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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements we consume?

Looking back at some of the European revolutions, it doesn't seem like so much is missing to cause an urge to revolt in people. So what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to happen?

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I think the problems affecting the system are just too widespread and bespoke for the individual to resolve. To actually understand fully the scope of tracking etc, you probably need to be qualified to be a computer engineer or someone with a similar resume. That limits the amount of the population that is even capable of comprehending the news to a small sliver. Extend that to any field: biology, law, physics, economics, etc. Popular science reporting is terrible because the writers and the readers both lack sufficient debth to put things in context. Earnest law reporting is going to take a law degree as well as a stack of books to put things in their actual context. Economics is even worse; they say a grand unifying theory of economics is impossible because of the time it takes to study all its various schools of economic theory means it cannot be done in a single human lifetime.

The great danger of having the knowledge of all things in our society be limited to a handful of siloed specialists is that it leaves a lot of room for placing opinion, biased, or slanted reporting to the same weight as the actual facts, since no one is qualified to see what is true and what isn't. It allows people who have no experience on a given issue to be in control of its outcomes, which invites graft sooner than learned experience.

> To actually understand fully the scope of tracking etc, you probably need to be qualified to be a computer engineer or someone with a similar resume.

I think it is much more severe than that. To understand the full scope you'd be labeled a conspiracy theorist.

"Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full"

Among sociologists and political theorists, this is known as an "embourgeoisement thesis".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embourgeoisement

Today I learned, thanks for a new word. And its opposite: "proletarianization".

> So what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to happen?

It's not so much an "allow" as it is a "what's the alternative?" The problem at this point is so deeply rooted (in the form of life-long politicians and bureaucrats), the only solution is a full-blown reset. Unfortunately, there's no way to do that without violent revolution. Considering the scale and diversity of thought in the U.S., doing that effectively with the least amount of damage is next to impossible (too many loose cannons with mental issues). It also requires violence, which, if you take a non-aggression stance on problem solving (my own POV) then it's a stalemate.

At this point, the only "fix" seems to be atrophy and circumvention. Atrophy in the sense that you just let it all run its course and meet its eventual demise (anticipating pain and suffering as the system collapses) and circumvention in the sense that you look for ways to excuse yourself from it.

Earlier revolutions happened as part of much smaller civilizations (exactly why the American Revolution was possible—far less variables and far more homogenous thinking among the dissenting class). In a country of 300M+ people, any "revolution" is likely to dissolve into chaos no matter how well-organized or how principled its ideology.

> I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things?

There are many reasons for this. It's partly due to the illusion that the current internet culture has created that expressing one's voice on a social media platform is an effective form of protest. It is not. How many change.org petitions are people going to sign until they realize that it means absolutely nothing?

I think this one of the biggest and least-discussed erosions of public discourse and assembly. By fostering an online conversation at the expense of an in-person one, we wind up shouting into the abyss instead of at the people who deserve to feel the pressure.

https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/2011/lagi2011a...

See Fig 2. Note how tight the correspondence is between FAO Food Price Index >= 190 per "constant prices", i.e. cost of food adjusted for inflation, and the emergence of civil unrest.

There is a certain level of desperation necessary to spark revolution. Food prices seem to predict unrest remarkably well in MENA countries per the study linked above. Maybe our experience in "developed" nations is so well-padded with infrastructure and consistent resupply that we are simply not enough in want. The hungry can usually find enough food to survive, because there's so much accessible excess, whether by theft or charity.

A writer at Statista provides an update for 2022 since the invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent effect on food prices around the world: https://www.statista.com/chart/27110/food-prices-political-i...

To answer your question you only need to investigate under which conditions coercion succeeds in changing behaviour.

I believe that we can dismantle the current world order by providing a more persuasive alternative. Legitimacy is not absolute, but rather relative, and currently the things built on coercion are more legitimate, that is not a law of physics (thankfully it seems to be the other way around actually).

People would rather point at other countries and virtue signal about how bad they are rather than care about what's happening in their own country.

Couple that with brain dead nationalism about how the US is the best despite the fact that we're very much behind in many areas and it's not surprising that so many Americans blindly allow their own government to do so many outrageous things.

People have no intuition for what is technically possible or its implications in cases like this, including most people in tech. So they fallback to mentally modeling these cases in terms of things they are familiar with, without any sense of the inadequacies of the model. You can tell people these facts all day but they don't grok it, really, and it would be hard work to try to grok it, which few people have either time or inclination for. They may feel uneasy about it in some abstract sense but as far as they are concerned it doesn't affect them in a material way.

Humans make decisions based things they can imagine and effectively reason about. Humans struggle to incorporate elementary probability theory into their reasoning; anything that requires complex systems thinking, which these kinds of topics do, is only going to be practically accessible to a small percentage of the population.

>we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes

I think it's this plus we have no time and the time we have is preyed upon. So, you're fed and more or less comfy, but you're also stressed and tired about that next paycheck. And if you don't get that next paycheck, then you will no longer be fed and more or less comfy.

> Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes?

Why would it need to be more? People feel no need to fear their government when they are content.

Identity politics is a distraction from class struggle.

Marxist theory acknowledges that capitalism provides too much to the proletariat to desire revolution, thus the focus on destroying capitalism and society.

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