tristan

Hey, thank you for re-reading and engaging with what I actually wrote.

The one interrogation that was not solved for me is that such a change requires a tremendous amount of energy and dedication across all society’s decision-makers, and I fail to see where that energy would be sourced from when almost any forces able to institute change benefits from the status quo.

I don’t disagree that there are better theoretical systems, I just fail to understand by what miracle they would ever be realised from the starting position we find ourselves in. It isn’t just about how many of us vs how many of them it is, unfortunately. The entire world’s understanding of power dynamics, trust in money and institutions would need to shift, and after that, there’s little guarantee the same people wouldn’t come on top again to corrupt it all.

I guess my question is: how do you guard any system from human corruption, other than just honour, promises, and gentleman’s agreement?

If you make yourself a ruler and give yourself the power to stop such corruption (which fundamentally needs to be more power than it takes to instigate it), you’re effectively becoming « the good dictator », and then how can you guarantee that this amount of power will not be used for bad by yourself, or any of the people that will come after you? When power concentrates this much, it only takes one bad person to get it.

I tried watching it from the browser and it showed correctly for me… 🤔 I don’t really know what the issue might be.

Thank you for that, this echoes my sentiment.

About technical difficulties, I don’t really know. My lemmy app doesn’t seem to be having any problems, so it may be a client-related problem.

That’s very intellectually dishonest of you to reduce my argument to “100% just saying ‘we shouldn’t do socialism because it has failed in the past.’” That’s what we call a strawman argument, and that’s not what I’m saying if you read what I wrote. What I’m saying is:

1. The way power and influence has been handed out in the past 200+ years, is mostly giving it to who was able to get the richest.
2. Getting richer than 99% of the population around you strongly correlates with sociopathic tendencies, aka not caring about your fellow humans and sacrificing everything for money.
3. People with capital and influence, and people with legislative power have social ties that run at a deeper level than just “capitalism,” and a system change would not sever or alter these in a significant way.
4. As long as “the influent” know the right people, they will try, and mostly succeed at, corrupting whatever new system has been brought upon.
5. Even if you somehow magically imprison or wipe out all these people, which is morally more than questionable, as long as there are positions of power within your system, sociopaths will continue to seek and attain them, and the cycle will start anew.

I’m not a nihilist, I’m providing an observation based on human behaviour and our current system. I’m not saying nothing can be done about it, but oh boy you’re going to need way more that socialism. You’ll need a grassroots, global (aka, almost every country on board with it) movement, involving a complete overhaul of the education and values system across at least 100 years (to give time for people from the old world to be replaced), and at the same time have the current people in power somehow relinquish all their advantages and sit back to look at it. People who’ve been educated to believe the world is their oyster and a zero-sum game, sit down and do nothing while they see others thrive.

… how am I the one who’s unreasonable?

Japan got “modernised” at the end of the Edo period, bringing about the abolition of classes and a forced transition to democracy. You would think that this resulted in commoners taking back the power, but all it really changed was daimyo adjacent people becoming politicians and samurais trading their sword for a CEO seat. No major shift in influence occurred, because social ties are immune to sudden changes in governance like this.

It’s all about who you know, and people with heaps of money know just the right people to corrupt whatever utopia you can come up with. The problem runs deeper than the system of governance, as we’ve forstered a system that strongly correlates power with sociopathic behaviour for too long to be able to just overturn it like that. I don’t want to say you should give up, but looking at things in perspective, I can’t responsibly say that’s a good plan either.

but we can do socialism using a bottom-up, direct democratic, consensus based decision making approach, rather than a top-down, centralized state. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.

No you can’t. Your country has spent more than the last 200 years glorifying and giving power to whatever sociopath was crazy enough to amass the most money at the expense of everything. You really think this group of people is going to sit back without using their circle of influence to corrupt whatever flavour of socialism you come up with? If you truly believe the people you’ve willingly given the keys to will do nothing and watch the world screw them over, I’m sorry to say you’re more gullible than optimistic.

Idk about body shaming, maybe “my dick” wasn’t a warranted response to begin with?