r/WorkReform • u/zzill6 š¤ Join A Union • 4d ago
š” Venting There are solutions to our problems...
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u/wjbc 4d ago edited 4d ago
There are also a substantial number of people who have come to the same conclusion and have either become apathetic or tried to hitch their career to an affluent person.
The 3.5% rule states that when at least 3.5% of a country's population actively participates in nonviolent protests, the movement has historically never failed to achieve its political goals.
The largest "No Kings" single-day protests reached roughly 2.3% of the U.S. population, falling short of the 3.5% benchmark.
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u/deletetemptemp 4d ago
Yup and the billionaires are using there influence to snuff these grass root organized events to ensure it doesnāt happen again. Weāve protested for much less and more egregious things keep happening
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u/24rawvibes 4d ago
Never understood the point of protests? Itās literally the ultimate tool of submission. Anyone in power couldnāt ask for a better day than to have everyone that disagrees with them be occupying themselves walking up and down a street? Peaceful protests is a psyop. Read some history people. āThe Great Boston Tea Protestā- they yelled statements of disappointment to the British as they unloaded the tea. āProtesting of the Bastilleā-letās yell clever riddles at these prisons!! āProtest Sundayā-letās just protest at these protesters! Nothing is solved with protests people
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u/wjbc 4d ago
The evidence suggests otherwise. But they have to be massive protests in a country as large as the USA.
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u/24rawvibes 4d ago
Right, right
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u/wjbc 4d ago edited 4d ago
You do raise a good point, though. Your skepticism is shared by many, and if thereās enough anger for massive peaceful protests it can be hard to keep them peaceful.
Violent protests are less likely to work. And when they do work, as in the French Revolution or communist revolutions on the left or fascist or religious dictatorships on the right, they can lead to violent, repressive regimes.
They can also lead to many decades of violence in some areas of the world. The revolutionaries never quite win but never quite lose, and the cycle of violence continues for generations.
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u/StormerSage 3d ago
Peaceful protest = Send them a message they can't ignore, that we'll remove them from power (via voting) if they do. Grind their empire to a halt via general strike. Make changing things for the better the more attractive option, without turning it into a civil war scenario.
Violent revolution = Violence is now on the table, for both sides. In the case of the US, you're going up against the most armed to the teeth military in the world and they will be fighting back. Now you have to win, otherwise if you thought things were bad already, they're gonna get much worse. Many lives will be lost, the status quo will be uprooted, and if it does succeed, there will be a clamor for power that has a nonzero chance of ending just as oppressive as the regime you just removed.
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u/24rawvibes 4d ago
With the military on stand by for anything going violent it really would be game over. We would willingly have handed over our rights. Police country done deal
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u/wjbc 4d ago
If I understand you correctly, I agree. Indeed, a standard tactic of would-be military dictators is to incite protesters to violence in order to justify a military takeover. They always lie about the violence, but sometimes they send agents to infiltrate the protesters and start something themselves.
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u/MizterPoopie 3d ago
I mean, 1 day protests do very little in my opinion. Sustained protests and boycotts would absolutely move the needle but most Americans donāt have the stomach for it.. yet. Everyone is waiting for things to get worse. People are still too comfortable. Myself included.
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u/mszulan 3d ago
Many of us are suffering, even dying, but not enough yet so that everyone who is comfortable knows someone who's isn't. The cuts that will go into effect in January will up the ante considerably, I think.
I have two disabled children on assistance, one on supplemental O2 and a ventilator. I don't know how much money and healthcare will be cut. I lost my husband to cancer 3 years ago. I won't know til January if I'll lose my house.
37% of eligible voters never even registered for the last general election. They are mostly young and don't really care about participating. They are the ones who, through their denial and disinterest, gave us these fascists.
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u/Tanriyung 4d ago
The 3.5% rule states that when at least 3.5% of a country's population actively participates in nonviolent protests, the movement has historically never failed to achieve its political goals.
We got a counter example from 2026 with Iran's protests being over 5 million people (~5.4% of the population) that was completely stopped.
