Democracies are strengthened by the degree of engagement by the people. The more people become informed, engaged with, and involved with their government and its activities, the more secure the democracy.
A disengaged and apathetic citizenry makes a government susceptible to corruption.
Restoring and reinforcing the stability of democracy begins in the classroom with a comprehensive civics-oriented strategy for equipping students with the skills and insights to achieve success in effective governance and their personal lives.
As it turns out, the overlap in skills for effective governance and success in one’s personal life are represented as an almost clean circle in a Venn diagram.
The range of interpersonal skills one can and should develop are core competencies for life. Communication skills, negotiation skills, and conflict resolution skills are all universally valuable skills. Developing competencies in areas like Robert’s Rules of Order and understanding the nature and process of effective legislation (rules to live by) may be more niche but are transferable skills that can be applied in other areas of life, particularly when they’re not considered obscure skills by a majority like they are now.
The more people who know how to declare a point of order, the fewer conflicts could escalate into violence.
Of course, the development of logic and critical thinking skills should be included in the curriculum, if not as courses but as strategies for delivering an existing course load.
Applying critical thinking skills development within a history class, for example, would increase student engagement simply by structuring the information delivery process through a means that challenges one’s thinking skills.
On an entirely different and equally crucial level is the reinforcement of a commitment to the role of the Fourth Estate in society. The profit motive must be removed to protect objectivity in the information delivery process, ensuring the public is adequately informed of relevant news in the most agnostic way possible.
Breaking corporate media into community-based employee co-ops will create a culture of checks and balances that approach the self-regulating effectiveness of the peer review process within the scientific community.
The election process is another area that must be made as agnostic as possible. Removing the undue influence of money in elections and reducing the tribalism of the currently corrosive culture in politics is critical to mitigating ideological bias. First-past-the-post elections should be replaced with proportional representation and ranked-choice voting.
With these measures, an exceptionally stable democracy can emerge on level ground with inbuilt resistance to corruption.
This post is a response to a question posed in its full format as follows: “What are the most concerning threats to free speech and open discourse in Western democracies today?”
The people currently scaremongering that free speech is under threat are the most concerning threats to free speech and open discourse in democracies today.
People like Elon Musk, who declare themselves “free speech absolutists” and then ban them from posting on a public forum because they’ve either personally offended him with their speech or they’ve raised too much money to support a candidate he doesn’t support.
People like Donald Trump are also a threat to free speech while claiming to be a champion as he issues threats to media empires like ABC for not kowtowing to his abusive behaviour during a debate or his vow to shut down late-night comedians who mock him and his cartoonish stupidity.
Freedom of speech is healthy and under no threat by any operating democracy in the world, not even in a corporatocracy like the U.S. is freedom of speech under any imminent threat — beyond that posed by the aforementioned predators.
The people who whine the loudest about threats to their freedom of speech are mostly the cancel culture crowd who interpret freedom of speech as a right to be listened to.
You can say whatever you want, but no one is obligated to listen. That’s the fundamental reality of speech in society in general. The freedom part applies only to a government’s ability to not threaten people for saying stuff that gets under the skin of some power-hungry official — like Trump. If he’s elected, then freedom of speech will most definitely be under a severe assault — although no MAGA believes that. They will if he wins. Then they’ll complain like the regretful Brexiteers in England.
“But… But… But… he’s not hurting the people we want him to hurt. He’s hurting us, too!!! He didn’t tell us he was going to make our lives miserable. He only promised we wouldn’t have to vote any longer. We thought that meant freedom!!!”
Nope… that’s “freedumb,” and say goodbye to your right to speak your mind.
In short, the people who claim to be the most fervent defenders of “free speech” are the people who pose the greatest threat to “free speech.”
I know… that’s effed up, ain’t it… but that’s the Bizarro world we live in… ours happens to be round… or possibly flat.
The Institute for Economics and Peace provides an in-depth analysis of civil unrest in the UK specifically through the .pdf available from the link below:
Note from this quote a clue as to the causes of civil unrest:
“The UK has become less peaceful in the last decade. Peacefulness in the UK deteriorated by almost 11 percent in 2022, the most recent year of measurement. This is the eighth deterioration in peacefulness in the last decade and the first since 2020. Fifty-eight Police Force Areas (PFA) deteriorated, while eight improved. This is the largest number of PFAs to deteriorate since 2018.
