ianwelsh | In face of a failed society, trust in leaders is insane. Crazed. They’ve obviously run society off a cliff, and they either are OK with that or are incompetent, or both. (And the smart ones are selling you that everything is OK while they sprint for the lifeboats: aka. New Zealand.)
For over 10 years now I’ve been telling Americans to get out. Oh, it’s not that America’s the only developed nation heading for failed state, for all intents and purposes there are no exceptions, not even Sainted New Zealand, but America’s one of the leaders (Britain’s another) and I have a lot of American readers. If you’re going to have everything go sideways into a propeller, better later than sooner.
But most Americans won’t or can’t get out, and Musk and Bezo’s dreams of escape to space aren’t going to happen for humanity en-masse: not in time.
We’re all in a big ship, it’s going down. Some areas are already underwater, others will be soon and the entire thing is going to sink.
And we have no lifeboats. We could, perhaps, have built some, if we’d started 30 to 40 years ago with massive investments, but we didn’t, and if our leaders were that able, they’d have been able to save the ship, since that’s when they had to act.
But this article isn’t about “we are fucked”, it’s about “too many of us refuse to admit it and that it means we need radical change.”
And one of the big reasons for this is the need for daddy. One of the big hurdles to radicalization is that it means you can’t trust your leaders at all. That they have fucked up, betrayed, or both. That they are bad, evil people who not only aren’t acting in your interest, but are your enemies.
I’ve been pounding this issue for a couple years, and some regular readers are probably sick of it. I am.
But it matters. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, who your enemies are, you can’t protect yourself from them. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, that your leaders are your enemies, you can’t properly take action on your own, with friends, family and other groups because at some level you’re still thinking that government or corporations will come thru and take care of.
All your life government and corporations have taken care of you. They’ve often been abusive parents, but they have made sure there’s food available to buy, streets to walk and drive on, laws, jobs, etc, etc… They run almost everything and you’re dependent on them for almost everything just like you were dependent on your parents and teachers when you were a child.
Bad parents still feed and house you. They’re monsters, but monsters who kept you alive. Children love their abusive parents even as they fear and hate them, and the same screwed up psychology pertains to business and government leaders and those they lead.
An entire life’s conditioning works against radicalization in anyone for whom the system has even slightly worked.
But the fact of the matter is that if we want to handle climate change and environmental collapse and all our other problems (handle doesn’t mean stop, but many problems are essentially trivial and can be fixed any time our leadership wants to, like health care or spam calls) means we need radical change. We need to change our system completely and we need to entirely get rid of our current leadership class, who have proved their incompetence and ill will.
That’s radical. That’s a leap.
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