So far you're on point as far as I'm concerned. I'm eager to see what you have to say about reversing course.
An issue that bothers me no end is the fact that we very well could get out of this mess if we collectively wanted to.
An issue that bothers me no end is the fact that we very well could get out of this mess if we collectively wanted to.
I suspect that collectively, we actually DO want to; we've just ended up with social and political systems, both domestic and international, that conspire against actually managing to do anything serious about it, like some prisoners' dilemma played out on a grand stage.
For example, we collectively would like to live a nice life on planet Earth. If climate change is real (and I'm in the majority that believes it is the case), then that that nice life is at great risk. But we do not collectively believe that climate change is real because of the aforementioned conspiracies to try to make us collectively disagree.
Half the population wants the post-capitalist, ecologically sound, anti-racist path forward.
The other half wants to lean hard into capitalism and traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) with an emphasis on innovating our way to the future and out of our current problems.
The post-capitalists look too much like communists to be trusted by the freedom folks, and the freedom folks look too much like history’s economic oppressors and robber barons to be trusted.
Historically these divides take a long time dissolve (unless there is a bloody conflict and clear winner).
There's no such thing as "freedom from", which is probably one of the main sticking points between these two groups. "Freedom from" is just a nice way to say "loss of agency due to oppressive external control".
I realize this may seem like a pointless semantic quibble, but I think at it's root it points out a philosophical divide, where-in I personally believe one side is divorced from reality.
There are reasonable discussions to be had about where on the sliding scale from totalitarian to libertarian that society should fall for the best results for everyone, but in no case is there ever a situation in which "freedom from" is a real thing. You are trading off "freedom" for "safety".
That is not always the case. Counterexample: "freedom from tyranny", as in "citizens are free from tyranny by the government" – that can hardly be reframed as "the government loses agency due to oppressive external control by the law".