Of the five UKPI indicators, homicide was the only one to improve, while the remaining four — violent crime, weapons crime, police officers, public disorder — deteriorated”
This suggests the aggravating factors for civil unrest do not lie within social dynamics among the population but an overall level of dissatisfaction with systems failing to meet the needs of the people.
Sadly, the propensity for ignoring causes and treating symptoms has exacerbated the problems as police have increasingly adopted militaristic policies for “serving and protecting” the public.
The militarization of the police has made this phenomenon worse, not better and they’ve been allowed to evolve in a counter-productive strategy that fails on every front from inciting civil unrest to increasing incidents of their wrongdoing as police are responsible for up to 40% of all domestic violence incidents.
The strategy of militarization of the police has turned them into a terrorist organization for many citizens. This is a consequence of conservative politics because imposition is the only language they understand.
Here is a summary provided by Chat GPT on social events in which Police catalyzed riots as a consequence of their inept approach to conflict de-escalation (from a U.S. perspective):
Numerous social events throughout history have seen police actions catalyzing riots. Here are some notable instances:
1. 1965 Watts Riots (Los Angeles, California):
– Trigger: The arrest of Marquette Frye, a black motorist, by a white California Highway Patrol officer.
– Outcome: Six days of rioting, resulting in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, and extensive property damage.
2. 1967 Newark Riots (Newark, New Jersey):
– Trigger: The arrest and beating of John Smith, a black cab driver, by white police officers.
– Outcome: Six days of rioting, 26 deaths, hundreds of injuries, and widespread destruction.
3. 1967 Detroit Riots (Detroit, Michigan):
– Trigger: A police raid on an unlicensed bar, or “blind pig,” in a predominantly black neighbourhood.
– Outcome: Five days of rioting, 43 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, and significant property damage.
4. 1968 Chicago Riots (Chicago, Illinois):
– Trigger: The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., followed by police actions during protests.
– Outcome: Several days of rioting, 11 deaths, numerous injuries, and extensive property damage.
5. 1980 Miami Riots (Miami, Florida):
– Trigger: The acquittal of four white police officers in the beating death of Arthur McDuffie, a black motorcyclist.
– Outcome: Several days of rioting, 18 deaths, numerous injuries, and extensive property damage.
6. 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Los Angeles, California):
– Trigger: The acquittal of four LAPD officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black motorist.
– Outcome: Six days of rioting, 63 deaths, over 2,000 injuries, and widespread destruction.
7. 2001 Cincinnati Riots (Cincinnati, Ohio):
– Trigger: The police shooting of Timothy Thomas, an unarmed black teenager.
– Outcome: Several days of rioting, resulted in injuries and significant property damage.
8. 2014 Ferguson Unrest (Ferguson, Missouri):
– Trigger: The police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer.
– Outcome: Weeks of protests and riots, resulting in injuries, arrests, and property damage.
9. 2015 Baltimore Protests (Baltimore, Maryland):
– Trigger: The death of Freddie Gray in police custody.
– Outcome: Several days of protests and rioting, resulted in injuries, arrests, and property damage.
10. 2020 George Floyd Protests (Nationwide, USA):
– Trigger: The police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
– Outcome: Protests and riots across numerous cities in the U.S., resulting in deaths, injuries, and significant property damage.
These events highlight the recurring issue of police actions triggering significant social unrest, often reflecting deeper systemic issues within society.
Imposition is conflict escalation NOT conflict resolution.
Although the militarization of the police is entirely the wrong way to go in addressing social unrest, they are a symptom of resolvable political problems beginning with the short-sighted views of conservative politicians who interpret every problem as a nail because they have learned only how to wield a hammer.
Nuance escapes them.
The patience required to facilitate peaceful resolutions runs contrary to a profit-oriented mindset that equates time spent with lost dollars.
The core problem is also exacerbated by their sycophantic support of the conditions that led to last century’s Great Depression and were responsible for triggering the Second World War. We are watching those conditions and their consequences replaying themselves right now in real-time with the horrifying implications inherent within the corrupt American system.
No nation is immune to the impact of economic distortions feeding despair among the public.
The core problem catalyzing the increase in civil unrest is economic by nature.
The core problem feeding the despair driving otherwise peaceful citizens into extreme action is the economic distortion corroding the basic patience, tolerance, and decency of otherwise peaceful people who want only to live modestly dignified lives but cannot because we have all been robbed of trillions in a class warfare that seeks to resurrect a facsimile of governance resembling a medieval caste system of two classes of people; rulers and serfs.
