I think that traditional liberalism has always been the buffer against the worst excesses of capitalism, but is powerless in actually evolving our system beyond capitalism. Without a fundamental change in how the economy is structured and how the rules of the economy work, without democratic participation in the economy and the workplace, all liberal reforms can and will be rolled back over time.
Couple this with automation, which forces participation in an economy and a workforce to withdraw, and you have an acceleration of the reforms for better rights and conditions. We're slowly seeing that.
For the whole system to change, we kind of have to address an elephant in the room: money isn't real. It's a social idea, an invention of the mind and nothing else. We confuse this as wealth, and that dogma grows large. For example, many people hilariously believe money is a motivator for humans to do good in the world, or to even do anything. Look at any other living thing and you can see motivation without the need of paper, but when its value is assumed to be objective, shitbrained thinking occurs. Furthermore, people also believe money
makes things happen. This is like a clock making the sun rise because the clock says 6 AM. That's getting the whole concept dead wrong. We say we need money as it's an improvement over barter, but it's still a social imposition to actual wealth; the real resources of the earth. For this to be allowed as a system of reason and justness, we have to acknowledge in a system that agrees to use money as the token of information, this simply must be offered to people on sincere, reasonable grounds. It is a human right to offer it to all as a guarantee because we say it's what we use in our system. By demanding rules on how one 'earns' the token, you all but assure abuse and a have not. Linking it to labor is a dying idea in the 21st century, and most people fail to acknowledge that. This is of course failing to address how a few have so much of it, but they're in the business of making money over wealth, a byproduct of such dogma. All because our system says the whole point of human life is to make human paper. It's kind of funny in a sad way, for all of our modern successes are made on modern ignorance. It's like we're accomplishing a lot while having one hand purposefully tied behind our back as we do things.
People really are too stupid to get that illusion in exactly the same way people are ignore-ant on the illusion of self, which
that illusion has produced most human suffering on this earth. I'd argue the latter combines with the former and the entire human game of duality creates the mess we have today, and that is a topic
far fuckin' beyond this topic, but I can explain more in PM or elsewhere. To simply put it, we live as it's self
versus other, to promote conflict and competition that's bred in violent one-upmanship. You have to be better than that other motherfucker because goddamnit, if you don't you're fucked out of being able to feed your family. This Bronze Age thinking really has no place in the developed world. Instead, because self and other go together, it's self
and other, which should produce a system of cooperation for as many as we can reasonably sustain on resources or in systems based on resources. We have a long way to go as a collective humanity to bypass these illusions. Religion and especially the illusion of free will get in the way of seeing the world as it is, with no ego and duality inferred upon it. So long as the idea of duality is inferred upon as a concrete idea, both internally and externally, we will always be making mistakes. Most of the world gets this wrong, so this is not an American-exclusive problem, but a problem we ought to address, for the betterment of society and human life as a whole.
We're only going to get change at this rate with violence, for Americans are caught in a situation of settling for less and not pushing the bar far enough. The collective consciousness of the citizenry has to get to a point that settling won't work and lead to a revolt. I wage that change happening on climate change and deep learning automation making an environment and economy hospitable for so much of the human labor force that this leads to protests and potentially violence. This wombo combo will effectively powerbomb the middle class, and not just in this country, thankfully. Playing corporatism literally pushes us in this direction and makes it go faster, and this is what I fear most. This scenario seems inevitable, yet absolutely illogical to reason as "yeah, sounds about right for it to happen this way". We also have no safety net to speak of for the automation problem, so the level of suffering will be greatly expanded. Perhaps that suffering will be a catalyst for the reformation we as human beings need in a world that has to come back to its senses.
