Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
I don’t really agree anything is impossible to fix. Maybe I’m optimistic but I think with enough time things can get better. As far as I know alcohol is much less common among younger people and there are more people avoiding it entirely now. Or maybe by impossible you meant really difficult.
The idea that people in charge should be better, so their actions can’t be questioned; rather than that they should be better, so their actions should be scrutinized. It’s so backwards and it enables nearly all of the worst abuses of power. It might be harder to fix people being attracted to power or being straight up malicious, but if we could solve the authority problem, then those would have a safeguard in a lot of scenarios. It’s so close to being solvable, too; people grow up experiencing misuses of authority that hurt them, they should understand the problem. But somehow it still seems so prevalent, that authority is treated as being above questioning or consequences. I hate it. But it is possible to change.
Guns in America. The need to act inspires fear on part of enthusiasts to buy more guns, ammo, support politicians that bolster stonewalls to any legislation that could make the country safer from irresponsible gun owners. The lack of meaningful action while this is happening shows how screwed the nation is as a gun cult continues to grow and grow.
Our inability to trust anyone foreign or unfamiliar. This legacy of our evolution used to be the safest way to live. No it just holds us all back.
I think this one is closer to being solved than we think, because we know the things that can help. Travel and simply meeting other people being the big one. And there are enough people who are accepting of outsiders that we know it’s possible on a large scale.
In the US and Canada?
Car dependency / Car centrism.
Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.
But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.
The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.
Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.
Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.
Wait til the petro dollar crashes. It’s going to be hilarious
EVs are coming, no matter how expensive/wasteful, you’d always have a car option.
As they do, they’re quickly turning into indicators of privilege. If/when the petro dollar crashes I totally don’t expect billy bob that drives his eight cylinder diesel to hold any resentment towards EV drivers when he’s stuck paying for something that he can’t afford gas for. But hey what do I know I prefer old school bicycles.
If I had more time under my belt I’d probably buy one. The 100k+ pricetag is just too much right now
alcohol is especially hard to ban because it’s just sugar and yeast, and you can even use natural yeast if it gets banned, and you can use fruit if sugar gets banned. While with drugs some tyrannical empire might be able to ban every single lab-related equipment and chemical (and even then, you would be surprised what people can make by themselves without anything else other then natural resources, I mean that’s how we got here as a species), alcohol is such a simple recipe that it’s just plain impossible to regulate effectively, and the current way of having it cheap enough that people don’t brew their own but expensive enough that the 99% of the population doesn’t turn into alcoholics is good enough
Greed.
Similar to this, I’ve got a real beef with our unresolved insecuritues we have as a people (in principle. Obviously in practise this is hard).
I feel like the insecurities that essentially, drive us, are really holding us back from meaningful progress on our legitimately hard problems with climate, energy/food distribution, etc…
We’re still drawn into BS distractions and opposing teams and whatnot like a bunch of monkeys with sticks (which is apt, to be fair)
Nearly every societal problem has a solution, but you need a medical / buddhist / marxist / approach (probably a lot of other disciplines / lenses use this approach too, those are just some ones that more or less follow this).
- Correctly identify the actual problem.
- Find the root cause(s) of the problem.
- Name / describe the state without that problem.
- Outline the cure / steps to carry it out and reach that goal.
The only problems that aren’t solvable, are things that would break the laws of physics.
As for drugs / alcohol use, lemmygrad and hexbear have a lot of good threads on drug / alcohol use, and how to view it, and handle it collectively. The USA is probably the worst example of a country to look at for alleviating the societal ills brought about by alcohol and drug mis-use, so its good to look at how socialist countries have tackled it throughout history. If you can’t find a thread I’d recommend asking over there, because you’ll get a lot of good answers.
Greed.
America is a great example of this.
anything harder than wearing masks
Lying in bed, debating if you have to pee bad enough to get up
Currently struggling with this right now
What are you talking about? Catheters have already solved this problem
You have to take it out though
That’s a different problem. Or, if you don’t want to solve that problem, you’ll have an infection problem. But you don’t have to worry about getting out of bed in the middle of the night anymore.
keep an empty gatorade bottle by your bed. wide mouth, soft lipped.
Getting consent to creating a life from a unborn child. Every human being was raped into existence by their parents.
Rent is due in 7 days.
I don’t know if that’s a problem with society so much as it is a problem with reality.
…or a problem with time and sequences of events.
Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.
Most don’t not just from some technicalities but because parents or otherwise we have a biological urge to consent to being alive and make live being.
The consent is from our nature and only extreme circumstances makes it otherwise.
Not true, police come and lock you up if they catch you trying to stop being alive
What do you mean the police?
Isn’t the hospital and medics the one who cares for suicidal people?
Putting them in jail if that’s what you mean is pretty barbaric.
Again though the police can’t detain you indefinitely. What stop people from doing it is being cared for the reason they wanted to in the first place.
Isn’t the hospital and medics the one who cares for suicidal people?
not in America, where hospitals aren’t free and a call to the suicide hotline will have the cops going to your house
This is so fucked. Yet another way the criticism Luigi brought is relevant.
skill issue
Human beings. The issue is humans.
We truly need those trisolarians to speed up.
You humans sure are a contentious bunch
You’ve made an enemy for life!
There’s no problem in society that can’t be fixed. But the problem is there’s too much conclusion without proper understanding
what do you mean
Exactly
Indubitably
Crime. There’ll never be a world without it and at some point society will have to realize that there’s an “acceptable level of crime”, beyond which any further measures to reduce it would be unacceptably authoritarian.
Fix poverty and you fix crime. I mean there will always be people with severe mental disorders that make them violent or deadly, but this could also be potentially handled by making complete mental health check ups part of universal healthcare. People who are likely to become violent could be separated from the population and potentially cured.
I remember the case of a 6 year old girl who was adopted from a situation of severe abuse, violent, sexual, and neglect. She became a violence obsessed psychopath. She kept trying to stick needles in herself along with other self harm behaviors. She attacked her adoptive parents with a knife. After this they locked her in her room at night and put a lock on their bedroom door. She attempted to kill her brother, and tortured and killed animals.
There is a documentary about her called Child of Rage. Warning - this is extremely disturbing.
Eventually, as no progress was being made, she went to live with a therapist for intense behavior modification therapy. She was cured without the use of drugs. Now she is a successful RN and author.
I went way off track here but I wanted to reemphasize that poverty is the source of the vast majority of crime, and even the most broken psychopaths can be cured.
End poverty, end child abuse, end crime. End capitalism.
Ending poverty would certainly help, but I disagree that crime would be fixed. People commit crimes for many reason that aren’t related to poverty. Envy, hatred, love, sexual desire, religious fanaticism, political extremism etc. Crimes like murder and rape often have motives completely unrelated to financial status. Not all perpetrators have severe mental disorders either.
In terms of “fixing” people who are violent, I agree in so far that the justice system should focus on rehabilitation and helping people. In many but not all cases, that can be achieved. But generally those people commit crimes first before they’re identified. You propose mental health checkups to prevent that in the first place, but many people who are in a bad mental place would not voluntarily go to those. So would you make them mandatory for everyone? That would be quite dystopian, especially with the possibility of being locked up without even having committed a crime. That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean by measures that are unacceptably authoritarian. And even then, people would definitely slip through the cracks.
That’s fair.