This trajectory is unsustainable and will continue to feed unrest.
This sociopathic profit motive cannot but lead to chaos.
Making matters worse is that the lifestyles of the wealthy class have put humanity on a trajectory toward its extinction.
No one should be surprised by an increase in public unrest.
Things are going to get MUCH uglier before they get better.
The questions we need to address are:
“How many casualties can we tolerate before we come to our senses?”
How much pain and suffering can we stomach before we lose our shit?
How many millions must die due to preventable causes and the behaviours of sociopaths hellbent on destroying this planet will it take before civilization is a chaotic mess of violent insurrections all around the world?
What will it take for the wealthiest among us to show some leadership and help set this ship of humanity onto a path toward a sustainable future?
(This post was an answer to a Question posed on Quora — where all my posts on Medium have originated; hence the personal response indicated within this article. — https://www.quora.com/profile/Antonio-Amaral-1/ )
The world is changing ever faster by the year. The natural reaction many people have toward circumstances changing in ways they haven’t been able to process is to resist that change. A large part of the problem contributing toward resistance to change is the perception that things were okay before the proposed changes had been introduced and “pushed onto them”. (People in general, regardless of their political ideology, don’t appreciate feeling like they’ve had their lives dictated to them.)
In the case of gay marriage, for example, many people seemed quite comfortable with their many generations of heterosexual marriage. They didn’t want to see their status quo change because that represents a change to something everyone believes is fundamental to society — family. The notion that a family is not a genetically controlled environment just doesn’t factor into sensibilities which still believe in the “Ozzie and Harriet illusion of family” (even though that symbol hasn’t existed for decades — if ever it did beyond a small segment of society). Changing that image is difficult for some people on a fundamental level because it means changing much about how they perceive the world around them.
Conservatives have the greatest difficulties with such changes because they are naturally predisposed toward conservation — (hence their designation as conservatives). There is certainly some value in preserving aspects of tradition and ideology to facilitate the cultivation of a consistent set of values to strengthen a community. We are at a point in our history where diverse communities across the globe that have been evolving for centuries are now transforming into a singular and global community. Many traditional values are forced into being discarded quickly without permitting conservatives their luxuries of taking the natural amount of time they would otherwise take toward adjusting to change.
Some conservatives can still support notions of slavery and misogyny. It seems clear that some of these views have been entrenched so deeply within the human psyche that we have many centuries of effort ahead of us to cure our society of such destructive attitudes… and because the changes which are occurring across this globe involve cultures which are still currently living in what the developed world regards as barbaric conditions; we have an enormous amount of work to do to resolve the conflicts arising out of the differences in perspectives as expressed by groups whose affiliations range the gamut of the spectrum of ideological concerns.
I don’t believe conservative values are fundamentally any different than liberal values; only the comprehension each group has on how to achieve those values differs between them. For example, both dislike the fact that unwanted children are forced into this world, and both would like to see the elimination of abortions as a means of preventing those children from being born into deplorable conditions. The conservative mind rationalizes that the best way to eliminate abortions is by imposing conditions and laws which govern behaviour. The liberal mind rationalizes education and support as the best solution toward reducing abortions to their minimal requirement. In the case of this issue, it seems clear to me in my biased mind that the liberal mindset is more capable of acknowledging the reality that people will respond far better toward receiving support than they would in being dictated to. This introduces an aspect of conservative thinking, highlighting a degree of hypocrisy in their efforts. No one likes to be dictated to, and it seems conservatives are the most vocal complainants of appearances of being dictated to. They seem incapable, however, of recognizing how their solutions are often impositions of their will upon others. They want their cake and to eat it, too. (This is speaking in generalities, of course, but that’s the nature of this topic.)
I think conservatives do sincerely believe they are helping our society to preserve values, but that often, they don’t seem altogether self-aware enough to recognize how many of their “proposed solutions” are not only not solutions but are often approaches which exacerbate the problems they claim to want to solve; but even worse is that they are approaches which contradict their values.
(A case in point would be the sheer number of laws they have introduced for controlling a woman’s reproductive rights while completely dismissing how those laws contradict their desire for a small government and greater freedoms as individuals… and under the auspices that they are protecting an unborn life while demonstrating no capacity for supporting initiatives to help already born and suffering children. They claim to possess superior morality arising from their religious beliefs, yet also complain about supporting those with the greatest need in society while lavishing riches upon those already wealthy.)