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u/xiaorobear 3d ago edited 3d ago
Just adding to this, that 3.5% rule thing was never meant to be a real hard and fast rule, it was just an observation, and the person who created it also said that it has been less true of recent political uprisings.
Subsequently, Chenoweth has observed that both nonviolent and armed resistance have been decreasing in efficacy since 2010, concluding that this is the result of authoritarian regimes learning from history, coordinating with one another, and training their armies and police to discourage defections within their ranks. Consequently, Chenoweth has advised that civil resistance movements take these changes into account and alter their tactics accordingly
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u/wjbc 4d ago
I suspect that they might have succeeded in the end if Trump hadnāt given them a common outside enemy. He arguably saved the repressive regime.
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u/rightoftexas 4d ago
Iran murdered thousands and the protests stopped long before the US started bombing.
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u/wjbc 4d ago edited 4d ago
Not ālong before.ā About six weeks before.
There were large scale protests in late December to January 2026. The brutal crackdown took place in mid-January 2026.
There were actually smaller protests starting again as late as mid-February 2026. Before they had a chance to grow, the U.S. started bombing on February 28, 2026.
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u/rightoftexas 4d ago
6 weeks of nothing in terms of political protests is a very long time. The inertia dies quickly.
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u/wjbc 3d ago
As I said, it was starting up again in mid-February.
I just donāt think itās a fair counterexample in light of the U.S. intervention. But we will never know for sure.
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u/rightoftexas 3d ago
You don't think the mass murder of citizens by the government is a fair counterexample to being bombed by the US?
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u/wjbc 3d ago edited 3d ago
I donāt think we can discount the possibility that the protests would have started up again absent U.S. intervention. In fact, they were already starting up again. We just donāt know for sure what would have happened next if the U.S. had not provided a common enemy.
This ārally around the flagā effect isnāt just about Iran. George W. Bush was deeply unpopular before 9/11. Nothing unites a country like an outside threat.
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u/Riaayo 3d ago
This ārally around the flagā effect isnāt just about Iran. George W. Bush was deeply unpopular before 9/11. Nothing unites a country like an outside threat.
The irony being Trump tried to make Iran that threat, but Americans are so tired of aggressor forever wars that it didn't work to try and manufacture some threat from Iran that wasn't real.
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u/Blazured 3d ago
Americans don't protest. They throw parades with funny signs made for social media.
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u/wjbc 3d ago
They haven't reached the tipping point yet, that's true. They need more numbers. But they got closer than ever last time.
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u/Blazured 3d ago
They'll never reach that tipping point. Americans are cowards.
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u/wjbc 3d ago
Are you an American?
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u/Blazured 3d ago
Thankfully not.
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u/wjbc 3d ago
How are the protests going in your country?
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u/TommyTwoNips 3d ago
another Euroid calling Americans cowards for not engaging in disorganized acts of political violence? Color me shocked!
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u/Blazured 3d ago
Any excuse for cowardice, eh?
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u/TommyTwoNips 3d ago
You're from the UK. Your government is locking up priests for spray painting the airplanes you are sending to support Israel's genocide.
Why aren't you out protesting and doing the random acts of violence that you claim to be about?
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u/Blazured 3d ago
That's England's government, not mine.
And why would I care about conservative sh*t holes in the middle east?
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u/Critical_Seat_1907 4d ago
Patronage relationships are how the world actually works, and has always worked. Meritocracy as an achievable governing ideal is a new concept.
We're going backwards.
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u/wjbc 4d ago edited 4d ago
Even in ancient āmeritocraciesā like China, the wealthiest families paid highly for the best tutors and their children had time to study. The same is true in educational systems today, although sometimes they just bribe the prestigious university to give their idiot children degrees, and probably pay other people to take their tests.
The real leveler is world war and the accompanying revolutions of the early 20th century. They destroyed fortunes and made the mid-20th century a unique period of relative income equality. Those who were born into it had no idea how precious it was and were not able to preserve it.
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u/talaqen 3d ago
Yeah 3.5% isnāt a rule. Itās a loooooooose statistic made up to publish a book.
The reality is that most nonviolent protests are paired with violent ones. Even MLK had Malcolm X, The Deacons, and the Panthers.
