Brain Washing.

Modern society is a cult and it is unlikely that the vast majority of us would hold the beliefs and opinions we do if it were not for the constant brainwashing and social reinforcement. Granted, spirituality and optimism are inherent to our nature, there is even a region of the temporal lobe which, through magnetic stimulation, causes individuals to have mystical experiences. Matthew Alper calls this the "God" part of the brain. This is where the idea of nature contra nurture is misleading. We have a natural potential for spirituality, language, music, cooperation, etc… That's the role nature plays in who we are, nurture defines the specific of how those potentials are expressed. Nurture is where the molding hand of society and its cult leaders take aim.

It starts with school, where kids are taught in a very hands-on way how to be obedient to authority figures. They're acclimated to prison style architecture and conditioned to follow a rigid schedule communicated through a series of bells. Einstein was notable for his disdain of the education system's tendency to destroy creativity and promote rigid thinking. Popular science communicator Neil Degrasse Tyson has even remarked on the startling difference between young children, eager to ask fascinating scientific questions, compared to older students who seem largely disinterested or uninspired by scientific curiosity. It's common knowledge that most schools don't prepare students for adult life. Home economics classes, driver's education, first aid, taxes and increasingly relevant computer literacy classes are either elective or not offered at all. Students are likely to be more harshly reprimanded for not showing up on time than they are for poor grades. Beyond learning to read, basic mathematics, and historical propaganda, not much is often retained for most students. Compare this to challenging life experiences you may have had growing up: navigating social roles, games you learned to play, the names of pokemon, how to get away with a lie, honing a craft you had an interest in. All of this may be as complex or more so than what you learned in school and because it had an impact on your life then and now, you have more vivid memories. Instead they cram information for tests and shortly after forget what they learned because it holds no real interest or value to them. Why should children care about the Pythagorean theorem if it will hold very little relevance to their actual lives? What they do retain is essentially the skill of showing up on time, doing as they are told, retaining short term information, and the overwhelming sense of disillusion and low expectation. 

Ken Ribinson explains that the most deleterious effect of school is that it kills a child's creativity. He tells the story of a girl who never paid attention in class unless it was about drawing. One day, she was drawing and the teacher, curious, asked her what she was drawing. A picture of God, she replied. How can you do that, no one knows what God looks like? They will in a minute, she said. The point he makes here is that children are not afraid to be wrong, in fact the idea often does not cross their minds. This fearlessness allows them to express a natural creativity that is destroyed over time by years of inside the box thinking. He also tells the story of Gillian Lynn, a dancer who struggled in school as a young girl. Today she would have been diagnosed with ADHD and given drugs, but she was before that time. Instead, she was taken to a doctor who interviewed her. After the interview he told her to wait in the room while he spoke with her mother outside and as he left, he turned on the radio. Believing she was alone and unwatched, Gillian began dancing. The doctor told her mother, "She's not sick, she's a dancer." Gillian went on to describe her experience at dancing school as "being around other people who had to move their bodies to think." It is well known that intelligence is not a uniform, quantifiable phenomenon. It is multifaceted and often unpredictable. There is little room for something like this, of course, in modern society. How many potential, world famous dancers are locked under a desk, cramming useless information into their chemically altered brains right now so they can go on to be an insurance analyst one day?

This book might never have come to be had I gotten my degree, although some will consider that an argument in favor of the current education system. 

This is not a failure of the education system, although most people consider it to be. The psychological and philosophical justifications for how schools are structured come from behaviorist theory, which is essentially about control. We try to motivate students with extrinsic rewards and punishments in the form of grades, and later on scholarships. Study after study shows that extrinsic motivation is less effective than intrinsic motivation. First, rewarding certain behaviors subtly teaches people to assume a task is not inherently desirable or interesting. Second, because students are anxious about their grades and afraid of failure, they do not have the opportunities to take chances or be creative. They can't question authority. Third, and this is why intrinsic motivation is far more effective, humans are not by nature lazy or uncreative. We love to do things, that's why we have hobbies. We need mental stimulation just to be happy. We need the safety to be able to try new approaches to problem solving. There are few children who don't show a natural tendency for creativity and a desire to be productive. What children hate is being forced to do things they suspect are so disagreeable that they have to be manipulated into doing them. The problem is what most people expect school to do is not what it is intended to do. Modern education was brought to America by Horace Mann after witnessing the effectiveness of the Prussian model. Prussia was one of the first states to introduce compulsory public education and the idea was that it would be a long term solution to potential revolutions such as the peasant rebellions in the 1740s-1750s. By 1900 public school was mandatory in America and early industrialists were heavily invested in standardizing education. Most people at the time were rural and illiterate, which meant there was a low supply of eligible factory workers. 