A conservative ideology and mindset may contribute some value toward establishing some framework for consistency within the development of a stable social structure, but it seems clear that the conservative mindset has lost all touch with what it means to be conservative in the first place and that it now is merely a caricature of an obstinate child who simply wants the world to capitulate to its own selfishly myopic views without having to give anything back in return for the luxuries they enjoy because of the sacrifices of those who came before us.
This post is a response to a question posed in its full format as follows: “What can we say for those people that worked hard but are still poor? Is it because they were born to be poor?”
The first place to begin one’s assessment of another’s fortune is with an honest apprehension of the environment affecting all fortunes by all people who inhabit a (somewhat) closed ecosystem.
To suggest some external source of magical influence like fate to factor in any of this merely distracts from an objective apprehension of the dynamics leading to disparity.
It is precisely this kind of magical thinking that every “Confidence Artist” (“conman,” “swindler,” “scammer,” fraud) throughout human history has relied upon to enrich themselves at the expense of their victims.
Making matters worse for the victims is the belief that they’re responsible for the actions of others who impoverish them.
This thinking epitomizes victim-shaming.
It’s no different than blaming one’s attire for “causing” a rape.
It’s precisely the thinking a homicidal monster utilizes when they claim someone else’s actions forced them to commit murder. They twist the notion of self-defence into a justifiable weapon to dismiss responsibility for their actions.
This perverse thinking permits people like Derek Chauvin to suffocate George Floyd until they stop breathing. It empowers all the evil monsters in our midst to invoke sociopathic rationalizations unrelated to the incident in question to justify the commission of murder.
People are not poor because of some cosmic assignment handed down to them by an authority, as if it were a justifiable assessment of their character at birth. People are poor because humanity has not learned the lessons of our primitive existence — namely, that we managed to survive our cave-dwelling origins only because we worked together as we hunted in groups. Each contributed to the welfare of the whole in ways that allowed everyone to benefit equally from the collective labours of synergy.
Margaret Mead has most succinctly identified the dawn of human civilization in her example of a knit bone discovered during her anthropological studies.
The worst aspect of all of this is that the evidence is abundant. There is no mystery as to why so many people struggle with poverty today.
In our early history, widespread poverty primarily resulted from natural scarcity due to environmental conditions such as an early frost wiping out an entire harvest or poor land management practices such as those that led to “The Dust Bowl” and the “Dirty Thirties.” Ironically, the magical thinking of “Manifest Destiny” driving an initial bump in prosperity contributed to the impoverished conditions that contributed to “The Great Depression,” which contributed to the stressors driving global aggressions leading to a Second World War only decades after the first global aggression.
The fuel behind all of the poverty and aggression is the same fuel contributing to an increasing number and degree of violent protests occurring worldwide today — income disparity. We have surpassed the stage of income disparity that triggered our first global aggressions due to the stresses of exacerbated conditions of poverty.
This cycle of class disparity has triggered aggressions throughout human history, and many of our popular stories are based on them.
We should know better by now, but we seem incapable of learning this crucial lesson from history.
What makes matters worse is that in today’s “post-scarcity world,” we produce more than we can consume. We have no excuse for poverty today beyond human failings, as expressed through our politics.
None of this is a mystery — or should be a mystery to anyone today. Yet, here we are looking for excuses to victim-shame the vulnerable in society who struggle to feed themselves every day.
The information providing clarity exists in abundance. Few people are ignorant of the fact that eight people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the whole of humanity. No one is oblivious to the magical sound of the designation we venerate of a “centibillionaire.” It’s like a status of godhood on Earth that people seriously believe is a consequence of effort and ingenuity and not a dysfunctional system that impoverishes the vulnerable.
Few people perceive that obscenity in terms of the threat to global stability that it is. Few people perceive that amount of power within the hands of an egotist as a direct threat to their livelihoods — unless, of course, they’re one of the thousands who have been displaced on a whim by a megalomaniac who spent $44 billion to own the world’s most enormous megaphone so that they can capture global attention every day.
Few people look at graphs like these two and become horrified by their implications.