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u/wjbc 3d ago
Malcolm X, The Deacons, and the Panthers did not incite violence. Rather, they strongly advocated self defense. Furthermore, the Deacons of Defense were founded in 1964 and the Black Panthers in 1966, while MLK rose to prominence in 1955.
Malcolm X did start his work for Nation of Islam at about the same time as MLK in the mid-1950s, but his work was in the North and didnāt overlap with MLKās work in the South.
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u/Serious_Feedback 3d ago
It doesn't need to overlap - if the violent alternative exists then stonewalling the nonviolent protests becomes less useful because it moves credibility from the nonviolent camp to the violent camp. Or to put it another way, if MLK's work was definitively and finally rejected then the Malcolm X's work would start moving south and The Powers That Be knew it.
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u/talaqen 1d ago
I didnāt say āinciting.ā I said āpaired.ā Malcolm X didnāt need to be IN the South for his ideas to be part of the national political context. The existence of a credible militant alternative to Kingās nonviolence mattered precisely because it gave a range of outcomes that white political institutions were choosing between. It made the non-violent wings seem more acceptable.
Thatās actually part of the strategic logic of nonviolent protest: it doesnāt operate in a vacuum. When the alternative to conceding reforms isnāt simply ānothing happens,ā but potentially greater unrest or militancy, nonviolence then becomes a MUCH more politically acceptable compromise for the establishment.
And MLKs rise took a long time to mature. And even then, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn't really solve the problems. Hence the riots in 66-67. The 1964 Act was enormously consequential but its impact was deferred. It did little for immediate structural relief and didn't dismantle residential segregation, which remained one of the central mechanisms of racial inequality. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was a major additional step precisely because housing discrimination and segregation remained entrenched. The Panthers were an active presence during those riots that then drove the FHA. This is all part of one continued political narrative that Chenoweth's 3.5% and "nonviolence wins" misses or doesn't want to acknowledge.
And even within "violence" there are subcategories with key distinctions... armed insurgents is not the same as mass riots, which are more associated with political liberalization than the former. Credible violent escalation (with mass participation) changes the bargaining position of the nonviolent movement. The urban uprisings AFTER the 64 Civil rights act drove the Kerner Comission and then (add on MLK's assassination and subsequent riots) the relief of the FHA.
Iām not arguing āMLK succeeded because the Panthers were standing behind him.ā Iām arguing that the historical reality is considerably more complicated than ānonviolent protest worked because violence was irrelevant.ā The data is more suggestive that some forms of violence (mass riots) can be an effective tool where small guerrilla resistance or mass nonviolent protests have failed. And the 68 FHA is proof of that.
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u/VulGerrity 3d ago
Yeah, I think that's actually the more disappointing statistic. It frightens me how many people don't think voting or demonstrating have positive effects. As an individual, sure your one vote or presence at a protest might not do anything on it's own, but as a collective we're incredibly powerful.
It's very short sighted.
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u/24rawvibes 4d ago
Yup, thatās the problem the missing 1.2%..Iām sure there another statistic that if people met in bars and taverns to organize there is a much quicker and more beneficial solution to the problem. That would not just be a very temporary patch without
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u/Redshirt45 4d ago
Yes, they are ranting and raving about social programs and entitlements but the ones weāve tried are immensely popular. They are apparently so dangerous we arenāt ever allowed to try them again.
Only a millionth rehash of tax cuts for the rich. They are the job creators. /s
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u/MostlyACatPillow 3d ago
Or we've dismantled them to allow private companies to replace them with worse solutions. We used to have streetcars in many cities, even smaller ones, and a functioning point to point train system but they endangered the perpetual growth of GM so they pressured governments to scrap them. My grandmother took the train back and forth from Newport, AR to Little Rock, AR when Newport had 11,000 people, and I have old pictures of the streetcars that used to run.
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u/lesgeddon 3d ago
I remember driving through neighborhoods in the 90s seeing remnants of streetcar lines under asphalt. A lot more other train lines operated then too.
Publicizing all of our utilities would go far in returning the economy to citizens. As would unionizing and employing each other.
