Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
alcohol is especially hard to ban because it’s just sugar and yeast, and you can even use natural yeast if it gets banned, and you can use fruit if sugar gets banned. While with drugs some tyrannical empire might be able to ban every single lab-related equipment and chemical (and even then, you would be surprised what people can make by themselves without anything else other then natural resources, I mean that’s how we got here as a species), alcohol is such a simple recipe that it’s just plain impossible to regulate effectively, and the current way of having it cheap enough that people don’t brew their own but expensive enough that the 99% of the population doesn’t turn into alcoholics is good enough
In the US and Canada?
Car dependency / Car centrism.
Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.
But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.
The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.
Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.
Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.
Wait til the petro dollar crashes. It’s going to be hilarious
Nearly every societal problem has a solution, but you need a medical / buddhist / marxist / approach (probably a lot of other disciplines / lenses use this approach too, those are just some ones that more or less follow this).
- Correctly identify the actual problem.
- Find the root cause(s) of the problem.
- Name / describe the state without that problem.
- Outline the cure / steps to carry it out and reach that goal.
The only problems that aren’t solvable, are things that would break the laws of physics.
As for drugs / alcohol use, lemmygrad and hexbear have a lot of good threads on drug / alcohol use, and how to view it, and handle it collectively. The USA is probably the worst example of a country to look at for alleviating the societal ills brought about by alcohol and drug mis-use, so its good to look at how socialist countries have tackled it throughout history. If you can’t find a thread I’d recommend asking over there, because you’ll get a lot of good answers.
It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.
“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.
Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.
But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).
This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.
Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.
When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.
And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.
For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.
That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.
Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.
Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.
And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.
But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.
We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.
This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.
This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.
We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.
But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.
These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.
Thanks for this. Was very thought provoking. It goes along with something my generation teases about with growing up in the 80’s. It was an entertaining and dangerous world and we didn’t have time for all this anxiety depression stuff. Haha
Poverty. Not for lack of resources or ability, but for lack of will.
For schaudenfreude. Capitalism would collapse without the schaudenfreude of enforced inequality.
Almost everyone trained to worship capitalism is always taught to see their worth as a function of how badly other people are losing. That’s why homelessness is an expensive problem we choose to pay extra for.
Studies have shown that all the conditioned shelters, programs, and cleanup are far more expensive than just providing conditionless basic housing for everyone without. But the homeless serve an essential purpose under runaway capitalism that takes control of a society instead of being a lowly tool of it: Capitalist Scarecrows and to look down on and fear becoming.
How can I feel rich if there aren’t poories dying in the streets?
anything harder than wearing masks
Greed.
America is a great example of this.
Lying in bed, debating if you have to pee bad enough to get up
keep an empty gatorade bottle by your bed. wide mouth, soft lipped.
What are you talking about? Catheters have already solved this problem
You have to take it out though
That’s a different problem. Or, if you don’t want to solve that problem, you’ll have an infection problem. But you don’t have to worry about getting out of bed in the middle of the night anymore.
I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.
In Marx’s own idea the point were class warfare is no more is when our civilization can satisfy any needs of anyone.
It would be the ultimate goal of communism, perfect equity through infinite automation of all resources.
Then they would only be art, philosophy, science and social activities.
Except, as long as there’s limited resources, fighting for it is our nature. To the point of having to much if may be.
Considering how little we actually know, how much we are still figuring out today, how wrong we once were, and most definitely still are on many things, about said nature, the naturalistic argument is IMHO rather weak. The argument silently assumes too many things, at least with our current knowledge - that human beings do actually have an inherent nature, that said nature is uniform enough across the whole species to make that generalization, that said nature is inevitable and can’t be evolved past or rationalized against, that it always was the case and will always be, etc.
Definitely true.
I think the hypothesis of a nature both in human actions and society as a whole does have enough merits to be a good starting point.
Were I think there is a lot of unpredictability is on conditions of living and technologies.
Technologies especially, evolve so much quicker than society or human nature.
I would say recently our technologies twisted some of our own nature. For instance how we reproduce in such a controlled way.
Not only this but we do now more than ever things not because of our nature. And it’s also been put into very unique situations.
A great example is social media (including Lemmy itself). We have access to communication so far from us it created very unique communities.
If humans have a nature, then humans will always have that nature by definition. “We” might get beyond that nature, but it won’t be “us” after that. It will be our descendants.
And not like “sons and daughters” but rather “our evolutionary descendants”.
As for humanity, we exist in a particular set of inescapable challenges, which define what it is to be human.
Yeah I feel like human nature is actually cooperation.
It definitely is a big part of our nature as social creatures.
Although we can cooperate with our group and fight against another, hence the consistent wars throughout history.
