I keep thinking about the future. Specifically, what do I want society to look like in twenty years. And I keep thinking that we can’t let society be some abstract concept anymore. Most of us move through society without thinking. When we interact with others, we don’t think a lot about what we say, we act according to our instincts, honed from years of interacting with friends, siblings, parents, and teachers. For most of us, most of the time, that’s Okay. The people we interact with either know us or are enough like us that their rules of social interaction are mostly the same. More and more though, that’s not the case.
A common figure quoted in newspaper articles recently is that roughly a quarter of adult children are estranged from their parents. The phrase “Okay, Boomer” has become a meme. More and more people are complaining the people complaining about their Racist, Sexist, Homophobic and Transphobic comments. I think that the problem is that for people who aren’t affected by systemic oppression, knowing the rules without first breaking them is hard. It’s doable, but I keep seeing people who should know better screw it up. And I keep thinking “We can’t just let people guess what the rules are. We have to decide them.” And I don’t know how to do that in a way that won’t hurt the very people I want to help.
In a perfect world, what we would have is a Wiki with strict moderation that everyone who wants to contribute to it can. There would be people spending what time they can going over social rules and common blunders, looking for rules that could be applied to anyone. Moderators would be chosen to be as representative of society as possible. Not only that, but they would be detail oriented so they could find an answer to any issue no matter how small. Most importantly, it would be understood that these rules aren’t meant to be enforced anywhere. They aren’t laws, and shouldn’t be used as a substitution, but the rules would, if possible, take real world laws into account. But there would be an understanding that what the law says and what people actually believe society should be don’t always overlap.
That’s the idea. The issue is the people moderating it would have most of the power on said sight, and however carefully chosen, they would only ever be able to approximate society’s wants and needs. There’s the issue that although in theory the people in power are given power by the will of the people, in reality they are usually chosen as part of a system that the people allow to stay in place because changing it would be difficult. Then there’s what happens if society is split between those who want things to change and those who want things to stay the same.
Most importantly though, it would be hard to implement a system like this without it putting more pressure on those who are already disadvantaged by society. Groups like the disabled, homeless, mentally ill and those who were formerly incarcerated. The groups that often don’t have a place in society. If we want to help them, we have to change society so that they can live and move about safely. It would be better for them, and it would be better for us.
In truth, I don’t think making the rules of society obvious changes the fact that society in general, and American society in particular, needs to change for everyone’s sake. We keep letting those with the most power make all our decisions, and we can’t do that anymore. We need things like universal healthcare, sick pay, help for those who’ve been released from prison, lower drug penalties, universal basic income, and so much more than that. It’s honestly difficult to keep track of how many things we need to make better in this country. But when we do that, because things will only get worse until we do, we need to work on building a society that all of us want to live in. We need to find a normal where all of us can be genuinely happy, no one has to succeed, and no one needs to worry about failure. Until we do that, we won’t be able to fix the world.
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