The statistics are easy to find showing that a handful of billionaires control more wealth than the bottom half of the population in the United States. Extreme wealth generates its own gravity, sucking more and more resources toward itself.
The United States owes much of its prosperity to the stolen labor of slaves. When official slavery was ended, powerful men in the former Confederacy made sure that the Black population would remain subjugated. By the end of the 19th Century, powerful business interests built immense fortunes by suppressing labor -- creating a virtual slave economy -- until reformers in the government heeded the uprisings and broke the power of corporate consolidation and collusion.
Big business kept trying, and had flourished again by the 1920s, setting up economic collapse. A few rich tumbled, but the solid fortunes survived. Let the common folk bear the brunt of the decisions and follies of the powerful. It has been that way throughout history. Power accretes, life is cheap, and you're a slacker and a coward if you don't play along.
While humanity plays out its endless power struggles, we trash the environment. We keep discovering that we removed some key piece that we thought was not important in our haste.
At the moment, we are developing technology that allows the wealthy to keep tabs on us and suppress us better than ever. Any government that we instituted to keep them in check would use the same technology to protect itself. It might be okay as long as the government was staffed by people who would not abuse that power. What are the odds?
The future seems to hold a couple of unpalatable probabilities: the majority of us end up grubbing for sustenance in a global economy run by a few for the benefit of a few, and we end up in constant losing battles with the armed forces and law enforcement of the regime in perpetuity.
We can "vote with our wallets" all we want, boycotting this or that visible head of the multi-headed mega-corporations, but we're just an inconvenience for a single division or two. The major money machine thrives. We can elect progressive champions who will vote for the things that would truly improve our lot in all respects, but they will have to deal politically with the well-funded representatives of the corporatocracy.
Thinking about a real shootin' revolution? Your odds are terrible, given the global reach and vested interest of the wealthy. Forget whether you would win. The war itself would reduce the planet to a smoldering rock. This is not hyperbole based on the power of nuclear weapons. It's a mere fact about war: it pollutes and destroys without restraint. Lots of things will get blown up. Both sides are fighting for their lives with nothing to lose.
I hate to be a downer, but any future generations you produce now will be slave labor or doomed cannon fodder. But it doesn't have to be grim and sad. You've just freed up a lot of disposable income as well as relieving yourself of a moral burden. You don't have to leave, just because you have refused to give the wealthy your children as hostages. Have fun! Eat tasty food. Listen to music. Travel.
See, here's the thing: The rich will keep breeding. They'll go on for years before they even notice that we've stopped providing cheap labor. They will produce more of their privileged offspring than the top tier can accommodate. Those kids will filter down into the lower roles. Laws will have to be rewritten to disinherit them, so that they can't rebel and take over the system that their families have maintained for generations.
The wealthy themselves, mostly not expert at anything except keeping a boot on the necks of the people who work for them, will have to develop expertise pretty quickly to keep up the automated systems they paid others to invent so that they could lay off a bunch of workers. Their utopia depends on having just the right number of underlings to keep things humming. If we all refuse to help them meet their staffing needs, they lose their comfy bubble.
Lest you think we could bring about paradise on Earth just by starving out the wealthy and collapsing civilization, remember that violent coercion was one of humanity's first innovations. It isn't going away. The only way to end it is to end us.
Naturally, this is not going to be a popular point of view. I resisted it for decades. Lots of people will continue to feed the voracious appetite of the culture of power. I decided early on not to have children, but I held out the hope that a better future was truly -- though remotely -- possible. However, as years have passed and technology has evolved, life has gotten simultaneously more comfortable for the privileged and more tenuous for the vast majority of us. Many of us down here in the disposable masses enjoy comforts and conveniences that did not exist 20, 30, 50 years ago. My view of a nice world to live in was shaped by childhood observations in the 1960s and '70s. In many ways it has not changed. But generations that followed have completely different baselines and perceptions, and they far outnumber me. I was already outvoted by my own generation in making the first steps toward that better world.
The permaculture crowd seems to have a rough idea of what I had in mind and had no name or platform for, but they're locked in battle with elements in their own age group who want to put medieval religion in charge of government and make racism great again, while driving petroleum fueled vehicles in defiance of repressive science. So what progress have we made? The former "greatest country on Earth" (USA! USA! USA!) is now lurching toward a polluting dictatorship that considers war crimes to be expressions of national might and virtue. Will those forces win? I join with those who say that they will not. But the struggle to stop them delays all other progress as we ally with disillusioned former followers of the regime who are willing to defend democracy at long last, but only so that we can go back to the same stupid arguments that were dooming us before and paved the way for the authoritarian takeover in the first place.
We will beat them. We will unseat them. But they will still be around, seeking another route to power. The struggle doesn't end. A multitude will labor in obscurity so that a minority might feel like they've made a substantial difference. We need warriors, champions, heroes to sacrifice themselves in defense of all that is great and good, but we mock their sacrifice by refusing to learn how to keep it from happening over and over.
We all do better when we all do better. But starting right now, getting the resources to help the lowermost do better means taking a big chunk out of the uppermost. Thus we aren't "all doing better." The great rebalancing may be beyond the will of the sizable percentage who will see their fortunes diminish. "What's in it for me?" will take over as the guiding principle. Take over? It never left.
A growth mindset has driven humans for at least thousands of years. Why pay for what you can take by force? Why settle for your own little valley when you've produced more sons than your farms can feed, and they're getting restless?
I have lived my whole life under the threat of World War III. We have avoided it so far, but the threat remains. Fans of the Star Trek universe remind us that the peaceful future of the Federation lies beyond World War III. Like human beings need to teach themselves that dumb lesson one more time, using even more modern and horrific weapons than in the second volume of the trilogy.
With so many people designing their lives around fantasy fiction, whether it's the Bible, Star Trek, DC Comics, or what have you, it's such an ingrained tradition that we have groups of believers trying to bring about specific events described in their texts as stepping stones to the good part. Ironic when it's science fiction blinding people to the open eyed, unprejudiced observations of the actual scientific method, which could show us how to get to the good part now without the firestorms and bloodbath. But no: let's use cautionary tales as an instruction manual instead. Let's get so caught up in fantasy and cosplay that we dance right into the fiery crash that no one in their right mind really wants to go through.
We have yet to produce a complete generation of offspring that say en masse, "Hey! You people are crazy! We're not doing it!" We keep breeding rival teams to fight on in perpetuity while the whole ecosystem crumbles.
Vote with your wallets. Vote with your sperm and eggs. Tell the power-mad bastards no.
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