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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Many people, especially in our subculture, tend to feel like if they can't solve an entire problem forever, if they can't Change The World, what they're doing is futile and pointless

But most people can't change the world. Most individuals shouldn't have the power to change the world. What we can do is be a force for good in the lives that are proximal to us. If we can make a few people's lives better, we should rest easy knowing that we've done our part.

If we can do more than that, then great. But never let the overwhelming hugeness of the entire world cripple your ability to make your little dent. Most people only get the chance to make a little dent - if that - and there's nothing wrong with that.

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One of my favorite quotes:

> "I was in the Air Force a while, and they had what they call 'policing the area,' and I think that’s a pretty good thing to go by. If everyone just takes care of their own area, then we won’t have any problems. Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there. And look around you, and see what needs to be changed."

-Willie Nelson

Reminds me of another one:

> To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

Confucius, The Great Learning

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

— Gandalf

Isn't this also the tragedy of the commons problem though? It only takes a few bad actors to not take care of their own area and over time, those that are doing extra to make up for them eventually feel like they're being taken advantage of.

I feel like in Japan it works because the culture adds enough social pressure that those not doing their part fall in line - or something. I don't think most western culture has that social pressure any more nor do I expect it can by added back

it's not that bad. japan may be the one extreme and the US the other, europe is somewhere in the middle on a sliding scale towards the US. the broken windows theory fits here. to use the analogy, if a window is broken in japan someone would go fix it unprompted. europe mostly manages to keep broken windows in check. and in the US broken windows have gotten out of hand.

the better alternative to social pressure is building community. social pressure means that you are forced to conform because everyone you interact with expects you to. community means that everyone you interact with is your friend.

The only thing that changes behavior is consequences. Thus fines and a functioning justice system are born. Somehow shame doesn't work anymore.

> Somehow shame doesn't work anymore.

We don't need to wonder. Shame as a mechanism only works in social contexts that feature a high degree of social dependency. In olden days, if all your neighbors hated you to the point of dissociating with you, that could be tantamount to a death sentence (who's going to share food with you when your harvest fails or take care of you when your household falls ill?); that's a society with high social dependency. For better or worse, modern society is built on abstracting away this dependency. (It's the same thing that explains declining church attendance: a church is a social organization, but nowadays if you need to find a spouse you ask a dating app instead of your congregation, and then when you need marriage counseling you ask a professional marriage counselor instead of your priest, etc. Economic transactions have replaced social dependency.)

>Economic transactions have replaced social dependency.

The flipside of this is that a lot of situations have improved. You can divorce your abusive spouse now instead of your priest telling you to just accept the abuse because god wills it. Everyone whining about the downfall of society seems to forget that it didn't actually work for everyone before.

> Everyone whining about the downfall of society seems to forget that it didn't actually work for everyone before.

I'm not presenting this as either a good thing or a bad thing, only pointing out that the mechanisms by which people ensure social adherence have changed. And yes, that's "changed", and not "gone away". For all the things the cryptobros got wrong, they did accurately identify that, in a transactional society, the only thing required to exclude someone from society is to take away their ability to perform financial transactions.

I think shame fails to work when people can broadcast online a version of events that makes them look like the victim and get tons of people backing them up.

I find it really challenging to get people to notice these things, let alone actively take even small actions for positive change.

I'm interested in what the community thinks are some of the methods I could use to improve these things, and why people quickly become inured to these kinds of problems.

I'm thinking, specifically, about peeling paint, litter, dirty signs, the kind of thing that even a passing effort, a hammer and a nail, or a bit of soap and water can fix for a surprisingly long time (~months, certainly).

It's one of the things I think is an interesting contrast between "first world" countries and many of the places I've been that are poorer - less wealthy places seem to put a significant effort into basic maintenance, because replacing things are so expensive compared to the cost of living.

Part of the reason people don't do those kinds of things where I live is that the municipalities specifically prohibit any kind of alterations, including repair, on municipal property. If something is broken, they will tell you that you must wait until the municipality feels like fixing it

I think it's that people are tired. Tired of paying large amounts of money to taxes that don't seem to fix anything in their day-to-day lives. Tired of companies screwing them over at every possible turn.

I recognize things won't easily change while people think that, that it's a tricky, vicious cycle. I wish I knew how to fix it, other than - as another commenter points out - doing the 'little' things and pushing ever so slowly for the change we need.

>I think it's that people are tired. Tired of paying large amounts of money to taxes that don't seem to fix anything in their day-to-day lives. Tired of companies screwing them over at every possible turn.

Tired of hearing these endless debates. Tired of seeing people peddle policy based o11n one set of principals out of one side of their mouth and a different policy based on different principals out of the other.

>doing the 'little' things and pushing ever so slowly for the change we need.

Sometimes improving things, sometimes creating yet more layers of spaghetti that prevent future change....

> Sometimes improving things, sometimes creating yet more layers of spaghetti that prevent future change....

I'm talking about, say, engaging in discussions about politics, trying to understand each other, trying to compromise.

I assume you're referring to, for example, enacting more government programs.

>I assume you're referring to, for example, enacting more government programs.

Or saddling existing ones with poorly thought out requirements and revisions and whatnot.

These programs always seem to start decent and go to crap with time as the "older" bits of government sink their teeth in with subsequent revisions because there's no political will to constantly fight the fight you need to to keep it from becoming co-opted or at the very least degraded by other interests.

At some point people start noticing the pattern, get tired of it and just saying no to the initial request even if it has merit. It's probably just yet another symptom of how bankrupt our institutions are. <sighs>

Fixing peeling paint correctly is a really substantial undertaking, especially as compared to picking up litter.

Removing the loose paint, figuring out if there’s a moisture problem, rot/rust, or other physical repairs needed, buying appropriate paint (maybe matching the color), then sanding, cleaning, priming, sanding, cleaning, and painting.

Slapping a bit of new paint over a problem is not the answer unless you want to make a recurring problem out of it.

If you pay government 40-50% of your income to government to manage common areas, you think you have already paid for this. You would feel foolish to spend even more of your resources on this. It is someone else's job, not yours.

In places where there is not such a strong governance structure, what you see is people doing more of what comes naturally to everyone. The communal idea arises naturally for things that people want to do. Sure, it's messier without town planning officers, etc, but the governance structure doesn't stop things getting done.

You say they are poorer but gdp, salary or whatever is not the only metric one can use to measure meaning in life. Time is the real money.

On the other hand, people pushing for incremental improvements on narrow issues while maintaining motivated ignorance of 2nd and 3rd order consequences multiplied by scale is exactly how we get the perverse systems we have.

> Most individuals shouldn't have the power to change the world.

This is a great insight. I have a tendency to think grandiose thoughts about the impact I should be having on the world, but there's really no reason that any of us should be able to make an outsized impact.

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

Your comment is a breath of fresh air coming from the comment section between the article about self hosting emails. Even beyond the moral imperative, it's saddening how a website called hackernews seems to have such a high amount of late stage capitalism drones.

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