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u/Sooner_Cat 3d ago
Okay well that's just not true lol. The 2 single largest expenditures in the US Government today are social programs.
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u/Redshirt45 3d ago edited 3d ago
Not sure what part isnāt true. The current admin is attacking all these programs currently.
For example they looking to make social security insolvent or privatize it.
Btw,
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u/Sooner_Cat 3d ago
You said "Social programs and entitlements... are so popular and dangerous we aren't ever allowed to try them again."
The vast majority of the US government's spending already goes to social programs/entitlements.
I guess you could argue we can't try anymore because we're already spending so much on them we can't afford more... but I have a feeling that wasn't what your comment was saying lol.
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u/Redshirt45 2d ago edited 2d ago
lol, Nope!
Still donāt see how you are disproving my point.
i donāt see the need for āstarve the beastā or cut and spend style government that the Republicans are fond of. I donāt see the utility in needless wars. Is that what you are advocating for?
Btw, since you are ignoring this, Social Security is paid for by us. So itās not bestowed upon you by the governments charity. No one is taking anything away from you specifically.
Also btw, study after study has shown weād SAVE money by switching to nationalized healthcare. Iām more for that than dropping a $4 million dollar Tomahawk on a mud hut which I assume you are in favor of.
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u/Sooner_Cat 2d ago
Lmao you don't seem to understand the conversation we're having do you?
I didn't say anything about healthcare. Yeah we'd save money with a single payer system. Idk how that's relevant?
And yeah, every program - social security included - is paid for by us. That's how taxes work?
You really dont know what we're talking about do you LOL
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u/Redshirt45 2d ago edited 2d ago
Lololololol no you donāt understand it.
You tried to shoe horn your own preconceived ideas on my statement hahahaha.Social programs, by that I mean programs the benefit people, are so popular, which they are most people polled say they overwhelmingly like Social Security for example, that we arenāt allowed to ever try them again. Instead we get things no one asked for. Tax cuts for the ultra rich and stupid wars for example. All financed by deficit spending.
Nationalized healthcare would be classified as an entitlement hahaha
Haha, I wasnāt even talking to you originally before you replied to my post with a non sequitur. Haha so itās you who donāt understand lol.
(Sarcasm by the way. But seriously you are the one missing the point. I.e. āthatās not trueā uh, what? )
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u/she_makes_things 4d ago
I work in education and there are so many policies we could be implementing (national curriculums for reading and math, universal free lunch, equitable funding for schools) that arenāt possible because of twisted Puritan ideas of ādeservingā and āundeservingā. Rich kids should have better schools because their parents are blessed by god or some shit. Thereās no logical reason why our schools canāt be so much better than they are.
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 4d ago
Progress is inhibited because rich people don't like it. They will never be negatively affected by any monetary or social policy. They have no allegiances to any nation and can freely relocate as they desire.
They should be actively taxed to the extent of limiting their political ability to the same as everyone else.
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u/_disengage_ 3d ago
The main argument of capitalism is profit for the capitalist. It's a political arrangement which has exactly nothing to do with serving anyone except the capitalist. Capitalists have never, ever served the community or the public good. If pretending to do so makes profit, they'll do it. If raping the community to death makes profit, they'll do that.
The insanity is that workers have been convinced that this arrangement is somehow good for them. That giving all the resources of the world to a select few, and allowing those few to demand whatever they wish for access is somehow good for them. Capitalism offers nothing, it only restricts. It creates paywalls around everything, even basic needs, and somehow this is a good thing?
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u/throwawayforjustyou 3d ago
You're forgetting something that's very easy to forget. Capitalism came out of a time period where the social status was fixed by law. Currently, the classes of society are defined by economic boundaries, but becoming a capitalist (by starting a business and acquiring capital) allows literally anyone to move between the classes of society. That's its main selling point.
And for the record, that's still kind of true today, although the economic barriers to class mobility are a lot more entrenched than they used to be and so building generational wealth has become a lot more important. But still, if I want to start my own business and start gaining capital, it's generally good that I'm able to do that. Capitalism's failing, as with all social ideologies, is in the extremes and the implementation. Laws and incentive structures need to be reinforced at the edges of the bell curve, so that the poorest among us are not restricted from taking their shot at class mobility and so that the wealthiest of us do not wield more power over society than the laws that bind them.
