Society isn’t real. We made up the rules we live under, we decide what happens to those who break them, we decide when something needs to change. But society depends on us never figuring out that it isn’t real, that we never wake up wondering why things are the way they are and conclude that there isn’t a good reason. In order for society to survive, we have to believe that those in charge represent our best interest, that people are doing the jobs they’re best suited for, and nobody is punished needlessly. The worth of society depends on how many believe they are better off participating instead of going alone.
This means that unless you’ve experienced a problem firsthand, you won’t realize there’s a problem in society. People within society live under the illusion that society is perfect, or that it only has very minor problems, or that problems can be ironed out with hard work and love. Unless your society is actively failing, you probably can’t see that it needs to be fixed. And so long as people aren’t able to see how a society doesn’t work until it can’t be fixed, society will always be doomed.
I’ve talked before about how every big issue began as someone being unhappy with the status quo, living life feeling like something just wasn’t right. Every society has to deal with the fact that most of the people living in it aren’t perfectly happy. They could be annoyed with their neighbors, they could hate their jobs, they could dislike the people in government, but most people just grudgingly tolerate these annoyances because they were taught from a young age not to make a big deal over small things. So long as these issues stay small, then people will still be happy, and society will continue on. But when small issues escalate, when the neighbor complains too much or the job asks too much from them or the government does something truly outrageous, they will rebel, and if they’re lucky their rebellion will be enough for people to take notice and change things to that everyone will be, if not happy, at least content. But if people stop listening, or if the proposed resolution doesn’t leave everyone satisfied, people will start questioning how good society actually is.
The higher your status is the harder it is to see how society faulters. Status is gained by proving yourself worthy, and when you’ve proved yourself worthy, people aren’t easily able to admit that you aren’t worthy anymore. This means that you’re shielded from problems to an extent. The issue with that is that the people in charge, the ones most equipped to change things, are the ones who are least likely to do that, even if they’d be willing to sacrifice their power if it was necessary.
When you put that all together society is doomed to have people who are unhappy with no good way to fix it. A lot of people say that that’s life, but the people who say that are people who don’t feel that society is broken because even if they can’t be successful, they can still dream of success. Unhappy people are the bane of a society because they will be the first to ask why society has problems and why they can’t seem to fix them. I want to stress that this isn’t a problem with the elite, it’s a problem that everyone has. No one in charge really gets to chose whether they’re in charge, any more than someone in poverty chooses poverty. The only difference between rich and poor is that you’re supposed to do things that will increase your chances at wealth. The problem with society is that in order for it to work, people have to be able to ignore problems until it’s too late to fix them. So long as that’s true, society will always be doomed.
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