IT'S TIME FOR BREAD RANTING ABOUT SOMETHING IDK WHERE THIS IS GOING YET WE'RE GONNA FIND OUT!
There is something so fundamentally wrong with the way society (as in the general culture as presented by the media, people online, and real-life interactions) approaches problems, and I do think that comes from us simply living in a world too big for us to handle.
I'm going to speak mostly on US terms, as that's what I know as a (reluctant) US resident on a very US-centric app, but from what I've seen this can apply to most larger scale nations, though I'm not going to generalize and say this is catch all.
In my time outside and online, I've encountered a very "doomer" attitude. The world feels like it's collapsing around us, much bigger than anything we can ever understand, and people see these and it feels insurmountable. No one feels like putting in the effort to make reasonable change, because the system we live under purposefully makes it hard to do so. People are depressed, they're hopeless, and thus they simply accept that "that's the way it is", and scoff at the youthful and naive desire to make change, to the point where in pop culture seeming unironically passionate about anything is "cringe".
But why? In a country built on the ideal that the people should get a direct say in the actions of the government, why are so many left hopeless? More importantly, why is this a common theme?
Was this by design? In the US, I don't think so, more I see it as a biproduct of the main culprit: the sheer size of the nation. It's too damn big. I'm going to apply it to some very simplified percentages, but you'll get the rough idea.
The House of Representatives was formed in 1789. According to the 1790 US Census, the nation consisted of about 4,000,000 people, and in 1793 it was decided there were to be 120 House members to represent these people.
Let's assume each house member has an equal amount of "Speaking power", and that each rep represents the same number of people for simplicity's sake. In the 1790s, this would mean each rep spoke for about 33,333 people (not taking into account slaves, infants, or other factors, again these are very rough estimates). With some quick math, this means that each represented person had .003% of their rep's talking power, or if the rep had $100,000, each person would control about $3 worth. Not a lot, but it's something.
Now look at today, the population is sitting at around 400,000,000, ten million times what it was in 1790. The reps sit at 435. Now, each rep speaks for around 920,000 people, and each person hold .0001% of their rep's talking power. No, that is not a typo. ONE TEN-THOUSANDTH OF A PERCENTAGE. If your rep had $100,000, you'd contribute ten cents.
It feels like we cannot do anything BECAUSE THE WORLD HAS OUTGROWN US. The size of the US has created a situation where the people have so little speaking power, the effort it would take to make change feels insurmountable. And who's to guarantee that anyone in power will listen?
This is a common theme in history. It's commonly said that an empire can only be as wide as the distance that can be traveled in two weeks on horseback, and that standard isn't to create a happy society, it's to create one that functions AT ALL. This standard was applied because exceeding that distance it would be difficult to communicate with the outer corners of the empire with ancient postal systems (horseback), but I think it also applies in reverse. If a society is too big, it's people are too removed from its government to have any reasonable autonomy in it, which is how you get authoritarian regimes.
I am of the belief that people are simply not build to work on the scale that we currently do. It's overwhelming, we feel distanced from any change.
People always wonder why anarchists are anarchists, things like this will always be my answer. Again and again, large scale nations fail to meet the needs of their people and fall into the hands of the corrupt and wealthy. This system has grown beyond what we can reasonably control, thus it must be torn down.
Guys should I put this in the anarchist library
