Not saying this is the correct route, but I do see the cultural decay, foreign influence, and complete lack of civic duty causing massive political failures in the US in real-time as we grow lazier, less interested, and more content. Any idea how we account for that in a reasonable fashion?
You don’t. People have always said that about basically every country. What is “cultural decay”? Define “civic duty”. Why is it a problem that people are content? Are we lazier? Are people on average more content now?
The key lesson is that you can’t force people to care about what you do. Inspire people and they’ll follow you, don’t and they’ll do something else. FDR increased a sense of civic duty by paying people to do civic works.
I think I might’ve come across incorrectly when I said cultural decay. I mean to convey the consequences of a cultures effect on politics. For example wars, pollution, or nuclear weapons. I think you’d have trouble denying those have effects that are inherently social and require civic cooperation to prevent. Doing otherwise seems to me to actually objectively be a problem, assuming you value living. That’s actually what I meant about laziness as well, that we’re less invested in the core responsibilities that now exist with how advanced our technology and societies have become.
I agree you can’t force anyone, that’s not freedom, but I also feel and fear we may be past the point where inspiration can handle the challenges. FDR never had nuclear war looming, the interconnected and chaotic nature of social media to contend with, or a bevy of other modern factors like llms that I get the gut feeling are insurmontable. I’d like to be convinced otherwise instead of subscribing to apathy but I feel like I’m living through the dawn of a new age.
I think my central point still holds, so I’ll develop on it a bit more.
Every era has its challenges, and they’re all seemingly insurmountable and possibly the worst thing yet. They’re less significant from our perspective, but we have the benefit of history. We know how the story progressed.
FDR did have nuclear war looming, they just only knew that meant “bad”, but not the details. It was probably scarier then. We know now that he actually didn’t because the German program was doomed to failure from the start, but they didn’t at the time. They had an economy that was in tatters, a massive food shortage resulting in poorly quantified starvation, the most powerful militaries on the planet conquering Europe and Asia, and so on.
We’re past the age where the president is likely to be able to inspire unity of purpose like they did then, but that’s always been how you get people to care: someone needs to convince them, or you pay them. In a time if turmoil, you can inspire a lot of purpose by giving people a stable job, and then constantly extolling the virtues of the purpose they’re working towards.
All that to say, we don’t know the future. You are living through the dawn of a new age. Our problems aren’t insurmountable, we just don’t know how to do it yet. The details are different, but it’s not a new circumstance.
I’m not an advocate for apathy, but… If it does go wrong, what actually happens? America collapses, war, people die, and turmoil. We can’t know the timeline, and we have 3/4 of those now with the remaining being pretty intangible. The fall of the Roman empire, depending on which fall you’re looking at, took 300 to a 1000 years. To the people living through the fall, it wasn’t even visible. The final fall ushered in the Renaissance, both a period of great development, but also pessimism born out of the proceeding centuries of turmoil (European peace shattered by 200 years of war, famine, several plagues, and an ice age). Injecting masses of fleeing scholars from Constantinople into that propelled things to new heights as their knowledge from the fallen empire blended with the local knowledge.
We don’t know if the empire is falling, how long it’s going to take, if we’re at the beginning or the end, or if we’re even in the empire. We don’t know if the collapse will trigger a dark age (not actually dark, just “not roman”), or a golden age as waves of American scientists, artists, writers, mathematicians and engineers take their work to China and unintentionally create a fresh blend of perspectives and shared knowledge that builds on both. (Stereotypes aside we have a lot of those).
People problems are ultimately solvable by people, inevitably by talking.
History consistently tells us that it’s weird, messy, and long. Live life, be kind. If someone says to do something for other people for moral reasons, it’s a coin toss if they’re doing something history will look kindly upon. If someone says to do something for group identity, they’re probably fine. If they say to do something to someone else for group identity, they’re most likely not. If someone is saying something you’ve heard before but a lot of people are listening and the people in power don’t like it, thiniare probably shifting. Maybe not for the people speaking, but shifting.
It’s late and I’m rambling as I fall asleep. When I say “you don’t”, I mean that history and society are too much to bend in a deliberate way. Best you can do is the right thing at the time as best you can and not worry too much about your role in the big picture. So few people have a role that sets them at the bend of those forces.
Also, I’m not too worried about LLMs and social media, fundamentally. People have been saying and believing bizarre shit forever, they just made it easier and faster. The fading lustre of the Internet is just a drift back a bit towards before it, when people just believed stuff and then no one ever corrected them.
The problem is looking at it too functionally. You cannot fix it by “fixing” voting as if voting magically creates a functional government. It’s a method to derive consensus. You cannot look at a system that is failing to produce consensus and then fix it by directly removing anything that increases consensus. That’s insane.
You need to critically look at the entire system and identify what the problem is. In this case it’s largely the abstraction layers. People now interact with their government through filters even greater than the old Hearst days. Information flows from media filters to the population and from the population to government through social media filters. And both of those filters have their own agendas. Of course nobody believes the resulting government is responsive or legitimate. It’s not.
There are many potential solutions for civic engagement. But that largely means breaking down the very walls that powerful interests have created. There’s no easy solution to it. Certainly not “let’s make these stupid people unable to vote.” A solution is much more radical and takes understanding both what you want to achieve and how the current system is preventing it.
Fair and reasonable. I just don’t see a large force that would lead the current us in that direction naturally, and if I did I feel like I’d have more hope for a stable tomorrow.
Sure. Disenfranchise people. That’s a suitable hack to a checks notes stable, legitimate, and responsive government.
