Yeah, this is exactly the dilemma we’re facing. Some days I feel like it’s impossible, our species is doomed and it’s our generations’ fault. This was the pivot point where we had the knowledge, the technology, the potential to organised ourselves to sustainably share this planet in perpetuity, but instead we chose short-term greed and factionalism.

To your opening question: in two dimensions, you can stay still in one while moving along the other.

We’re in a complex multidimensional space of political/economic possibilities, but the current discourse keeps everything focused on a single left/right dimension as though that’s all that matters. By ensuring you’re only seeing that battle, always fighting the other half of the population, they prevent any possibility of change in other directions (e.g., massive capital market reform/redistribution).

I’m not American so can’t speak to your detailed points about Republicans, but the same left/right, liberal/conservative division is happening everywhere, as well as the simultaneous acceleration of the polarisation of wealth, erosion of wealth redistribution systems and rapid destruction of our global environment for the short term gain of the ultra wealthy.

Insisting that you must constantly fight the other half of your country’s population is an error. You are being distracted and misled. So are they. You don’t win by beating them. You win by convincing them to stop fighting too.

By the same logic, the more either party wins, the more the Overton window stays fixed on the current systemic status quo being the only viable, or even imaginable system.

Both parties are unambiguously serving the interests of their respective elites. They’re just using different tactics to distract their respective audiences. In both cases the core strategy is to evoke the strong emotional intuition that sacred values are being violated. For conservatives, those values are tradition, and especially sexual norms. For liberals, it’s the protection of vivid victims.

The only actual solution is to stop fighting your enemies and start working together to actually redistribute power and reform the whole system.

Oh, worth putting out there, the other tactic I see often is to create the impression that the only alternatives are 19th century political philosophies: capitalism vs communism, etc. In reality, there is a massive space of potential global political and economic systems we could adopt, and we’re in a much better position to work together as a single species to scientifically explore that space and design a stable global system than we were 150 years ago. But we can’t get started while everyone is convinced that all they can do is vote for their team in the next election.

And the other half genuinely think that their team of bought politicians are the good guys…

Oh my sweet summer child. How have the jailors convinced you that half of them are on your side and it’s just the other jailors that are keeping you here?

Lipps is back home in Tennessee

she lost her home, her car and even her dog

At least there’ll be a lot of very relatable music…

These are excellent insights, well articulated. Thank you.

Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?

To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?

But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.

Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:

1. folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)

2. folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.

3. folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.

LOL

Joke’s good enough it deserves a comment in addition to the upvote.