It was absolutely planned, if not expressly planned for destroying trust. Planned for maximizing revenue, minimizing costs, for oppressing and dividing the population to exploit them and prevent a challenge to their corrupt systems, and so forth.
It’s amazing that America somehow is destroying trust in itself from so many different directions right now, almost seems like a planned demolition, but I think it’s more of a chaotic tragedy of errors and horrible judgement.
hector@lemmy.today 11 hours ago
cecilkorik@piefed.ca 4 hours ago
Also there’s a big part of this that is intentional sabotage and manipulation by a wide network of chaos-creators that mostly seem to lead back to Putin. When a former-KGB kleptocrat steals and controls everything in the world’s largest country and becomes effectively probably one of the world’s richest men, and then starts playing 4d chess with all the world’s other richest men, I guess it turns out you can probably cause a lot of chaos and quite possibly completely destroy the international global order.
I’m willing to bet that is one of Putin’s goals, but it’s not his only goal, and just because he’s evidently accomplished it with gusto still doesn’t mean Putin is actually capable of accomplishing all his others goals of building or being part of any sort of new world order, because this chaos only destroys and tears things down. He’s got destruction down to a science, and I’m sure he thinks he can leverage that to create what he wants in the world, but he’s failed at that and will continue to fail. But he has proven he can fuck things up pretty badly for the rest of us, whether we want to admit it or not, so, personally I’m willing to give him credit where credit is due.
The real question is, are we going to accept that what came before is irretrievably broken, and if we are willing to do that, what are we going to build in its place? Because with chaos comes opportunity, but those opportunities are few and limited. The chaos will continue, and the chaos can worsen. Significantly. If we’re going to turn this around, we have to be smart about it. There are a lot of paths that lead to very bad places, and only a few that have good endings. And you’d better believe that Putin and other forces of chaos are still going be trying to sabotage those too, even more aggressively as they realize their own dreams will never come to fruition.
I think we’ve got to start by rooting out all the elements of corruption that have allowed this to happen, or else anything we try to build in its place will be built on quicksand. What exactly those are? I have a bunch of opinions, but that’s where the debate will start to happen, and I think we’re going to need to start having those conversations before we can really address this. We need to establish our philosophical foundations and values, agree that we all value human life, that we value all lived human experiences, and that all humans are created equal, and I think we can go from there to try to define and refine exactly what those things mean and how we’re going to implement those values into building a civilization that we actually want to live in and that other people want to live in too, where we can all agree on these things and find ways to pursue equality and happiness for all.
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Thinking all of that can be controlled would fall under hubris IMO. The powers have done nothing but stoke resistance and rebellion against their hierarchies.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Reading too much into it. It is simply their self-interest (the wealthy) conflicts with your self-interest. They are just grabbing as much money as they can and creating as many distractions along they way to confuse and distract.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 53 minutes ago
while fucking themselves over in the long term.
Soup@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I think you over-estimate the wealthy. These aren’t terribly intelligent people, they just have enough money to force what they want. The other commenter is correct, it’s largely just hubris and them believing they’re gods because they had the money things that aren’t terribly complicated but are otherwise out of reach for normal people. Everything they do that’s a trick is only clever to to those who are easily fooled. No one intelligent is confused, they just lack power to do anything especially with so many of the aforementioned fools supporting the rich.
orclev@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
It’s not the whole country, it’s the perfect storm of the absolute worst people who spent the last few decades working to seize power combined with the death throws of late stage capitalism. The political and economic elite in America (and most other countries) have merged and corrupted each other beyond redemption, but the ultra capitalist systems of the US means there are few if any effective checks to their power. In a properly functioning country the government checks the power of corporations via regulations and laws and in turn is checked by the will of the public but in the US the incessant corporate propaganda has convinced a depressingly large chunk of the population that government regulations are inherently bad and that everything works better when corporations are free to do whatever they want. That combined with the absolutely blatant bribery and corruption in US politics means that corporations control the US government rather than the other way around.
The whole thing worked for a little while while the corporations were at least pretending to somewhat care about consumers and things like anti-monopoly regulations, but now that Trump has shown the government is very loudly and publicly for sale to the highest bidder they’ve all gone mask off and are just doing whatever they want. The problem of course is that they’re also run by morons that either don’t see the cliff they’re all collectively racing towards or just don’t care because they’re planning to bail out with all the profits while the greater US economy burns.
Ultimately this is the sprouting of the seed that was planted back in the 50s from an amalgam of the cold war anti-communism propaganda and the latent racism that was never properly dealt with following the civil war.
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
True. I guess a lot of it is also the fallout of citizens united.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 54 minutes ago
america is fine. the problem is the US.