Feels are not policy

At policy scales, it doesn't matter how you feel about something.

It matters what the material result is. That material result is what the policy does.  What the policy's official, actual, ostensible, or apparent intents are do not matter in any way; the material result is what the policy does.

If people are dying, the point of the policy is to kill those people.  That's what it did; that's what it does.

This extends to malnutrition and unable to find work and unable to find a place to live.  That's what the policy does; that's what it's for.

Trying to get people to support politics which have truly awful material results (starting with smoking! the tide of misinformation approach to climate has continuous roots back to smoking) leads to insisting that feels are so a basis of policy, because it's the only thing that works when you have the facts against you; appeal to emotion.

If you want effective policy, well; be prepared to make structural change.  This means "make some people less prosperous than they now are", which is entirely fine if you're talking about the actively rich (are you making more than ten times the floor of the mean or median income? then you) who don't need to be any richer and not fine at all if you're talking about taking the ability to rent housing away from ten or fifteen percent of the population.

Be prepared to try to understand the statistical arguments.  Be prepared to fund the tracking studies and a robust office of statistical facts and to recognize that knowing what is actually going isn't free, especially because a lot of people involved have an incentive to lie.  (They want to go right on having the advantages the current system gives them, and if people freeze to death from being homeless, that's entirely fine with them.)

You're going for making the realizable access to future choice greater and relatively evenly distributed.  (The system we have now is going for zero future choice via "no humans".)

It's still all bad insecurity management

Actual security arises from your community of other people.  They can watch when you sleep; they have skills you don't.  Some things just aren't possible to a single person.  (Try running the hoist and managing the dragline by yourself....)

Money messes with this.  Once you've got money, you have an alternative to status; having lots of money makes it relatively easier for you to compel people to do what you want.  Sure as death, sure as fate, the existence of money and some iterated selection gets you social structures that exist to use money as a social coercive; I am rich, so you must do as I say.   Keep iterating those and you wind up with an overclass and slaves.  (And watch out for your definition of "slave"; functional definitions are much more instructive than looking at ritual or overt social markers.)

The overclass reacts really really badly to being told they can't do something or have something; they're in the overclass because there's something a bit off in their heads and they perceive the best route to personal security as maximizing their ability to compel everyone around them.

This is why there's this massive pretense that the climate is a question of if; if there's climate change.  If we have to change in response.

And, well, no.  It's not if.  We're going to stop extracting fossil carbon.  The question is how we stop.

There is no way to stop -- the options are "on purpose" and "because civilization has collapsed and nigh-all of us are dead" -- that leaves the overclass where it is.  Nothing lets them keep as much of their current ability to compel people to do what they want; a post-capitalist (is has to be post-capitalist; "I get to keep all the loot" is inconsistent with "no looting the environment" and "no ignoring real costs, even the distributed ones", so there's no way you can get a capitalist system to stop extracting fossil carbon) economy won't support an overclass at all (if we're smart) or this one (if we're lucky, and there's still civilization).  The current overclass can't deal with that; a comfortable life won't do, because they won't feel safe.

So what we've got is a situation where humanity will plausibly go extinct and billions certainly will die early because the overclass finds that much, much less alarming than not being as relatively able to compel people to do what they want as they are now.

(Yeah, there's a strong analogy with transit, white supremacy, housing, and several other messed up things; the point is not being rich.  The point is to be able to compel everybody you come in contact with, on the one hand, and to be immune from compulsion yourself, on the other.  Because they're frightened.)

So the point is that this isn't a facts problem; there's no question about the facts.  This is a brain-lock-from-terror problem.  Among a group of people who are systemically, structurally, nigh-impossible to compel.  (Because they built the system that way!) Definitionally an aristocracy, and definitionally indifferent to the fate of anyone who isn't specifically and personally and individually them.

Everybody else, we need to inform our politics with facts, including the "terrified aristocrats" one.

Rugged individualism

So there are various news reports to the effect that US Republican senators will acknowledge, do acknowledge, in private that Trump certainly was guilty, but they voted to acquit out of fear.

That's what forty years of rugged individualist rhetoric does; it makes you incapable of believing in collective action.  As an individual, sure, you're too weak.  Collectively, you win, but you have to believe in the collectively.

If you get stuck in an ideology with no collectively, you're helpless.   That's what that ideology is for.

Try to keep this in mind.

Civilization

I need to get back to "right action" sometime, but right now -- with the US going publicly non-democratic and Canada contemplating stochastic genocide -- it seems like time to talk about civilization.

Civilization is the idea that through collective action, the circumstances of life can be arranged that, on the odds, you die of something other violence or starvation.

Seems like an improvement, doesn't it?  The tradeoff -- everything is tradeoffs -- is that you get law and taxes.

In an authoritarian society, you get three classes of people; those who the state oppresses, those who the state does not oppress, and those whose purposes the state acts to further.  (This manifests as white supremacy in most of the Anglosphere; there's the expectation that if you're white and rich, the state acts to make sure you get what you want; that if you're white, the state will not act to frustrate your purposes; and if you're not white, you (at a minimum) get your purposes frustrated to make sure you don't start thinking you might be white.)

What we're seeing now is fundamentally a choice between authoritarianism -- the comfort of a secure, known hierarchy and the primate reassurance of knowing there are people you can hit who won't dare hit back -- and civilization.   Pretty much anyone in the "those whose purposes the state acts to further" class are, and always will be, against civilization. (They think taxation is immoral and detest the idea of being bound by laws.)  A whole bunch of folks doing bad insecurity management desperately need the "dare not hit back" thing, because otherwise it's a big cold world that doesn't care at all and they're not good for anything; give it a few years and their odds of starving are very high.

If you want civilization -- if you want collective action to try to get everybody into the future together -- you have to not want authoritarian structures.  "If you don't work, you starve" is capitalism; it's also an authoritarian structure.  Everybody rich today and deciding to stay rich -- no matter who or what it kills -- should not be a surprise; we've got the century-old example of the House of Hohenzollern to point out that, no, really, absolutely whatever you do, capitalism says you get to keep the loot.  Murder isn't on the balance sheet anywhere.

Civilization is possible; the point to a functioning civilization is not the good it does.  ("Good" doesn't go into systemic terms!)  The point to a functioning civilization is that being authoritarian makes you materially worse off.  If that's so, people have the option of doing something about the odds of the various means of dying.[1]  If that's not so, the system does not notice; it's measuring something entirely indifferent to what killed you.  "Late Capitalism" isn't "capitalism has run out of resources" half as much as it's "nothing is now able to defend itself from capitalism".g


[1] it doesn't magically make you not-a-supremacist; it doesn't magically make you able to extend the scope of civilization to more people.  You can look at the post-1960 anglosphere and decide that, yeah, this is people who care intensely about making sure various other people don't get to participate in civilization, and if that means living under a bridge roasting sparrows on a curtain rod, OK.