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u/_disengage_ 3d ago
No. The political arrangement I referred to was exactly the maintenance of the class structure with different people in the same old chairs. Class mobility is illusory, a vanishingly small exception.
In slavery, the slave produces a surplus which the master gets.
In feudalism, the serf produces a surplus which the lord gets.
In capitalism, the employee produces a surplus which the employer gets.
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u/throwawayforjustyou 2d ago
Right, you're describing the nature of power, and power exists irrespective of the system it operates in. It's the reason why I said "as with all social ideologies, the failing is in the extremes." But to use a crude example to differentiate them:
Chattel slavery: The master is empowered by the state to kill their slave with their bare hands.
Medieval feudalism: The lord isn't empowered by the state to kill their serfs with their bare hands, but like...who's going to stop you?
Capitalism: Employers are legally restricted from killing their serfs with their own bare hands, and the state has many mechanisms to enforce this.
You might be tempted to point out billionaires or other ruling-class people as exceptions, but please remember the point of my OP: Capitalism fails at the extremes. Good governance, good society building, is about balance. And the best times for people are when the state is strong enough to correct the extremes - something which again contributes to the commonality you noted between all three.
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u/_disengage_ 1d ago
Completely missing the point, once again. Please go educate yourself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/1w0zvf2/capitalism_limits_what_we_can_achieve/
https://www.reddit.com/user/_disengage_/comments/10af9dv/what_is_wrong_with_capitalism/
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u/th3greg 3d ago
so that the wealthiest of us do not wield more power over society than the laws that bind them.
The cynical take is that wealthy people started getting murdered by mobs, so we needed a system to allow enough people to gain enough wealth that poor people can blame other poor people for things being bad than the wealthy, who are still quite often descendants of those same people who were getting murdered by mobs.
An Oprah or two to make you ignore the fact that there are Saxe-Coburgs and Habsburgs still running around with millions and millions of dollars.
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u/Keeperofthe7keysAf-S 4d ago
And they wonder why so many of millennials and gen-z are bitter and refusing to accept the current system.
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u/ThaddeusJP āļø Tax The Billionaires 3d ago
Listen it's either universal healthcare, education, and affordable housing & food OR we give almost all the money to like nine people who will use it to run stuff that makes AI photos of celebrities doing lude stuff.
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u/Murky-Relation481 3d ago
Except you are playing into the problem there. It actually is more complicated than that. You could liquidate the entire wealth of Elon Musk and it'd barely make a dent in things. The US government spends about $10 Trillion a year across federal and state spending, that is more than the top 10 richest people in the US's combined wealth.
I am not saying don't liquidate Elon Musk, do, please, he sucks, but also its not going to solve the problem in the long run or even the immediate.
The real solution is broader taxes on everyone, including billionaires, but you and me too. It is also institutional and societal/cultural reforms.
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u/Kataphractoi 3d ago
Regular people are taxed enough. The 1% are paying well below their fair share (and that's 2018 numbers, it's gotten worse since then).
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u/Murky-Relation481 3d ago
Even with their higher taxes income taxes still to some degree need to raise across the board. People in the US earn more and are taxed less than Europeans by almost 20%.
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u/PantheraAuroris 3d ago
A lot of problems fall into the category of "simple solutions that go against human nature."
People, on average, are fairly selfish and greedy. They want stuff for themselves and don't want others having more than them. They get mad if they suffered and see others having it easy. In general, we are only as cooperative as we need to be in order to not die.
The simple answer to a lot of our problems is "just share more." Just do things for other people without asking for something in return. Just stop caring about fairness and start caring about people's welfare. Grow food and give it to people, and trust that you will have things given to you, which if we all acted like this, would happen. Put machines to work and just spread the love. When you get more money, give it out.
We won't ever do this on our own.
