I was reading about cultural despair and read a review article

[prototypian]

I read this in salon yesterday reviewing the book I had recently finished on cultural despair in America. Cultural despair is the idea that broad swaths of an entire culture get trapped in a world where declines are not violent crime such as revolution but are a sense that their entire life is and will always be futile and they are disposable as humans.

The review article had some interesting oiints

Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay. Some 43 million Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance. There are 10,000 bankruptcies a day, with perhaps two-thirds of them tied to exorbitant medial costs. Food banks are overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families. Roughly 10 to 14 million renter households, or 23 to 34 million people, were behind on their rent in September. That amounts to $12 to $17 billion in unpaid rent. And that figure is expected to rise to $34 billion in past-due rent in January. The lifting of the moratorium on evictions and forecloses will mean that millions of families, many destitute, will be tossed onto the street. Hunger in U.S. households almost tripled between 2019 and August of this year, according to the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture. The proportion of American children who do not have enough to eat, the study found, is 14 times higher than it was last year. A study by Columbia University found that since May there are eight million more Americans who can be classified as poor. Meanwhile, the 50 richest Americans hold as much wealth as half of the United States. Millennials, some 72 million people, have 4.6 percent of U.S. wealth.

Only one thing matters to the corporate state. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate crisis. It is the primacy of corporate profit — which has extinguished our democracy, taken from us our most basic civil liberties and left most of the working class in misery — and the increase and consolidation of its wealth and power. Profit alone has replaced morals as what is good and just as though wisdom, kindness, consideration and conscientiousness are second and can be ignored if profit is to be made.

This is the thing that makes me most want to die.

 

[SomewhatLoved]

I think I feel this.

When I was younger (like many teenagers, I think). I wanted to change the world. But as I grew up I started to realize just how big and complicated the world is, and how hard it would really be to make any grand change. The more I learn the more amazed I am sometimes that shit works at all. Sometimes things that are so simple seem like miracles once I think about the corruption and laziness of humanities. Like how the fuck are our roads not falling apart (well, at least some of them)?

I think if you went back thousands of years when human civilizations were like tens or maybe hundreds of people at best, you could absolutely change the world. But with globalization, industrialization, and modern society it's pretty much impossible. We have 8 billion people who are all connected and interdependent in some way. Because of the scale of humanity, changing anything takes an insane amount of effort. Change is very slow, and bureaucracy usually makes it that by the time a genuine attempt at good comes out the other end, it's been changed, deformed, and dumbed-down to the point that it's effect is a lot smaller than initially intended.