Yet… here we are, sending ourselves on a path in which the logical conclusion of the trajectory summed up by these two graphs is the end of human civilization as we know it. Instead of focusing on how to correct our course, we’re looking for reasons to victim-shame the most vulnerable among us.
It’s entirely disgusting that so many people are so willing to demonize the victims in society that it is mind-boggling how such utterly primitive thinking can exist in modern society.
Centuries from now, if we survive this insanity, this mindset will be viewed as the horrific equivalent of witch trials from our history.
This post is a response to a question posed in its full format as follows: “We have to be impressed by the Democratic Party’s ability to ‘Fool some of the people ALL of the time.’ Could those in their pocket kindly define their go-to mime: ‘Threat to democracy?’”
After this question, the next question you posted on your profile qualifies as a “threat to democracy,” as does your ideological mindset in which you divide society into an “us versus them” dynamic.
Your understanding of a law intended to protect everyone equally is broken and favours the application of subjective biases that disenfranchise half of the population. Furthermore, you have no respect for that half of the population as you endorse stripping them of rights you take for granted for yourself.
You place all of the onus of responsibility onto that half of the population while perversely ignoring how demeaning the very concept of life is by elevating tissue in development beyond the degree of value you should be placing upon the life and lives affected by that process.
Women are not different in every state, with different needs or rights to protect according to the political whims of zealous religious hypocrites dehumanizing them as incubators for the production of children they can dispose of once they’re produced.
There exists no valid justification for the segregation of fundamental human rights by state because abortion is not a state issue but a human issue.
States’ rights, in this case, erode democracy and reduce critical functions within human lives to commodities serving the vapid whims of political ideologues rather than the universal values of human life in a uniform fashion.
It would be best if you were far more concerned with how “states rights” are intended to address issues affecting localized areas, not universal matters.
It would help if you protected the clear divisions between geographical and universal human concerns.
You don’t do that, though, because you have already indicated your primary concern is to pit citizens and neighbours against each other with your ideological division of society, and that, right there, is the greatest threat to democracy.
It would be best if you fought alongside your neighbours to protect all equally, not against your neighbours, to win an egotistically subjective degree of superiority over them.
While you are busy gloating over what you dismiss as a non-issue, the betrayal of women’s rights and democracy as a whole, you reveal a horrific degree of nation-destroying sociopathy.
The reality is that reversing Roe v. Wade has already had a devastating impact on the lives of fellow citizens you don’t seem to care in the least about.
This is not “nothing.”
It’s a horror show, and you show yourself to be a horrific monster by pretending this doesn’t matter.
In reality, states should stay out of people’s lives and let them live according to their universal right to self-determination.
It’s not a state’s right to overrule universal rights. It is a divide-and-conquer strategy that undermines an entire nation as a fundamental threat to its stability as a democracy.
The worlds of all these people have fallen apart. You have chosen to overlook the pain and suffering your attitude causes them in favour of banging your ideological drum while disparaging your neighbours in the process.
That makes YOU a threat to democracy. YOU are too full of yourself to realize how badly you betray it. YOU are more interested in achieving ideological dominion over your neighbours than in supporting the social contract and working together to resolve common problems.
The original format of the question this post answers was written as follows: “Which possible political system could replace modern democracy and have less flaws than democracy and still benefit the many?”
This question makes it seem as if how we manage our affairs and have a dialogue over how best to peacefully coexist in productive societies that encourage us all to achieve our best potential as individuals and as a society is just a matter of a change of clothing.
That’s now how this works.
Societies do not succeed or fail based on the system we use to govern ourselves.
Societies fail because we fail to govern ourselves as individuals.
Societies fail because human corruption leads us to failure.
Societies don’t fail because we pick the wrong system.
Systems fail because we fail to raise humanity from the muck of our primitive urges as individuals.
Haitians in Springfield are not living in fear today because democracy has failed them but because corrupt human beings have chosen hatred over understanding.
The only system that will ever work is the system that cures us of horrifying statistics such as one in five of us is a mentally unstable individual or 70%-80% of families are dysfunctional, or the primary cause of people leaving their jobs is because of abusive leadership in their place of work.
The only system that will work is the system of people who refuse to tolerate monsters corrupting human society, and that extends far beyond simple politics and well into every other aspect of human life and what we colloquially refer to as “civilization.”
The only system that can ever have a hope of working is the system that focuses on developing human potential, which means education, healthcare, and the ability to succeed on one’s merits in a system that encourages and develops our ability to achieve success through self-determination.
