[mschuster91]

> I think in general there's a somewhat unfounded notion that someone is actually in control that's getting harder to defend in the light of what's been several decades of fairly public failures to address obvious problems in society. You to look very hard to find examples of public policy successfully addressing any sort of problem, and even in that case it's questionable whether the problem was actually solved or whether it's just a case of regression to the mean.

I think it's obvious by now when all that began: with the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia in the early 90s. With the corrective against capitalism lost, everything defaulted to greed in the following decades.

Before that, humanity showed many times over that it could cooperate on critical crises and to ban dangerous stuff: sulphur in fuel was banned after "acid rain", lead and asbestos were banned, CFCs were banned after the ozone hole, nuclear weapon tests were all but abolished, biological and chemical weapon developments as well. Even the right to wage wars of aggression was under pretty solid control.