What is there left to believe in?
noahpinion.blog
noahpinion.blog
Even if you could pick the place and person, I'm still not sure there's any better time to be alive than today. A lot of people imagine being a white American male was better in 1950 than today, but I'm not so sure.
There are a lot of people, particularly Millennial men, whose parents had it better at that time than the Millennial men do now.
We are living in a post-truth world. Mass Media and Social media manipulation have been on basically for centuries, and the trend has been far stronger as social media reached a high percentage of world's population. And a major player in all that process was the US government, but it is important only when it lands close to home.
I grew up in Brazil, during a military dictatorship (sponsored by the US, BTW), and, if I can suggest one thing it's this: everything is politics. From deciding where you and your colleagues go for lunch, or whether you indent with spaces or tabs.
So, if you want to not get disappointed, involve yourself with politics. It starts with school boards - they decide what students study, what they will eat, how money is distributed between districts, etc. Get to know the candidates, learn how it works, think about the possibility of running yourself if you can's see any sane people there. If there is someone sane, campaign for them. Visit others, talk about the issues, talk about solutions. Go to city council meetings, consider running for city council.
Rinse and repeat. If successful, think about the next level. This is how you change things. Not by protesting on the streets (that works, but it's not as effective), but by coordinating votes.
You don't need to be a candidate, but if you know how to crunch data and run simulations, you can get electoral maps and help direct campaigns to spend the right amount of money on the places where it will be most effective. Learn the Cambridge Analytica playbook and use it (unlike them) for good.
There is a huge number of interventions you might want to do that could help shift the demographics enough that the mid-terms turn out more aligned to your ideals.
> When they said, “Give us a king to judge us,” Samuel considered their demand wrong, so he prayed to the Lord. But the Lord told him, “Listen to the people and everything they say to you. They have not rejected you; they have rejected me as their king.... > When that day comes, [the people asking for a king] will cry out because of the king you’ve chosen for yourselves... > — 1 Samuel
No mere human is deserving of being "believed in," whether it's a king, politician, religious leader, or even one's own self. We're simply not good enough (or powerful enough, or...) to be able to truly fix the world's problems on our own.
We took a bunch of sociopaths from the monied parts of the US (mainly the east and west coasts) and told them that if something is good for them, it's good for society.
Is it bad that we're destroying a region's economy by shutting down its main employers? Of course not, because the right people are making money off the increase in shareholder value brought about by offshoring those employers to countries with totalitarian governments that keep the pay low and the unions busted.
Just a quick example.