Work toward a better world while you're hanging around

Nearly everyone thinks they're working for a better world. The conflict arises between values, not intentions. There are nihilists who want to let it die or actively make it die, but the majority of people do try to live their values and think of the world they will leave for their children and grandchildren. It's just that some of those visions are cruel, hostile, exclusionary, and require the deaths of millions to create the future that the specific faction will dominate. The prime example is "the white ethno-state." Christian Nationalism or any theocracy makes for bad neighbors both inside and outside of a nation's borders. And that's hardly a comprehensive list of political philosophies that run on death.

When people gather to chat informally about the world's problems, around the keg, the bong, or in the church of your choice, the concept of monoculture can seem comforting. No more disagreements! How incredibly bland. How fundamentally impossible. You can neither persuade nor kill your way to absolute uniformity of thought and behavior. But it's tempting. At any given time, millions of people are drawn by it. We're being ruled by a cabal of them now in the USA. One of the few things that helps us oppose them is that their visions don't perfectly align. Even on the dark side, so dead set against diversity, their own diversity leads to conflict. And these are not people who handle disagreement productively.

The reason our country has been dragged into a far-right lagoon of manure is that the right in general has been tugging that way for more than 40 years. If you want to get super technical about it, it's been since the 17th Century, with early antecedents in the 16th. Heck, even the 15th. European conquest and colonialism underlies the entire modern civilization of the Western Hemisphere. Looking down on inferior people has made us feel better about ourselves for as long as there have been people. When inferiority centers on skin color or command of a certain language it lumps masses of people into a quaking mat beneath the feet of the people with the "superior" appearance. You might respect some aspect of their skills, but still annihilate them in whatever numbers you have to when a material goal demands it, because they're ultimately inferior overall, and disposable.

Working toward a better world is not inconsistent with reducing human numbers and acknowledging that life is pain and ultimately pointless as far as we can tell. Not everyone should raise kids directly, but many of us grumpy bastards can still be helpful in a variety of ways. Remember I said "self extinction," not "self annihilation." Life can be good, and we can raise the standards of it for nearly everyone. I say nearly because some children are born with congenital diseases that will make their lives painful and short. Other people might get a little further before some built-in defect takes them down. Or a big storm hits, or an earthquake, or wildfires, or you're unlucky enough to live during a pandemic and die before we develop a treatment -- assuming we can -- you know: circumstances beyond our control.  That still leaves a vast array of circumstances that are most definitely within our control, such as how we view and treat each other.

I'm not a sociable person. But I'm not an antisocial person. If people want to gather and have fun, that's great. I prefer if it's not intrusive and destructive, but that still leaves a lot of room for all kinds of activities I find distasteful or boring. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and put up with shit because it's not your business, it's only temporary, and it's not really hurting anything. Other times, seemingly innocuous acts like leaving your car or truck idling for hours are truly antisocial when you add up all the instances of this selfish behavior that occur in a country of 340 million people, or a planet with 8.2 billion people on it. It's a lot of little things, along with the high profile big things like mass shootings, wars, and economic policies that turn the working class into beggars.

The internet and social media are full of content creators promoting community activism and local involvement. I don't ever talk to my neighbors, and they don't talk to me. It's not hostility. It's New England. I do reflexively avoid people who display symbols of the regime, but they have probably been avoiding people with rainbow flags and touchy-feely bumper stickers already. I display none of that, but I have published a cartoon or two that made me wonder if I was going to get beaten up after a public meeting. Did it do any good? I don't know. Point is, I know I'm a weirdo and not much of a conversationalist, so I keep to myself. If I see a chance to do something in a group that helps the group, I do it and then fade back. Community involvement sounds so positive and friendly and involving, and it intimidates the shit out of me. I would still do my best to pull you out of your burning car, no matter what your bumper stickers say. Then I would run away.

When it comes to voting with your wallet, how you fill it is as important as how you spend. Assuming that the human species will try to continue, our definition of success will control how cruel or benevolent that future will be. We will still need skilled workers in practical trades and in supporting roles. Compensation will depend on how we structure our economy. Arguing or calculating from existing numbers is wildly misleading to say the least, because current numbers are based on suicidally rapid resource depletion and grotesque overpayment to the topmost tier of the ownership/management class.