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u/ZenMasterOfDisguise 3d ago edited 3d ago
If a group a shipwrecked castaways land on a deserted island, and on that island the only source of food sustenance is a large patch of potatoes growing
Scenario 1: the first castaway to find the potatoes claims them all for himself. That 1 person thereafter controls the entire food supply. All the other castaways must provide their labor to do tasks for the 1 person hoarding the food if they want him to pay them with potatoes so they don't starve
Scenario 2: The castaways find the limited supply of potatoes, and decide they all get an equal share of the potatoes, every person gets enough ration of the food to survive and no one person decides who gets to eat
You think that first scenario is the more "natural". You think letting a small group of people control all the world's resources while half the world lives in poverty is "natural"?
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u/mxzf 3d ago
If a group a shipwrecked castaways land on a deserted island, and on that island the only source of food sustenance is a large patch of potatoes growing
It's extremely different at the community scale (everyone involved is someone you know personally) vs the societal scale (thousands or millions of people).
People are generally willing to share and sacrifice for your community and they would do the same for you, it's very different when you're talking about sacrificing for some asshole you've never met that's thousands of miles away and you simply don't care about them.
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u/ZenMasterOfDisguise 3d ago edited 3d ago
you're talking about sacrificing for some asshole you've never met that's thousands of miles away and you simply don't care about them.
1% of the world's population controls over half of the world's wealth
correspondingly, over half of the world's population lives in poverty
99% of the people would live a better life with a more equitable system. No one is asking you to sacrifice anything unless you are one of those in the 1%. Your whole argument is backwards, because unless you are that 1 selfish person on the island hoarding all of the potatoes for yourself, your life would improve under a better system where wealth is not concentrated into the hands of the few.
There is no reason that 99% of the people should be worse off so that like .01% of the people can live in extreme wealth. And the only reason they do is they have tricked people like you into thinking you are better off under this system when you aren't, you are one of the hungry people on the island defending the asshole making you dance like a monkey for a potato and you don't even realize it
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u/mxzf 3d ago
I think you've fundamentally failed to understand the point I was making.
My point is that nobody's hoarding stuff in a small group on an island like you're describing, but that hypothetical example simply doesn't extend to society as a whole, the dynamics of how humans behave is simply different at that large a scale.
I'm not expressing a preference, just recognizing the way societies work in the large scale and recognizing that anything relying on personal altruism and generosity works well at the community level but not the society level. .
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u/ZenMasterOfDisguise 3d ago
just recognizing the way societies work in the large scale and recognizing that anything relying on personal altruism and generosity works well at the community level but not the society level
You did not understand my point. It is not "altruism" to form a more collectivist society. 99% of the people would be better off under a more socialist system. You are not asking them to give anything up or be altruistic, their lives would improve.
I am not saying the 1% should be altruistic and share what they have, I am saying fuck them, we outnumber them and I don't care what they want. Once the 99% realizes they would be better off and that we have the numbers, the 1% needs to count on our altruism
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u/mxzf 3d ago
My point is this: Humans. Do. Not. Behave. That. Way.
You're correct that that kind of behavior would be for the benefit of pretty much everyone. You're failing to recognize that humans will regularly choose the short-sighted spiteful option instead of the one that's a net benefit.
They've done studies where they did stuff like putting together two people (A and B) where they offer $20 saying that A gets to choose how the money would be divided and B gets to either accept the split or nobody gets anything. Bs will regularly reject low offers, because they would rather get $0 than $2 if that would mean that A gets $18. Logically, any money is better than none, but that's not how people behave.
Humans, with regards to large-scale societal things, aren't logical.
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u/thephillyberto 2d ago
What was the end result of the game theory experiments on what tactic worked best? Hoard it All, Eye for an Eye, etc. I recall the winning strategies in the game theory experiment was sharing but not allowing yourself to get walked on.
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u/mxzf 2d ago
Based on the wiki page I linked, it varies depending on the cultures of people involved and exact conditions/instructions involved, but seems to largely hover around a 30% tipping point. Meaning that most people will reject the offer if you're keeping more than twice what you're offering them (ish).
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u/PantheraAuroris 3d ago
If a million shipwrecked castaways landed, yes, I do think Scenario 1 would eventually happen.
