How shall we be made to compromise with the bullshit of society?

Work or starve? Work or jail?

pictured: society

Do you hate your boss? Do you hate your coworkers? Do you hate your customers? Is the only thing that keeps you showing up to work the fact that you’d starve without a job?

Great! That means that the system is working. 

Well, it’s not great-great. It’s just good that such a situation is the worst-case scenario.

See, if you are forced to work to avoid starvation, that means everyone else is too, at least in theory. That means that insane freak jerks who suck and also who hate your guts are as compelled to contribute to you as you are to contribute to them.

What about the rich assholes, the bankers and CEOs? The people who do nothing but lust for wealth and power? Here’s some good news: they aren’t warlords! If they want an incredible amount of wealth then they have to figure out how to build a company that generates that kind of wealth, rather than burning towns to the ground and enslaving their inhabitants.

Maybe you could replace “bankers and CEOs” with “the government”, but then you’d have the same problems. You’d have to make peace with submitting to a bureaucratic elite, or - maybe, perfectly - an institution that somehow represents the democratic majority. But what if you’re on the wrong side of that majority? What if someone whips up 51% of the population and gets them extremely excited to blame all of their problems on you? 

One way or another, “living with people who are different from you” is the great challenge of any human society. It means living alongside people who’s deepest ethical commitments are evil to you and whose general way of showing up in the world is disgusting and frustrating to you. “Diversity” doesn’t just mean “actually a unity, made up of people who are unified by being Not Straight White Men and who as such are on the same side”. It means “people who are rotten motherfuckers can vote”. It means figuring out how to keep them from destroying you - with the price of that being you not being able to destroy them either.

One way or another, we have to figure out how to compromise with The Bullshit of Society, figuring out how to seem presentable and work-able with people who are wildly opposed to us. I think this’ll be true no matter what kind of social system we design - difference is as immutable as death, in my opinion. We have build a society where the worst parts of us - everything on the spectrum from laziness to greed - are redirected into the best things they can be, rather than trying and failing to ignore them. 

Humanity will always surprise us in the good things it can do, in the visions it can have, in the heroism and mercy it can show. It will also always surprise us in how nastily it can mess things up. Building a better world includes comparing our present day to the worst case scenario - every day without rivers of blood in the streets is a very good day indeed!