I think human nature isn’t one sided.
But you’re right in that cooperation is the most effective (and desirable) way of survival.
Getting consent to creating a life from a unborn child. Every human being was raped into existence by their parents.
Rent is due in 7 days.
I don’t know if that’s a problem with society so much as it is a problem with reality.
…or a problem with time and sequences of events.
Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.
Most don’t not just from some technicalities but because parents or otherwise we have a biological urge to consent to being alive and make live being.
The consent is from our nature and only extreme circumstances makes it otherwise.
Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.
I don’t know if that’s true. I shot myself in the head once and just woke up like nothing had happened. I suspect life might not be as fragile as it appears from the outside.
It is surprising how resilient we are. Getting shot in the head is an example, we often underestimate the chance of survival.
Unfortunately it doesn’t prevent all suicide.
Not true, police come and lock you up if they catch you trying to stop being alive
What do you mean the police?
Isn’t the hospital and medics the one who cares for suicidal people?
Putting them in jail if that’s what you mean is pretty barbaric.
Again though the police can’t detain you indefinitely. What stop people from doing it is being cared for the reason they wanted to in the first place.
Isn’t the hospital and medics the one who cares for suicidal people?
not in America, where hospitals aren’t free and a call to the suicide hotline will have the cops going to your house
This is so fucked. Yet another way the criticism Luigi brought is relevant.
skill issue
There’s no problem in society that can’t be fixed. But the problem is there’s too much conclusion without proper understanding
what do you mean
Exactly
Human beings. The issue is humans.
We truly need those trisolarians to speed up.
You humans sure are a contentious bunch
You’ve made an enemy for life!
I understand the point in OPs post, but I disagree with it based upon evidence we have available to us. I think first and foremost it is important to mention (I dont have the studies linked but it shouldnt be hard to find) that teenage drug use overall is trending downward, with that including underage alcohol use/abuse. If younger generations use it less, the problems caused by alcoholism will be less prevalent as time goes on. Secondly, weve been putting up with drunk drivers for a while but (as our younger generations have been told for about 20 years now) the consequences for drunk or impaired operation of a motor vehicle have become more and more severe. I do believe alcoholism is something that can and will be phased out given enough time. The only thing that is still a mystery is what vice is going to replace it, and whether it is going to be better or worse.
Yeah education and prevention were always the best measure against addictions. But when it’s something deeply ingrained in society it takes time to move on. I like to think society is it’s own living thing, evolving much slower.
Driving will end long before drinking will
I have wondered this about certain harmful cultural values. Culture seems to be the “great enabler” when it comes to things we would wish would change about people (think of Japan’s habit of overworking people or Greece’s penchant of old inequality). And the fuel of the flame there is going to take a gamechanger to douse.
Crime. There’ll never be a world without it and at some point society will have to realize that there’s an “acceptable level of crime”, beyond which any further measures to reduce it would be unacceptably authoritarian.
Fix poverty and you fix crime. I mean there will always be people with severe mental disorders that make them violent or deadly, but this could also be potentially handled by making complete mental health check ups part of universal healthcare. People who are likely to become violent could be separated from the population and potentially cured.
I remember the case of a 6 year old girl who was adopted from a situation of severe abuse, violent, sexual, and neglect. She became a violence obsessed psychopath. She kept trying to stick needles in herself along with other self harm behaviors. She attacked her adoptive parents with a knife. After this they locked her in her room at night and put a lock on their bedroom door. She attempted to kill her brother, and tortured and killed animals.
There is a documentary about her called Child of Rage. Warning - this is extremely disturbing.
Eventually, as no progress was being made, she went to live with a therapist for intense behavior modification therapy. She was cured without the use of drugs. Now she is a successful RN and author.
I went way off track here but I wanted to reemphasize that poverty is the source of the vast majority of crime, and even the most broken psychopaths can be cured.
End poverty, end child abuse, end crime. End capitalism.
Ending poverty would certainly help, but I disagree that crime would be fixed. People commit crimes for many reason that aren’t related to poverty. Envy, hatred, love, sexual desire, religious fanaticism, political extremism etc. Crimes like murder and rape often have motives completely unrelated to financial status. Not all perpetrators have severe mental disorders either.
In terms of “fixing” people who are violent, I agree in so far that the justice system should focus on rehabilitation and helping people. In many but not all cases, that can be achieved. But generally those people commit crimes first before they’re identified. You propose mental health checkups to prevent that in the first place, but many people who are in a bad mental place would not voluntarily go to those. So would you make them mandatory for everyone? That would be quite dystopian, especially with the possibility of being locked up without even having committed a crime. That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean by measures that are unacceptably authoritarian. And even then, people would definitely slip through the cracks.
That’s fair.
