How is it that we managed to abolish slavery? How do we have an age of consent? How do we have minimum wage? Everyone in power is evil and hates us, but why are women still allowed to vote? How come minimum wage hasn’t lowered or been removed entirely?
And more importantly, how do we get good things to happen again? Because it seems like no matter where someone is on the political spectrum, THEY’RE ALL EVIL and they hate us. (And even if they didn’t, they’re still controlled by evil billionares.)
Power corrupts. Every time. The only way to work around that is accountability. The people we give power to get it for a limited amount of time and with clear rules on what they’re allowed to do with it. If you break the rules, you’re held accountable. That’s how a modern democracy works. Once accountability breaks down we get *gestures vaguely at everything*
Not just democracy… methods of keeping power in check like that are something every well functioning society needs. Wengrow and Graeber’s book The Dawn Of Everything lays this out pretty clearly.
That’s exactly right. We stopped holding people accountable, we normalized bad behavior as “that’s just how it is” and became comfortable with it always happening. Anger is a useful tool. It has a purpose. This is its purpose. Maybe it would’ve been good to become angry about all this earlier, but that water has already gone under the bridge and it’s not coming back. We are here now, and now is the right time to be angry about *gestures vaguely at everything*.