Another week of quarantine - I think it's been five weeks now since I started working from home.
I thought about writing, yet again, about some of the issues with things as they currently are, but I think I've written plenty on that. I want to play around with ideas on what could be.
A lot of this is tied up with values, of course. And priorities. What is the ideal system? What do we owe each other? Lots of metaphysical questions like that. But I'll skip over the underlying assumptions, for the most part.
Or rather I'll drastically oversimplify things by repeating what I'd said in an earlier post - we should have a system that enables people to become their best self.
Our Founding Fathers had this idea that the ideal system was to have a lot of self-sufficient people. They focused on small family farms, ofc. Part of the thinking behind the Louisiana Purchase was to help ensure our population was primarily small farmers for another generation or so (and they wanted an estate tax to help prevent the growth of an aristocracy)... but most people in the States are no longer farmers. I suppose the modern equivalent, in terms of independence and self-sufficiency, are the small business owners (i.e. 'mom and pop stores'), free-lancers, and self-employed.
More and more of us are, well... the term 'wage-slave' may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
This has consequences.
Aside from the challenges of having a true 'marketplace of ideas' when so many people are afraid of speaking out for fear of losing their jobs, there are also all the problems people absolutely hate about corporate culture.
That is to say - most of us constantly have to deal with large, impersonal, bureaucratic organizations that make us feel like we're not valued as a person. As an individual. Every time we get told that something is 'company policy', no matter how irrelevant it is to the circumstances at hand, it gets frustrating. Companies like to talk as though we're all valued employees, that they have these great programs for finding and keeping talent...
But overall, the message is that we're all just unwanted expenses. Companies are more concerned with the bottom line, after all, and people are one of the biggest expenses of all.
We've had decades, honestly, of management reducing the workforce, and piling on more and more work on the few they've retained, and the ones who remain are often too afraid of losing their healthcare and reliable income to really protest much. (That, and our powers-that-be have done a helluva job of breaking unions and so on and so forth.)
Right now, I'm not writing all that as an attempt to persuade those powers-that-be that they're wrong. I don't know how to convince the people benefiting from the current system that it actually sucks.
It's just... I understand why so many people want to find someone willing and able to fight for them. It's part of why so many young people found Bernie appealing. It's also part of why Trump's persona appealed (though I am constantly amazed at how many people fail to notice that he never delivers on that promise.)
There's a sense, as well, that our media is compromised. They're more concerned with keeping access than holding anyone accountable, too buddy-buddy with the same uncaring powers-that-be that benefit so disproportionately from our current system, so they're part of the system (and problem), too.
Which, again, I generally understand and agree with. And yet they still at least *try* to verify information their sources give them, and fact check... so they're far better than unfounded rumors and conspiracy theories that have absolutely no basis in reality. (I'll take the mainstream media over OANN any day.)
All of this is, like I said, superficial. I'm not talking about deliberate disinformation campaigns, and I'm glossing over a lot.
If you're happy with the system as is, if you don't see the problems with a Senator who believes that the coronavirus is bad enough to sell a large quantity of stock... but isn't willing to speak out publicly, and actually try to do something about it... I don't know what to tell you.
Tucker Carlson has gone back to being the wrong-headed pundit we all know, but at least he cared enough about American lives to speak up to Trump. It's sad that more Republicans didn't do likewise.
So enough of all that. You either believe already, or don't. Whatever.
I want to play around with what some of the other possibilities out there.
I thought about writing, yet again, about some of the issues with things as they currently are, but I think I've written plenty on that. I want to play around with ideas on what could be.
A lot of this is tied up with values, of course. And priorities. What is the ideal system? What do we owe each other? Lots of metaphysical questions like that. But I'll skip over the underlying assumptions, for the most part.
Or rather I'll drastically oversimplify things by repeating what I'd said in an earlier post - we should have a system that enables people to become their best self.
Our Founding Fathers had this idea that the ideal system was to have a lot of self-sufficient people. They focused on small family farms, ofc. Part of the thinking behind the Louisiana Purchase was to help ensure our population was primarily small farmers for another generation or so (and they wanted an estate tax to help prevent the growth of an aristocracy)... but most people in the States are no longer farmers. I suppose the modern equivalent, in terms of independence and self-sufficiency, are the small business owners (i.e. 'mom and pop stores'), free-lancers, and self-employed.
More and more of us are, well... the term 'wage-slave' may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
This has consequences.
Aside from the challenges of having a true 'marketplace of ideas' when so many people are afraid of speaking out for fear of losing their jobs, there are also all the problems people absolutely hate about corporate culture.
That is to say - most of us constantly have to deal with large, impersonal, bureaucratic organizations that make us feel like we're not valued as a person. As an individual. Every time we get told that something is 'company policy', no matter how irrelevant it is to the circumstances at hand, it gets frustrating. Companies like to talk as though we're all valued employees, that they have these great programs for finding and keeping talent...
But overall, the message is that we're all just unwanted expenses. Companies are more concerned with the bottom line, after all, and people are one of the biggest expenses of all.
We've had decades, honestly, of management reducing the workforce, and piling on more and more work on the few they've retained, and the ones who remain are often too afraid of losing their healthcare and reliable income to really protest much. (That, and our powers-that-be have done a helluva job of breaking unions and so on and so forth.)
Right now, I'm not writing all that as an attempt to persuade those powers-that-be that they're wrong. I don't know how to convince the people benefiting from the current system that it actually sucks.
It's just... I understand why so many people want to find someone willing and able to fight for them. It's part of why so many young people found Bernie appealing. It's also part of why Trump's persona appealed (though I am constantly amazed at how many people fail to notice that he never delivers on that promise.)
There's a sense, as well, that our media is compromised. They're more concerned with keeping access than holding anyone accountable, too buddy-buddy with the same uncaring powers-that-be that benefit so disproportionately from our current system, so they're part of the system (and problem), too.
Which, again, I generally understand and agree with. And yet they still at least *try* to verify information their sources give them, and fact check... so they're far better than unfounded rumors and conspiracy theories that have absolutely no basis in reality. (I'll take the mainstream media over OANN any day.)
All of this is, like I said, superficial. I'm not talking about deliberate disinformation campaigns, and I'm glossing over a lot.
If you're happy with the system as is, if you don't see the problems with a Senator who believes that the coronavirus is bad enough to sell a large quantity of stock... but isn't willing to speak out publicly, and actually try to do something about it... I don't know what to tell you.
Tucker Carlson has gone back to being the wrong-headed pundit we all know, but at least he cared enough about American lives to speak up to Trump. It's sad that more Republicans didn't do likewise.
So enough of all that. You either believe already, or don't. Whatever.
I want to play around with what some of the other possibilities out there.
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