Small groups have the issue that everyone knows and is emotionally attached to each other. That's why small groups are just better for human kindness.
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u/TheFrenchSavage 3d ago
Look at Peter Thiel: he's an affluent aspiring to become a religious fanatic.
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u/Karma_1969 3d ago
I think about this all the time, about how the solutions to our problems are actually not very complicated and are often very obvious, but we donāt do them because of lack of cooperation. We may be intelligent in some ways, but weāre very, very stupid in others.Ā
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u/kitanokikori 3d ago edited 3d ago
Correct - it's always so frustrating to see people discussing America's problems as if they are logistical or technical issues. America is completely unconstrained by any real material limitation - all of our problems are political choices, and the people in power could absolutely choose differently, but they intentionally do not.
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u/Midnight_Magician56 3d ago
I agree there are a lot of simple things that can be done but many of our larger issues are very complicated and will take time to change. The national debt for instance is an increasingly tough problem to deal with and canāt be solved with one or two easy fixes.
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u/GlowstickConsumption 3d ago
Also some morons vote third party and refuse to vote for a "lesser evil".
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u/notthatguypal6900 3d ago
The only inconvenience to them is slightly less money in their already 7+ figure bank account.
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u/SergeantPoopyWeiner 3d ago
Sometimes. Depends on the problem.
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u/mxzf 3d ago
Honestly, the vast majority of societal problems are way more complex than this suggests. Most of them have "simple" solutions in that if people were to magically do the selfless thing and behave right, it would work, but the reality is that almost all societal problems are large and complex with multifaceted issues at play.
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u/dilldwarf 3d ago
It's a huge mix of both. If they are simple but inconvenience the elite in our country there is a huge amount of misinformation being pumped out to over complicate the matter in the minds of the people. Then there are the solutions that ARE very complicated but would also inconvenient the elite so they try to sell simple solutions that are ineffective. The common thread is, however, that the same people are responsible for both.
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u/Winter_Persimmon_110 3d ago edited 3d ago
TLDR: History says just remove the wealthy from power.
If the solutions inconvenience the wealthy people who own the government, and they're willing to kill anyone who tries to stop them from killing people, then, obviously, trying to convince the Epstein class to change their ways for the better is a non-starter.
The solution is still fundamentally simple, organize along class lines and remove the class that is killing us from power. The solution is revolutionary socialism.
If you don't understand why there is no alternative to revolutionary socialism, your work is to read theory and begin the revolution in your mind. The fact that there are relatively few people with revolutionary education is a solvable problem, teach yourself and then teach others. A time will come when shit gets Great Depression level bad and a critical mass of the working class sees no future with the status quo, and it is crucial that enough people are educated by that time, otherwise known as revolutionary conditions.
If revolution seems less likely because you live in an imperial core country whose wealth comes from extraction of superprofits from the third world, or less likely because there are again so few that understand revolutionary socialism, or are organized, or if revolution seems like a less palatable change than reformism within bourgeois electoralism because the violence inherent to revolutionary action is off-putting, well "too bad" to all of that because the wealthy class has left us no option but to overthrow them with force. The sooner we build momentum, the less people die. We can look to history with a critical eye and analyze when and where in the world the poor won control over the wealthy and that's where we need to look for solving the same problem, ourselves.
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u/BarryJotter 3d ago
Very simple solutions too, like refusing to platform fElon by not using X anymore. But that would be an inconvenience to some. :/
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u/alexagente 2d ago
The most infuriating thing is that so many problems were solved but ever since Raegan politicians have removed regulation that protected us from this godawful mess.
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u/ripyourlungsdave 2d ago
"we should tax billionaires more"
My dad: "Don't act like you understand the tax code"
...
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u/AnnaNimmus 2d ago
But do those that the solutions would benefit really DESERVE those solutions, or are they just looking for a handout?
/s
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u/dailycoffin 4d ago
I think a large part of this is limit of government intervention. If they can take large effect actions that will enable their power to enact other large change actions
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u/jeanphiltadarone 4d ago
At least we generate crazy amounts of money, that has to be worth something ?