Founder of The General Education Board and advisor to J D Rockefeller, Frederick T. Gates, had a clear motive for universal education;

"In our dream, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are…"

In 1914, The National Education Association stated, "We view with alarm the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations—agencies not in any way responsible to the people—in their efforts to control the policies of our State educational institutions, to fashion after their conception and to standardize our courses of study, and to surround the institutions with conditions which menace true academic freedom and defeat the primary purpose of democracy…" Rockefeller and Gates constantly touted the virtues of an egalitarian, universal education that would be free of religious favoritism. What sounded to some like progressive tolerance was really no better than a Confederate slave owner, loudly proclaiming "I'm not racist, I don't care what color or creed my slaves are!"

Agustina S. Paglayan's 2022 study in American Political Science Review points out that political leaders are still very aware of the value of a proper education. Paglayan finds a pattern across several countries of education reforms following moments of major civil unrest. A government's biggest threat is and always has been its own people and early indoctrination is necessary for what Plato would call "social harmony." This early advocate for state sponsored indoctrination was correct when he claimed that it would only take a single generation for the Noble Lie to take hold.

Once the free trial is over, young adults are expected to enter the workforce and start paying their subscription fees. John Meynard Keynes, in a 1930 essay titled "Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren" predicted that automation would replace most jobs and that by the time his grandchildren were of age we would witness a 15 hour work week. Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book "Bullshit Jobs" argues that Keyne's prediction should have come true. The technological rises Keynes expected did largely take place but what he did not foresee was the rise of meaningless, bureaucratic jobs. Keynes was mistaken about the true value of having most of the population perpetually engaged with something other than politics. The common explanation for the failure of Keynes' prediction is that we collectively chose to consume more goods (this would be largely due to Edward Bernays, whom I will get too shortly) rather than have more free time. Graeber argues that this does not reflect the data. If more consumption were the true cause we would expect to see a ballooning in more production based jobs, what we actually see is a swelling of clerical, administrative, and middle management employment. 

Graeber conducted a study in the UK, polling people on whether or not they felt their jobs contributed meaningfully to society. 37% claimed they were certain their jobs did not, 13% were unsure and 50% were sure that they did. Graeber goes on to say that while it's easy to see how many people would likely be mistaken in assessing their job as meaningful (no one wants to think they're toiling away for no reason) it is hard to see how they could be mistaken in claiming their job is meaningless, thus we can expect the actual numbers to be skewed towards more bullshit jobs than polls reflect. In response to his article on the subject, writers for The Economist argued that workers are unable to see the end products of their labor because of an increasingly specialized and digitized supply chain. Analogous to auto factory workers on an assembly line, the line goes, each worker contributes a tiny but meaningful component to information products. Graeber counters this with the example of modern universities, which have seen a 50% rise in teachers and students, an 85% rise in administrators and a roughly 200% rise in administrative assistants. "Has the supply chain of teaching changed in the last century?" he asks.

He catalogs 5 types of bullshit jobs: (1) Flunky jobs, which only exist to maintain appearances of legitimacy in businesses. A common example would be a receptionist at an office who handles about 2 calls a day, but it is expected that offices have receptionists, even if their function is largely antiquated. (2) Goon jobs, such as telemarketers or corporate lawyers who primarily exist because other companies have them but the industry as a whole contributes nothing positive to society. (3) Duct Taper jobs, Graeber gives an example of a university which only had 1 handyman and hired a second individual whose job it was to apologize to other employees for the handyman being busy. His pay was roughly equivalent to a second handyman's. (4) Box tickers, who exist to make it look like an organization is investigating or correcting some sort of scandal that it in fact is not. Imagine a university is shown not to accept enough Chinese students, so they create a committee of bureaucrats to analyze and resolve the problem, although nothing will likely change. (5) Task Masters who either supervise people who don't need to be supervised or invent new bullshit jobs.

