this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.
In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.
On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.
Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.
Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.
Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.
There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.
When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.
It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)
And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:
All of these radical restructurings of society were based on gradual buildup until catalyst points shifted the dominant Mode of Production. By analyzing Capitalism, a decentralized market economy that necessarily gravitates towards centralization in Monopolist Syndicates, we can predict that Socialism is the next step. Marx is correct.