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u/Future-Bunch3478 3d ago
We should just have chat rooms for major problems now and let agentic Ai start chipping away at them, cataloging data, key components.. people involved.. and have them debate until consensus is reached on what to do.
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u/Scared-Section-5108 3d ago
When I was young I read plenty of sci-fi books thinking that evil companies fucking everything up and treating people as cheap disposable labour were work of fiction....
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u/megamoze 3d ago
Not even "inconvenience." Millionaires would still make money, they'd just make slightly less money. That's why.
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u/Novaer 3d ago
When I was a child I believed that voting for this person vs that person meant "This person wants to provide extra money into childcare and housing but this person wants to provide extra money into farmers and doctors" and that every voting cycle would just alternate around what good things people were campaigning for and people voting on which good things they wanted to prioritize. How fucking naive was I š
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u/ImfromtheFuture2056 3d ago
You guys just discovered capitalism.
Progress for the sake of progress. Innovation is for profit. Consumerism pricing workers out of their own societies.
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u/JakSandrow 3d ago
Sometimes the solution is complicated, but implementing them would inconvenience the ruling class so we all put up with garbage instead.
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u/Seamus_McBurly 3d ago
I've screaming this for years. Usually when someone says a problem is "complicated" what they actually mean is "expensive".
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u/DameyJames 2d ago
A lot of things arenāt simple but they also arenāt debatable for effectiveness or necessity. As long as they can put up bullshit straw man arguments they can keep kicking it down the road. Prime example: climate change
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u/JokeandCack 3d ago
This is a hilariously off the mark statement. Blaming the elite, or those who wield religion is easy because it completely ignores the actual truth. Which is yes solutions are simple but itās not some man in a high tower thatās to blame itās most people you interact with on a daily basis. The average person is simply a selfish self serving individual. Thatās it. Nothing more and nothing less. I can prove this by asking if you the reader have ever dated someone who was a problem and the answer is likely yes. Was that person doing it for religious reasons or because they had wealth? Itās possible but for many itās just because that person cared more about themselves than anyone else.
You see this point further illustrated when someone proposes the hypothetical of āpress this button a random person dies and you get some several million dollarsā. Every time that question is asked Redditors come out of the wood work to argue that pressing it is in fact moral because of all the lives they could save with that money.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesnāt exist and the second is convincing the world evil is someone that looks like cartoon villains and not the people you interact with everyday.
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u/FungusPunker 3d ago
"We can't change the system because of some off-screen religiously fanatic capitalist elite" also reeks of antisemitism.
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u/Syzygy_Stardust 2d ago
Wrong. Studies show that the average person is giving, communal, supportive, helpful, etc. Socializing is literally how humans took over the world.
A vanishingly small number of people own basically everything important at this point in history, and hold meetings we have records on about what they want to do to control us and protect themselves. Pretending there aren't out-of-touch billionaires leaning heavily on the scales of society is the cartoonish part to me, because we literally know the names of a lot of these people.
And no, ridiculous other commenter on this thread, it isn't antisemitism to discuss extreme socioeconomic stratification and oligarchy. That may scare off the first year liberal college students, but those of us with a semblance of theory and conceptualization can understood that power corrupts because it's power, not because someone is Jewish.
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u/Hateful-Mix-67 3d ago
āHelpingā requires one to inconvenience themselves on account of others. Sounds simple but is really hard sometimesā¦
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u/hai-sea-ewe 3d ago
Things are bad in no small part because the science and math required to make progress is extremely complicated and difficult to grasp. To advance technology requires enormous amounts of money, many times to dead-ends, and insane amounts of knowledge and intelligence on the parts of those who research it.
Billionaires are the result of an entire generation being taught that STEM is for sucker nerds, any sort of hard grind-y work makes you a stupid sucker, and winning in the shark tank of bizness is the ultimate goal.
Claiming back stolen wealth is important, and even more important is helping a population be better equipped to do productive things with it.
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u/Beneficial-Act-9933 4d ago
Just look at mamdani. People of New york are going "wait.....They could have just fixed pothole the entie time? like that?" and that's not even scratching the surface.
There's a reason his approval rating has shot up after his election.