Keeping most people occupied is another important measure of control. People are essentially bribed with their paycheck to keep silent about the kafkaesque nature of their position, which most overwhelmingly feel guilty about. People want to work and contribute meaningfully to society. While it may be true that musicians and storytellers aren't necessary for the world to keep spinning, surely most people value artists more than they value telemarketers. The problem is that "the free market" really only reflects the values of the top 1%, the ones with the disposable income and overwhelming means to influence our lives and our leaders.

Consider: A typical shovel at a hardware store is designed to hold 21.5 pounds of dirt. This number was arrived by a man named Frederick Taylor, who paid multiple workers to move piles of dirt from one place to the other. At the end of the day, he recorded how long it took and cut off a bit of their shovels. The next day the workers would mirthlessly shovel all the dirt back to where it was. Taylor recorded the times and cut a bit more off the shovels. At first, each day the workers finished a bit faster. Eventually they started taking longer. Taylor used this data to find the optimum size for a shovel. Too big and the loads were too heavy, too small and workers had to make too many trips. Taylor didn't stop at shovels. He and his methods eventually came to inspire Henry Ford and every corporate manager since then. He was trying to solve a problem of inefficiency and disorder. 

Before industrialization, most workers were artisans. They picked their hours and they created products from start to finish. They sold the products of their labor. When they started working in factories, they generally worked on, say, cars, from start to finish. For Taylor, this was a problem. Workers often showed up irregularly for work and were frequently drunk (public education was yet to be widespread and perfected as an art.) Worst of all, they possessed knowledge and skills that made them more valuable than the managers and possibly the owners. This would make controlling them difficult, since they had significant leverage over the company. The solution was simple, division of labor. From now on, the workers would only do 1 or 2 tasks. It would be repeated to such an extent that they'd become specialized and ruthlessly efficient. Best of all, no single worker would understand the overall process of manufacturing (only managers would) and if they didn't fall in line, they were easily replaceable. This, incidentally, is why some amount of unemployment is necessary, to have a reserve workforce. If the workers strike there is always a starving bum willing to gleefully take the position the others were too good for.

Taylor's scientific management ultimately led to productivity increases of several hundred percent for the companies that employed it. This led to a problem humanity had never faced before, overproduction. People only needed so many cars, so many beds, so many dishes, meanwhile companies needed to continuously grow and generate higher profit margins for capitalists or else they'd lose to their competitors and be slowly weeded out of existence. Enter Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He is largely responsible for modern advertising and the public relations industry and in his 1928 book, "Propaganda" he sums up his philosophy;

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

He set out to convince the public that we needed to buy more. Suddenly brands and widgets became more than just practical innovations (most are not even that) but a lifestyle. We don't buy something because we need it for practical reasons, we need it as a symbol of status and identity. Bernays is infamous for convincing early feminists that cigarettes (when smoking was considered "unladylike") were a symbol of equality. Much of his ideas are still employed: oil companies marketing their products as "clean coal", companies embracing diversity in their advertisements during black history month or gay pride month, or Christian values, or whatever cult of personality conservatives have joined. It's important to realize this virtue signaling for what it is, advertising. Whatever the CEO of a company personally believes, it is their legal responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. Big corporations do not care about issues of social justice, they exist to sell products and make a profit and seeming to care about acceptable, popular social issues is good business. This is overwhelmingly the state of our lives (those lucky enough to be in developed countries.) As children we're quickly taught to kowtow and forget any instinct towards curiosity. As adults we roll a big stone up a hill, 21.5 lbs at a time and watch it all fall back down every evening. Eventually, our bodies and minds fail us and we will die knowing we helped the line on the graph go up a little bit more.

