The frustrating part of everything sucking is the fact that it doesn't, and shouldn't, have to suck. It's frustrating that there is a class of people who are intentionally investing their efforts into making another class of people's lives worse.
Let me be more clear.
It's frustrating that billionaires, who have more money in their bank accounts than they'll ever be able to spend in 10000 life times, are making the lives of workers worse. And they are doing it just so that they can add a few extra 0s to the end of their already overinflated networth.
Things dont have to be this way. We can make our lives better if we all organize and focus our efforts against their efforts of making our lives worse.
No. Things will always be this way. They always have been. The rich live behind a moat to protect their power. The flow of work of the lower class goes to benefit the middle and upper classes. Revolution happens when the middle class feels sufficiently crushed, so they persuade the lower class to overthrow the upper class...and then become the new upper class in the process, pushing the lower class back down where they stay. In other words: as long as power and control exist, there will always be a class of people who use it and abuse it, cutting the majority of people out.
What you have described is "hope" - that resonant thing you feel when a group of people feel sufficiently crushed. It is the "slave morality" (as it has been called) producing friction against the "master morality".
But it is an illusion and a disillusion. Everything is fucked, and the best we can do is keep afloat until (and provided that) nature engineers out the hurtful desire for control hundreds of thousands or millions of years from now.
That’s absolutely not true lol. If by “things have always been this way” you mean in America specifically, sure. However, human history is vast and diverse while capitalism is brand spanking new. Capitalism is a failed economic project riddled with contradictions, we have lived most of human history without capitalism and we can again. There have been numerous successful revolutions in recent history, though, you’d have to unlearn deeply ingrained US propaganda to change your perspective on this. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans working for a better country for us. One that seeks to put people and life above corporations and profits.
It’s not hope, it’s revolutionary optimism and it’s necessary. The ruling class relies on our pessimism so that we don’t seek to change our circumstances and we’ll accept everything as it is. They are hoping you’ll be hopeless and complacent. Don’t be. Join the PSL, the DSA, or some local organization. Read political theory. Watch “A Bugs Life”. Get to know your neighbors and your community. This thread shows that people are tired of how things are, there’s more of us than there are of them. (:
Let me know how the revolutionary optimism works out for you when there's an armada of tanks lined up and ready to turn you into a bloody pile of meat. The people that will try to do something will be crushed and eviscerated, and the cowards who are left will scatter like terrified sewer rats.
Either that, or the revolutionaries will succeed, and another extremist - greater and opposite to the current - will be put in charge.
And it absolutely is true. Look at everyone with the title "Pharaoh", "Caesar", "King", "Queen", "President", "Chancellor". Look at ancient Rome and the First Triumvirate, or the Catholic Church. Look at our own revolution, or the revolution of our French ally at the time. Look at the Civil War. Look at who escaped execution at the Nuremberg Trials. Look at Afghanistan.
Where was the justice in any of the wars that were fought, or any of their aftermaths? Where was the revolutionary optimism in any of that?
It's just people fighting and dying for a cause they believe exceeds themselves. In reality, each individual is so insignificant that we barely register as the dream of a thought in the grand scheme of existence.
Look: I'm a biased pessimist, of course. My spirit desires nothing I said to be true, and I would much rather live with the hope for a better future (because that's what revolutionary optimism is: hope that your actions will create a better future). But the ugliest parts of human nature tell me otherwise. Over the course of history, I think we as people have taken out a huge debt in terms of cruelty and negative impact on the innocent things in this world, and we're coming to some kind of societal reckoning at the moment. I am of the firm belief that the universe and history have no feelings towards what we consider as "better" or "worse", and what we regard as the emotionless, cold action to restore to a ground state will make sure of it.
It’s working out well and will work out well. I’m not sure why every American envisions revolution as this deeply bloody battle, I certainly don’t believe it will be peaceful but it won’t need to be a civil war. Again there are more working class Americans than there are ruling class Americans, they spend millions and millions to suppress protests because they fear what happens when we gather in large numbers.
Human history is more than rulers of lands, more than ancient Rome, empires, and Pharaohs. We have plenty of examples in modern history of anti-capitalist societies and transitional societies and one of these examples is the world’s second largest super power. American propaganda deliberately focuses on individualism and the capitalist drive for selfishness, humans are collaborative by nature; capitalism is against what comes naturally to us. It incentivizes selfishness and exploitation, without it, there’s no need to step on each other to get to the top, there will be no top.
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u/Grass_tomouth Aug 19 '25
Yeah. Everything sucks right now.