We don’t need to be ruled. We should know better how horribly wrong every other system has turned out to be. It doesn’t matter how messy democracy is because that’s not a problem with the system of democracy. That’s a problem with human beings.
We need to fix ourselves as humans and as a species sharing this mudball with billions of other species if we want any system to be stable over time.
Democracy as a concept is not “flawed.” It’s the best idea we have ever had. The problem is us. We must focus on being better individuals before we can better organize ourselves within any system.
We need to stop pointing the finger of blame at anything and everything that is not us and start taking some responsibility for who we are and what we are. If we can’t manage to do that, then we deserve to send ourselves over the brink and into oblivion.
Let’s distill this issue into its simplest perspective.
Knowledge is Power
The most effective approach is also the approach that focuses on the most crucial responsibility for a democracy to fulfill if the people truly want to create a stable society capable of achieving its potential as a peaceful and prosperous community.
Education is the most effective way to empower people. It’s the only way to empower people.
Every other method involves coercion, imposition, and, ultimately, the subjugation and deterioration of a people.
Nothing empowers an individual more than learning to accomplish goals in ways they never thought possible before. Nothing brings society together in a common cause more than the information all members need to make good decisions for themselves.
Everything we see today recognized as toxic and destructive to democracy is directly due to an abysmal level of education. From the cheerleading to the taunts, to the entrenchments, to the emotionally unhinged betrayals of the social contract, can be traced back to a paucity of education.
Racism, misogyny, and all the bigotries eroding relationships and community cohesion to contribute to escalations in conflict to feed criminal behaviours can be cured with appropriate levels and forms of education and public awareness campaigns.
People can learn to protect themselves without relying on a nanny state if the nanny state could stop infantilizing its public.
Democracy has been perpetually criticized for its chaotic nature by people who judge democracy by its lowest common denominator, but that destroys every form of governance.
Democracy is an inspirational form of governance because it is built upon the initiative and ingenuity derived from the fruits of individual potential all benefit from.
Leaders and caretakers of the public good must serve as teachers and coaches for those who struggle to cope with challenges.
We should not strive to impose, direct, herd, or subdue people but show them the paths they can take to achieve their best selves and our best communities.
We have no problem taking this approach within our learning institutions because we have learned from experience how to motivate students to achieve their best.
Somehow, though, we reverse course once the educational curriculum is completed, and that’s to the detriment of everything we hold dear in society.
It’s because we do not extend a supportive, proactive, and growth-oriented approach to cultivating our societies that we have an escalating force of militarized subjugation of the people. Those tasked with the responsibility of protecting and serving the public have metastasized into a destructive force of militarized imposition on the people to become state-sanctioned terrorist operations.
It’s because we have not learned to appreciate what we learned from our institutions of learning that the state empowers its protectors with an attitude of entitlement to brutally abuse its people and be responsible for committing homicides of the people and being protected by the state for their betrayals of justice.
We have allowed ourselves to develop an entirely destructive approach to reactionary mismanagement of society and the issues we all struggle to live with.
It is because we abandon the lessons taught to society by its leaders in education — of all forms, that innocent citizens can be murdered in their beds while sleeping by those who are supposed to protect them.
The lowest common denominator that critics love to cite when bashing democracies is not the least educated among us but those who are educated and who abandon their lessons to wallow in their basest instincts.
The lowest common denominators among us are the leaders who fail to lead us.
The lowest common denominators among us are those who are allegedly trained in conflict de-escalation while adopting conflict escalation techniques to murder innocent citizens.
We need to change that dynamic and fire every leader who does not inspire better behaviours from the rest of us. Leaders in society must be aspirational, not deaden, depress, or dishearten us all to disengage from our responsibilities to self-govern.
We cannot create a thriving democracy by tearing each other down and shutting people out of our roles and responsibilities to ourselves and our self-governance.
We cannot tolerate those who fail to lead us to a better world because we can see the trajectory of self-destruction occurring everywhere corrupt leadership exists.
If we want human civilization to survive, our leaders must do more than provide lip service to hope. Our leaders must empower the people to cultivate hope on an individual basis. This is the only way for us to come together to solve our common problems and preserve our present to protect a future for our children.
We cannot accept less than those who can lead by example because the examples we live with now demand violence to eject them from our midst lest we lose everything we hold dear.