Despite technological advances and narratives of social progress, work is getting worse for most people. Up until around the 1970s, income for the average worker kept pace with productivity. Every year as technology became more efficient and worker management was refined, workers produced more goods and services. As annual productivity went up, so did wages, otherwise you ran the risk of producing a lot of goods and services that no one could afford to buy and the economy would stagnate. If wages had kept up with production since 1979, minimum wage would be $21.50. The difference between that and the actual minimum wage goes directly into the pockets of CEOs and other higher ups, who it has been noted, often contribute nothing meaningful to society. To solve the contradiction between high production and low wages, credit has become increasingly available and necessary. Debt makes workers more precarious and dependent on their jobs. Hours are increasing, benefits are shrinking. Job security decreases as more workers are accepting gig work under duress and we drift closer and closer to a worker's revolution that no one seems to have neither the energy nor the enthusiasm for. 

America is the richest country in history. There is no reason we cannot provide better working conditions, universal health-care, real education, and more leisure time for our citizens. We're told that we live in a society led by elected representatives whose job is to serve our interests. How is it that our richest 3 individuals have as much money as the poorest half of our country added up? Why do we have the world's largest military when there are still 40 million citizens living in poverty? It should be obvious to everybody that this fundamental idea of American democracy is a lie. Much like education, however, the system is not broken. It is working exactly as intended. In "Testing Theories of American Politics" a 2014 study by Cambridge University, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page conclude;

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

Or as Aristotle would have said, we live in an oligarchy. There's a reason the candidate who raises the most money almost always wins. Political scientists try to act like this is a mystery, after all, you can't literally buy votes. No, its not that they use the money to win elections per se, rather that the wealthy (whose support is reflected by campaign contributions) have various means to influence society, e.g. media ties or previous candidates that owe them favors. Elected officials can legally draw their own districts, a practice known as gerrymandering which, with demographic data, allows them to divide up states into districts by party affiliation and maximize the number of districts with one or the other party affiliation. Both sides do this. Election days are not paid holidays, meaning that many literally cannot afford to vote. VotingRightsAlliance dot org lists 61 different ways arbitrary voting regulations, from draconian requirements for registration and acceptable forms of ID to slow processing times and obscure polling place relocations, suppress voter turnout which is consistently about half of the eligible population. The only real purpose of voting and the increasingly dramatic political theater the media bombards us with is to mask the reality of how decisions are made in this country. Institutions such as the Electoral college are a vestigial and blatant form of anti democracy. In the original draft of the constitution only white, male landowners were allowed to vote because that is basically the extent of who wrote it. Originally, members of the senate were appointed and the president did not have term limits until the 20th century. The house of representatives, which is the body most influenced by public will, was intentionally designed to be ineffective as any bill the body proposed would later be scrutinized and most often shot down by the senate. Instruction, or the legal requirement for representatives to vote the way their constituency dictated to them (a common practice in the colonies at the time) was considered by the House and shot down. The true purpose of the constitution was to limit democracy as much as possible, which was justified by the claim that people were too stupid to have a real voice in how society should run. Rhetoric of "protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority" thinly veils its true meaning: protecting the wealthy from the poor who by and large outnumbered them. In a similarly perverted logic, "The right to free speech" amounts to the right of corporations (legally considered as people) to spend unlimited amounts of money (legally considered a speech act) in political campaigns. The system is working exactly as intended and it isn't clear that many governments have ever existed for any other reason than to maintain the near universal power-hierarchy that has characterized human society ever since the rise of agriculture. Monarchies, tyrannies, theocracies, feudalism; civilization, unmasked, is a degrading contest of slavery.

Many Amerians look to European social democracies and to America's own New Deal era as examples of reforms to address these problems. While these are an improvement from our current situation, social democracies do not address the fundamental problem. Our economy l, and by extension our politics, are primarily and often solely motivated by profit. So long as capital holds power, even the concessions granted to the many in social democracies are temporary at best, which is what we in fact saw with the New Deal era. The extreme inequality between the richest 10 or 1% in a nation and basically everyone else is well documented. The corruption of private donors influencing political campaigns or else former CEOs or other prominent businessmen winning elections with relative ease (thanks to corporate ties and behind the scenes promises) is well documented. What many people don't fully appreciate is that even with completely honest and naive intentions, our politicians are still beholden to corporate interests. Local governments have to compete to provide big corporations with incentives to open up factories or warehouses, etc… in their territories. If taxes go up or if regulations are undesirable, major corporations can take their business and their jobs elsewhere. Government officials are effectively beholden not to the population they allegedly represent, but unelected corporate elites who have a legal obligation to their investors to maximize profits at all costs or else be sued and replaced by someone who will.