I tried to train myself to live within a very modest -- not to say meager -- income, but associating with normal people has lured me into the culture of routine luxury that we call a middle class lifestyle in the United States. Restructuring the scale of wealth may mean that I get stripped of what little I have, because I can no longer afford it under fair distribution of the reduced income each generation receives in order to preserve something for the succeeding generations that they create. It's a scary calculation, but the alternative is to assume that we will develop interstellar flight and find a ready supply of new planets we can deplete in our voracious quest for endless growth. Either that or just go out in a gorging, guzzling blaze of glory depleting this one.

Choose your vision and support it, or just live by impulse and let evolution choose for you.

Trump is not the problem

 While the 45th occupant of the Oval Office has dominated the news since he announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential primaries in 2015, we lost the chance to make him a one-person problem when we failed to vote against him in sufficient numbers in November, 2016. As soon as he reached the most powerful leadership position in the world, he embodied all of the hopes of the voters and the business interests that put him there. Those hopes already existed before he placed them on the throne, and they will exist long after he is gone. If you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can imagine.

When Hitler destroyed Germany with his manic obsessions, it was blatantly obvious. All of Europe was devastated by years of war. World War I failed as the "war to end all wars," but World War II succeeded as the War to Make War Inadvisable. I know it's not as snappy a title, but economic analysis bores most people to sleep. Germany reinvented itself as a bastion of tolerance because the country got to experience the ruinous consequences of bigotry run amok. If Hitler had the sense to keep his hatred within his own borders, the camps would probably still be running, in defiance of world disapproval, but global unwillingness to undermine German sovereignty. Look at how the Soviet Union behaved during its time, and how the "free world" built up arms, muttered threateningly, and stayed carefully on its own side of the line. Nukes made the stakes too high.

Global war became obsolete in the 20th Century. Warfare remains constant all over the globe, but no one with even a bachelor's degree in business wants a no-holds-barred total war for world domination. Small wars are profitable, although they have to be well managed. Big countries can pick on smaller ones, although the United States got its ass handed to it by the Vietnamese. Live and learn. Cough cough -- Afghanistan -- cough cough! Maybe not so much. But in any case the damage to a nation, its morale, its spirit, its compassion, drastic as they may be, don't damage production capacity and drain the resources of the top tier of wealth, for whom the country is run.

In 1984, George Orwell drew a broad, crayon sketch of how real global domination works. While much of the book is oversimplified, as all fiction has to be, many basic principles apply. Most notably, the common people, the most numerous, can be controlled by the information they are fed, and the necessities of life that are dribbled out in just enough of a flow to keep the strivers struggling to get their little bit, believing that their lives will get better, or at least no worse, if they just keep working for as long as they can.

Donald Trump is not the problem. Donald Trump is the visible pustule above a deep, systemic infection. You know that squeezing a zit can actually cause sepsis. Popping Trump might release a gratifying shower of pus and a momentary sense of relief, but the underlying infection would grow more entrenched. Indeed, pustule Trump was a shocking but predictable symptom of the poisoning that had been injected in steadily increasing doses since 1980. And, as we are constantly reminded, the real infection dates back to 1619, and further back, to contemptuous colonialism. The heirs to the country's worst aspects hold all of the power right now, because the numerous masses are controlled by the information they are fed, and the glorification of life-devouring work schedules that never seem to lead to that better world we were told must result from greater productivity. "Nobody wants to work anymore." Well, no shit: what has it gotten us?

Because the corrupt Supreme Court has placed Donald Trump out of reach of the law, we won't have the satisfaction of seeing the justice system work the way we were always lied to that it does: bringing any criminal before a jury of their peers, to be tried on the basis of the evidence, in accordance with the law. Until July 1, 2024, we at least could hold out the slim hope that the legal system could be used on anyone who broke the law, even though we saw it applied unequally as a matter of routine. No legal authority had officially codified any aspect of that inequality until now. With that seal broken, the tiers of the justice system may each in turn receive official sanction. The Constitution is only as good as the people who interpret it.

Real change starts from the bottom up. That's why the authoritarians shifted their focus to control at the state level at the same time that they worked diligently to eliminate federal authority. Smaller jurisdictions are easier to manage, because local voters actually have a harder time getting complete information. Sure, you can go to public hearings on upcoming issues, but who has time? Are the meetings during your work day, when you can't leave the job you desperately need for your meager income? Are they at night, when you work your second or third job, or are taking care of your family, or just resting up for the next day's toil? By removing federal oversight on behalf of ordinary citizens, the authoritarian movement guarantees that local bullies reign supreme. Your success at the local level depends on how strong local political machines are, and how dirty they can get without penalties. Like murdering civil rights activists and letting the murderers go free for decades. Authoritarian politics and organized crime are indistinguishable.