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by Grombobulous
28 days ago
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I get where you’re coming from, truly. I do also wish people were more politically engaged. But I just can’t go that far toward victim blaming, especially when so many forces work against people doing exactly what you suggested they do. Just look at how Occupy Wall Street was broken up and twisted into irrelevancy by our media. It was a nonpartisan movement that corporate influence successfully split off into the two warring sides so that critical mass could never be achieved. Any issue that is perfectly partisan never gets resolved, and the oligarchs know exactly how to turn most issues in that direction. My prediction is that the data center and AI backlash could work exactly the same way if resistance grows too strong. Anyway, perhaps I’m too far off-topic now. |
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The statistics I've encountered suggest that this is smaller than 10%. Between there and the percentage of people who even vote is one margin of responsibility, and there are many people who have time for more but put it somewhere else.
That's a choice, and people are free to make it. It also has consequences, like the elections that select officeholders.
Calling this "victim blaming" seems like rhetorical lane-shifting. We're not discussing crimes where someone suffers a violent attack of some kind they had no agency in, we're discussing a society where those who govern are selected by voters in elections, which at some level means issues are representative of those who vote (and those who don't).
We're all very used to locating agency in large systems somewhere we don't have control over, and at one level that's even pretty understandable as a first approximation -- most people don't have substantial influence at an individual level. And no individual contribution to your retirement account will leave you comfortable, it's the collected effort over time that might. That's true for individual influence too, and magnified by organized cooperation.
You brought up OWS. That's a reasonable example to consider in a lot of ways -- it was collective cooperation, certainly better than apathy, and I respect it for that (and did not take kindly to the ways it was disparaged especially in some partisan media).
It was also a movement that was probably overfocused on the the idea that social leverage is primarily about expressed demand, especially given that the goals of participants were diverse and unfocused. At times it almost seemed like the tactic (occupation) was the goal. It was successful in injecting some longstanding ideas into some parts of public consciousness (there's a 99% that's poorly served by things as they are now and 1% that are dramatically overserved) and may have created some networks that have had a longer influence. But I think it also showed that many participants don't know what effective ongoing influential cooperation looks like.
We want achievements like the civil rights movement but we have Woodstock ideas about what that looks like instead of movement-momentum habits.
I've had this conversation enough to know that I'm also in a sense making a similar mistake, expressing ideas and expecting that alone to change things, which is especially naive given that I know the mindset shift is a bit of a hard sell. At least I know that someone who argues back and forth over a series of comments probably cares more than average, maybe enough to create ongoing habits of influence themselves.