This requires no satanic cabal or powerful cynics sitting in their office 68 stories above everyone, laughing and drinking white wine as protestors are flattened with steam rollers. It just so happens that most of the people in positions of power are profoundly greedy and harbor a psychopathic lust for money and clout above all else; but even in a best case scenario the system values profit over everything. The rules strictly enforce it. A sustainable society requires a real education, health-care, infrastructure, a healthy environment, and the promotion of community identity, even when these are not profitable. Sometimes these interests overlap with profit but they will always be secondary, where they are promoted at all. Further, profits always come from the exploitation of workers, even in social democratic economies. When workers strike and successfully win their rights, capitalists simply make up the cost by ramping up exploitation in 3rd world countries. That, in a way, is a microcosm for the entire problem. What appears like progress is actually just the exportation of cruelty and the pretty looking gentrification of corruption. This will essentially be the topic of the next chapter.

David Ryan, in "Civilized to Death" argues against what he calls the Narrative of Perpetual Progress. He likens modern society to burning down one's house and calling progress the act of putting out the fire. Equal rights for women, the LGBT and racial minorities, for example, already existed in pre agricultural societies, as they still do for the few that exist today. Modern medical advancements treat and cure conditions such as infectious disease (which come from germs that evolved due to our close proximity with farm animals) and other diseases that result from our unnatural diets or the chronic stress of living in modern society. Our bodies, he notes, are meant to handle acute stress, such as running from predators. What we are not adapted for is the stress of worrying about abstract things, like a mortgage hanging over your head everyday. Depression, he notes, is the leading cause of disability across the globe. Before agriculture there was plenty of food and land for everyone, there was no need to fight wars or enslave enemies. There were no spoils to fight over and no work to be forced on lower classes. Work, for the most part, consisted of hunting, gathering, fishing, and building shelter. Much of these activities, Ryan notes, are things modern people do as hobbies or on vacation. 

In 1833, Charles Dawrin accompanied Captain Robert FitzRoy aboard the HMS Beagle to Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy, on a previous journey, had captured 4 Fuagian hostages as punishment for stealing one of his auxiliary boats. He had the idea that he would take them back to England in order to tame and return them home. FitzRoy expected that the native foragers needed only to be exposed to our superior way of life and would adopt it. Civilization, after all, was the result of millenia of human progress and sophistication. By the time Darwin had encountered the Fuagians, they were wearing suits and worried about keeping their shoes clean. They were released and a little over a year later, when Darwin returned, he found that the hostages had fully readopted the customs of their homeland. 

There are many accounts among early American colonists of citizens "going native," so much so that laws were passed prohibiting people from leaving the colonies to join the natives. Colonists were kidnapped from time to time and after being rescued, they would often break away at their first chance to rejoin native society. Columbus and other explorers noted how ill equipped many locals were as slaves as they had little concept of obedience or constant labor. Some aboriginal tribes in colonial Australia were completely eradicated due to genocide and those kept as slaves often committed suicide or altogether stopped reproducing. 

Historian Yuval Noah Harrari, in "Sapiens", largely corroborates Ryan's account of pre agricultural societies. He goes so far as to claim it would be more accurate to say that wheat domesticated humans. Wheat needed water, needed to be protected from worms and rodents, needed ample fertilizer and humans gradually and significantly altered their lifestyle to support all of these needs. The cultivation of wheat did yield opportunities for culture and leisure for a few, but for most individuals, life under agriculture offered no benefits over the relatively free and easy going lives of foragers. Ryan offers the hypothesis (supported by anthropologists such as Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd and Robert L. Bettinger in a 2001 paper, "Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene?") that after the last ice age, climate conditions were fertile for life. The human population grew and horticulture was practiced widely, though not out of necessity. For most species, hormones and genes react to population density in order to regulate the size of the overall population through fluctuations in fertility. Eventually, by the Holocene, natural conditions were no longer as favorable for humans and agriculture became necessary to sustain larger populations. Through our ingenuity, we managed to escape the natural limitations on population.

