You can't destroy a system billions of people depend on without killing billions of people. We need to learn to not depend on it first.
Our only hope is to culturally evolve past our current situation, and we're kinda of in the process of that now. I'm almost 50, when I was growing up any talk like this was old hippy fantasy (hippies are 25 yrs older than me), but now it's come back and more real than ever.
More and more people are seeing the police not as a helpful and necessary but as oppressors and sadists. Eating rich people is talked about every day. People are starting to realize that any state is inherently corruptible and if we want peace and sustainability we need to see the string of failures that is the state and realize it's a failed technology.
At some point, hopefully we'll get better at strategizing and acting instead of just complaining and protesting. Realistically using the tools we have available (e.g. the state) to put those currently running the system in their place.
Run for office, vote, be less dependent on the system, do mutual aid.
Yep, as I suggested. But let's not kid ourselves, most people talking online about destroying the system and aren't joking are speaking of violent communist revolution a la the 1920s.
True, the death toll in practice has only been in the range of 3.5 to 5 million in one case or 1 million up to many many more in another, with 20 million deaths being a probably-unlikely outlier estimate on the high side. I don't think it's ever killed billions or even close to it.
You can’t destroy a system billions of people depend on without killing billions of people. We need to learn to not depend on it first.
walkaway vibes. I wish this were practical.
Run for office, vote, be less dependent on the system, do mutual aid.
Indeed. We need to represent a better path than tearing down civilization in the hopes that everyone will get everything on their priority list, while tempering the state from the inside with sanity and decency instead of weaponization.
If a system crushes orphans, its purpose is to crash orphans. The designers and participants may say otherwise, but they are ignoring the crushed orphans.
If I make a system to move people around, but this also sometimes leads to the death of people, that does not mean that the purpose is to kill people. It is still moving people around. And instead of ignoring this issue, we make the system better at avoiding accidents and increase safety aspects.
If a system moves people around and some of them die, that’s the purpose of the system.
You can say “we don’t want any of them to die” and that’s true, but the system doesn’t reflect that.
You can say “fewer people will die because more people can get to hospitals, but some will die as a result of people moving around” and the system will demonstrate that.
Is that a “we don’t want anyone to die” system or is it a “we are going to accept some people dying as a result of the system so that more people can be saved” system?
(Agreeing, not arguing)
When something goes for so long with no amount of effort ever changing the thing beyond basically a coat of paint... Yeah, what it's doing is clearly the point. A glitch is a glitch but if it's still killing people next week, next month, next year... that's obviously a feature.
Kinda ridiculous to expect people to be mandatorily opted-into a system meant to grind them up then be like "Oh don't worry, it's just in beta and you can submit a bug report if it kills you or something." Yeah sure, it'll be "fixed" any decade now. Just gotta keep paying no matter what doesn't change and eventually something will change!
how do we strip down civilization/society - obviously, reign in the police but we'll still need meter maids and rapist chasers (civil and criminal enforcement). so how does that work? I don't ask as a challenge, I'm genuinely curious what the process looks like to those that want it, because all i can foresee is civil war hellscape if we stumble into it without a plan.
The system for all its significant faults is the only thing stopping Amazon from employing literal slave labor in the US, or any Republican who can pay / attract enough violent followers from firebombing every abortion clinic they can find the location of. Dangerous inequality of power isn't something the Americans created; it's a feature of the world which needs to be grappled with and moderated (whatever means you set out to use to do that.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "destroyed," but revolutions which set out to thoroughly destroy the unjust system completely have a track record of making things much much worse (e.g. French Revolution, Russian Revolution). If that type of thing is what you mean by destroyed I would urge you to look at places where what you want to do has been tried, and what happened after.
By that argument, the American revolution shouldn't have happened either. It's patently absurd to claim all revolutions always lead to the same results.
Removing a foreign occupier through violent revolution actually has a pretty good track record, yes (markedly different from destroying an unjust domestic system through violent revolution.)
Which one are you advocating for within the meme? Or something else? "Must be destroyed" can mean a few different things, all the way from FDR or Bernie Sanders which I'd be in favor of all the way to Russian Revolution which I'm not. I'm sort of just taking a guess at what it might be and responding based on the guess, but yeah I'm open to hear more explanation.
The American Revolution didn't destroy the existing system, it replaced the British control of the colonies with a federal control of the States, each of the colonial governments had a fairly smooth transition to state government, using the existing structure and most of the same people.
Please don't take this as anything other than a legitimate inquiry, as that's how i intend it.
If we're claiming that all of this bad is by design, and the point of the revolution was to create this system, then aren't you saying that the revolution was wrong? Like, the founders intended to replace a monarchical people moving machine that killed some of the people and replaced it with a democratic one that kills some of the people. If they designed it that way, then the revolution was pointless, and if they didn't design it that way, then the argument that the suffering is a feature (instead of a consequence) is demonstrably wrong...what am I missing?
I think the people who post and believe this kind of meme gravely underestimate the harm it will do to the most vulnerable and the enormous, mindboggling amount of money and time it will take to rebuild civilization.
but, like climate change, we're hostage to the people who are willing to go to the furthest extremes to advocate their position - jan 6th types, mostly. and like climate change, I don't see much to be hopeful for, even though I'm trying real hard to retain a shred of optimism for my kid's benefit alone.
ok so what's the plan then? how do you destroy the system but keep the tools needed for civilization to continue? It's an honest question because I see lots of doomer and boogaloo types but no one seems to offer up a plan.