffles me is that it takes them personally suffering to realize what was plainly obvious to every non-MAGA adult. You vote for the guy who said he would cut support programs you depend on and impose sweeping tariffs despite every economist predicting what would happen, basic necessities suddenly become unaffordable for you, and then it’s surprised Pikachu.