To quote Freud, "Mankind is proud of its exploits and has a right to be. But men are beginning to perceive that all this newly-won power over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfillment of age-old longings, has not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them feel any happier." Consider the prospects of email versus old fashioned letter writing. Has the ability to send written communication across the globe in an instant made the average human happier? One of the few laws of history, to the extent there can be said to be laws of history, is that luxuries tend to become necessities. As we make progress in meeting our needs and desires, we acclimate to them and grow to need them. Anyone in modern society without access to transportation and cell phones is going to be at a comparative disadvantage to those around them while having these things doesn't make us happier than our predecessors, rather they are seen as necessary. Our technological progress is like a drug addiction with an ever increasing tolerance requiring ever increasing dosing, while the high we chase is almost a forgotten memory.

Critics argue that thinkers like Ryan and Harrari selectively focus on the negative aspects of the agricultural revolution and ignore what it has given us, primarily that is, a population boom never before seen on Earth. I don't see how having more people around is in of itself a good thing. Besides humans, the most populous animals are the farm animals we keep in factory farms, where we raise and slaughter 60 billion individuals a year (another 80 billion when we count fish.) To put that in perspective, there are an estimated 100 billion humans to have ever existed. Their lives are not improved by these numbers, neither is the life of an individual whose species is on the brink of extinction any worse for that fact. The phenomenon of identifying with one's entire species is a reflection of mankind's need to feel a part of something larger, but it is not an objective measurement of well-being. If anything, we ought to suspect that increases in quantity come with sacrifices in quality.

Critics also interpret Ryan as wanting to return to some Rousseauian, idealized state of nature but this is a mistake. True, he spends most of the book criticizing the Narrative of Perpetual Progress and his solution, technological zoos that better simulate our natural environment, does not get nearly as much word count as his admonishing of society; but he specifically states that the human population cannot survive on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Nor would modern individuals want to. Critics fail to realize what Ryan is pointing at but won't say, because no one wants to hear it, is that it is simply too late for us. Ryan is not diagnosing the problems with civilization, he is performing an autopsy.

"When you're going in the wrong direction, progress is the last thing you need." -David Ryan.

Most of us know society is fucked up. No one trusts politicians, no one supports distant wars that seem like they will never end, no one is happy about extreme economic inequality (exceptions for those benefiting from it.) Even the bigots who persecute various minority groups do so because they sense that things are wrong and someone is to blame. It is in the interests of elites to keep us divided, thus racists are generally useful idiots. Nothing that I have said about society should come as much of a surprise to anyone, even saying that it's all been said before has been said before. Still these problems persist and it seems we are ultimately powerless in the face of them. Most people don't bother to worry about it anymore, or most people only acknowledge some limited aspects of the problem while fully expecting these problems to be solved, or they think much progress has already been made. The idea that all of this is normal or good enjoys constant social reinforcement. Every aspect of our society is intended to control us and manipulate our behaviors in the interest of the wealthy and we are so accustomed to this way of life we think we are still free. Anyone who criticizes education as some sort of conspiracy or admits that voting is useless is shunned because pessimism is the one true cardinal sin. Many academics on the left won't say it out loud but they are all pointing to the same solution, a full out revolution. The problem is that a revolution won't necessarily result in an improvement, it may just be a changing of the guard. Whether a modern peasant revolt will ever come about or is even feasible is doubtful, to say the least. Most people are too stupid, nihilistic, optimistic, or content with constant distraction. Besides that, the environmental clock is ticking. Ultimately my own recommendation is to stop feeding the machine. Personally, if I had been asked before I was born if I wanted to go to school, work for most of my waking existence, watch my body and mind slowly succumb to disorder, and finally die senile in a nursing home after being abandoned by my family, I would have declined. It doesn't matter if life is more good than bad or vice versa, not that we can ever objectively measure it anyway. The good does not cancel out the bad. Life basically consists of problems we wouldn't otherwise have and solutions we wouldn't otherwise need. We already see pronatalist billionaires voicing concerns about a declining population, which is only true in some developed countries but certainly not on a global scale. Our economy can only exist so long as there is perpetual growth and with a shrinking workforce and less customers to buy the meaningless garbage we dedicate our lives to manufacturing and tossing away, their positions in the dominance-hierarchy are threatened. The only way to win the game is to stop playing.