Not saying this is the correct route, but I do see the cultural decay, foreign influence, and complete lack of civic duty causing massive political failures in the US in real-time as we grow lazier, less interested, and more content. Any idea how we account for that in a reasonable fashion?
You don’t. People have always said that about basically every country. What is “cultural decay”? Define “civic duty”. Why is it a problem that people are content? Are we lazier? Are people on average more content now?
The key lesson is that you can’t force people to care about what you do. Inspire people and they’ll follow you, don’t and they’ll do something else. FDR increased a sense of civic duty by paying people to do civic works.
I think I might’ve come across incorrectly when I said cultural decay. I mean to convey the consequences of a cultures effect on politics. For example wars, pollution, or nuclear weapons. I think you’d have trouble denying those have effects that are inherently social and require civic cooperation to prevent. Doing otherwise seems to me to actually objectively be a problem, assuming you value living. That’s actually what I meant about laziness as well, that we’re less invested in the core responsibilities that now exist with how advanced our technology and societies have become.
I agree you can’t force anyone, that’s not freedom, but I also feel and fear we may be past the point where inspiration can handle the challenges. FDR never had nuclear war looming, the interconnected and chaotic nature of social media to contend with, or a bevy of other modern factors like llms that I get the gut feeling are insurmontable. I’d like to be convinced otherwise instead of subscribing to apathy but I feel like I’m living through the dawn of a new age.
I’m glad it was a misunderstanding. :)
I think my central point still holds, so I’ll develop on it a bit more.
Every era has its challenges, and they’re all seemingly insurmountable and possibly the worst thing yet. They’re less significant from our perspective, but we have the benefit of history. We know how the story progressed.
FDR did have nuclear war looming, they just only knew that meant “bad”, but not the details. It was probably scarier then. We know now that he actually didn’t because the German program was doomed to failure from the start, but they didn’t at the time. They had an economy that was in tatters, a massive food shortage resulting in poorly quantified starvation, the most powerful militaries on the planet conquering Europe and Asia, and so on.
We’re past the age where the president is likely to be able to inspire unity of purpose like they did then, but that’s always been how you get people to care: someone needs to convince them, or you pay them. In a time if turmoil, you can inspire a lot of purpose by giving people a stable job, and then constantly extolling the virtues of the purpose they’re working towards.
All that to say, we don’t know the future. You are living through the dawn of a new age. Our problems aren’t insurmountable, we just don’t know how to do it yet. The details are different, but it’s not a new circumstance.
I’m not an advocate for apathy, but… If it does go wrong, what actually happens? America collapses, war, people die, and turmoil. We can’t know the timeline, and we have 3/4 of those now with the remaining being pretty intangible. The fall of the Roman empire, depending on which fall you’re looking at, took 300 to a 1000 years. To the people living through the fall, it wasn’t even visible. The final fall ushered in the Renaissance, both a period of great development, but also pessimism born out of the proceeding centuries of turmoil (European peace shattered by 200 years of war, famine, several plagues, and an ice age). Injecting masses of fleeing scholars from Constantinople into that propelled things to new heights as their knowledge from the fallen empire blended with the local knowledge.
We don’t know if the empire is falling, how long it’s going to take, if we’re at the beginning or the end, or if we’re even in the empire. We don’t know if the collapse will trigger a dark age (not actually dark, just “not roman”), or a golden age as waves of American scientists, artists, writers, mathematicians and engineers take their work to China and unintentionally create a fresh blend of perspectives and shared knowledge that builds on both. (Stereotypes aside we have a lot of those).
People problems are ultimately solvable by people, inevitably by talking.
History consistently tells us that it’s weird, messy, and long. Live life, be kind. If someone says to do something for other people for moral reasons, it’s a coin toss if they’re doing something history will look kindly upon. If someone says to do something for group identity, they’re probably fine. If they say to do something to someone else for group identity, they’re most likely not. If someone is saying something you’ve heard before but a lot of people are listening and the people in power don’t like it, thiniare probably shifting. Maybe not for the people speaking, but shifting.
It’s late and I’m rambling as I fall asleep. When I say “you don’t”, I mean that history and society are too much to bend in a deliberate way. Best you can do is the right thing at the time as best you can and not worry too much about your role in the big picture. So few people have a role that sets them at the bend of those forces.
Also, I’m not too worried about LLMs and social media, fundamentally. People have been saying and believing bizarre shit forever, they just made it easier and faster. The fading lustre of the Internet is just a drift back a bit towards before it, when people just believed stuff and then no one ever corrected them.
The problem is looking at it too functionally. You cannot fix it by “fixing” voting as if voting magically creates a functional government. It’s a method to derive consensus. You cannot look at a system that is failing to produce consensus and then fix it by directly removing anything that increases consensus. That’s insane.
You need to critically look at the entire system and identify what the problem is. In this case it’s largely the abstraction layers. People now interact with their government through filters even greater than the old Hearst days. Information flows from media filters to the population and from the population to government through social media filters. And both of those filters have their own agendas. Of course nobody believes the resulting government is responsive or legitimate. It’s not.
There are many potential solutions for civic engagement. But that largely means breaking down the very walls that powerful interests have created. There’s no easy solution to it. Certainly not “let’s make these stupid people unable to vote.” A solution is much more radical and takes understanding both what you want to achieve and how the current system is preventing it.
Fair and reasonable. I just don’t see a large force that would lead the current us in that direction naturally, and if I did I feel like I’d have more hope for a stable tomorrow.