It means everyone is free to be who they are and to do what they choose as long as they do not infringe on the freedoms of others.
It means “freedom” is not a licence to abuse others or violate the freedoms of others.
It means religious people do not get to dictate how other people choose to live their lives, and that includes the freedom to seek a remedy to a medical condition without suffering from subjectively applied restraints or conditions by others.
It means freedom from religious persecution and the freedom to practice one’s religion without persecution for one’s personal choices.
It means the right to self-determination and bodily autonomy without restriction.
It does not mean the freedom to impose one’s views onto others because that violates their freedoms.
It does not mean the freedom to abuse others because that violates their freedoms.
It does not mean the institution of laws to dictate the personal choices of others because that violates their freedoms.
It means do whatever you want to do, think whatever you want, and believe whatever you want, but don’t be an asshole to others about it.
It means “The Golden Rule” — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
It means reciprocity — treat others as you want to be treated, but if you’re a masochist who wants to suffer, it does not mean that you have an excuse to indulge in sadistic behaviours toward others.
It means trying to be a decent human being toward other people. It means trying to respect their identical right to be who they are and to do what they want to do, think, and believe without having to endure your assaults.
It means learning to respect other people’s boundaries.
Freedom means developing empathy, compassion, and sensitivity toward others.
It means freedom isn’t free. Freedom comes with boundaries and at the cost of eternal vigilance.
This is the question as it was asked in its original form: “Will something like the “voluntary human extinction movement” become more and more popular in the future as the Earth’s destruction due to our unending greed becomes more difficult to ignore?”
So… Every human who voluntarily refuses to reproduce does so from a motivation of compassionate care for the environment to lay the entire future of human reproduction at the feet of those who don’t care about our impact on the environment.
This sounds very much like people choosing not to vote in an election because they feel their government is too corrupt, so they decide not to participate in the corruption as a form of protest. The result of that strategy is for the corrupt psychopaths among us to take up the slack of government operations. Abstention facilitates government transformation into a sociopathic entity that the abstainers chose to rebel against by stepping aside and letting the corruption continue without resistance.
Self-sacrifice may seem humane as a movement, but it merely hands unrestrained power to wreak ecological havoc over to those most responsible for environmental destruction.
By culling the portion of our population who have the most developed sensitivities of empathy and compassion, we leave behind a world of psychopaths and sociopaths who are free to do as they please without resistance.
As noble as people may want to make themselves out to be by adopting this attitude, it neither solves the problem of protecting the environment nor does it result in the extinction of humanity by attrition. What it accomplishes is to breed out the most crucial qualities of humanity that would protect our environment while allowing us as a species to achieve a balanced cohabitation with all other life on this planet.
This isn’t a solution to the planet’s problems. It’s a way of hastening them and the destruction of our environment.
It’s doomed to fail as a long-term strategy, but as a form of protest, it might successfully make a statement that could motivate the rest to rise and fight against corruption.
It is otherwise a way of stripping humanity’s only hope for evolving beyond our most destructive impulses. We need to encourage the development of empathy, not cull it from our population.
The main problem with the notion of passivist approaches toward resolving issues created by the psychopaths among us is the naivety involved in believing the most vile amongst us will experience a magical epiphany and become woke enough to care about their destruction.
They won’t.
They’ll destroy everything, and when they’re done, they’ll bemoan their fate while blaming something other than their actions for the consequences of those actions.
This would be like expecting Donald Trump to end up in prison and realizing, “Gee, maybe I should have behaved better.”
Not a friggin’ chance in hell that will happen.
If he ends up in prison, he’ll rail against the injustice of a witch hunt and believe himself unfairly persecuted until his last breath.
Neither cowardice nor apathy are solutions to saving our asses.
A democratic form of governance demands engagement, while the quickest way to destroy democracy is apathy. We’ve been doing a remarkable job of dismantling our democracies since Reagan by meekly handing over power to the powerful predators that have been reshaping human society into a collection of sociopaths who think nothing of exploiting their neighbour for a minor trinket serving as a temporary distraction from despair.
We must do the hard work of facing our monsters and reigning them in.
No shortcuts exist that will save humanity from itself.
No peaceful Kumbaya has ever prevailed against the barbarians at the gates.
This movement may signal a voluntary extinction of humanity, but it’s an extinction that will take every other creature with us. It won’t save them from our psychopathic predations.
thotbag 