I think what gets to me with these kinds of things is not so much the scale of the issue, but the denial of it as a problem or the acceptance of it as something unavoidable. Even for people that have cared at some point, the difficulty in finding a solution on a personal or even societal level, leads them to have to conclude that it's not so big a problem after all. Like googling articles that confirm that drinking wine or eating chocolate is actually healthy, because your inability to give up the habit makes you feel bad.
A constant active awareness of the immense suffering and inequality around the world isn't healthy, but the opposite of convincing yourself that it's not a problem at all makes any sliver of a solution less likely. The purest ideology allows us to believe that since problems can only truly be solved in one way (market forces, liberal democracy) that suffering or death occurring under the mandate of such forces are 'natural' and unpreventable. In fact, to take direct action to solve things like poverty outside of these forces, is to challenge the natural order. And like some kind of trolley problem morality, direct interference now makes you responsible for the situation, whereas the deliberate neglect before was more wholesome and good, as you adhered to the natural laws. This is why China's Xinjiang policies are unforgivable, being direct actions, while hundreds of millions of starving Indians under deliberate neglect is not, even though the suffering and death born from the later is incalculably greater- even assuming the worst possible accusations against China are true.
I think the full acceptance of the situation of the world, and the realisation that you are personally unable to fix it no matter how hard you dry, either leads people down a path of denial or self sacrifice (think eco-terrorism or devoting yourself to work in a hospital in the exploited world.)
My personal cope is to follow an ideal of living a life such that if everyone in my position did the same, it would see the improvements to the world that I hope for come to be. This is towing the line between action and inaction, of denial and self sacrifice, but it's the only way I can think to live a relatively 'normal' life while recognising the vast suffering adjacent to it. Though I am not sure if it's the right thing to do.
The real estate guy played every card in the deck, I'm almost impressed.
He can't justify things in moral or even close utilitarian terms, so avoiding taxes is just something "intelligent people" do . The rich are rich just because they are intelligent.
We shouldn't decry capitalism, because seeking wealth is just a natural law of civilizations. This meaning that it's simply unavoidable and we shouldn't bother to try to stop it.
He even jumps into the old "It's the middle class that suffers the most" trope that they always use, because they're the ones that have to pay all the taxes while the rich and poor live off the work of the mistreated middle class. This makes the poor out to be parasites, that are at least as much, if not more to blame for inequality. Anyone that feels they are paying too much in taxes will then know that they must be this middle class, and that the poor are the reason why they have to pay so much in taxes and live paycheck to paycheck (not realising they are the poor by their country's standards, and that the only ones below them make so little they literally can't be taxed.)
It's scary how the bourg factory just mass produces these people, and even when they are highly financially successful like this guy, they still have to sell the youtube "How to become a billionaire" channel spiel. At some point I have to wonder if they start believing their own bullshit. Maybe that's the only way they can live with themselves?
Democrats will spend the next four years putting all their energy into rebuilding the old 'respectable republican party' and do literally no policy with full control of congress and with a destroyed GOP.
Since the 70s there's always been some kind of ultraliberal fringe that want US conditions with basically no social programs, but the parties specifically for these people like Fremskridtspartiet or Liberal Alliance don't do any better than the "socialist" party, which is to say they have influence but only so far as the two big centre parties want to court them for support over others.
There's old school communists around, but usually older urban workers or things like a small maoist fisherman groups. Class is not a serious political topic because most people are relatively well off, and the "socialist" party has become more centre-left over time.
Unless you want the ultra liberal voters, which aren't that many, you don't say that you want to privatise healthcare or university, since even centre-right people want these things done by the state, though they would also support having private alternatives. What the less radical right leaning parties support are typically budget cuts and sometimes tax cuts, but in actuality they can't do much because the left parties just fight them in parliament and they need to get the votes from either the ultra liberals or the centre-left parties, and getting the latter votes for some concessions is usually easiest.
It's actually the centre-left that ends up privatising the most, since the right leaning parties won't stop them when they're in power and propose this, and third way style social democracy has been a thing since the early 90s. Denmark will be one of the last countries in the world to have a revolution, the status quo simply dominates both in politics and in the minds of the majority of people.
In my country (Denmark) this was very explicit. Oddly it's not something that is general historical knowledge, which I can only guess is because the topic isn't of much interest here.
I was reading political considerations from social democrats following WWII, and they were concerned with raising wages or providing housing since it would "damage the recovery process" but they felt it necessary to do to avoid an increase in communist popularity which was at an all time high.
In general, the massive increase in public spending in the period between WWII and the seventies went almost uncontested, even though the increase in public spending increased faster than the total growth in GDP. Since then however, public spending compared to growth has remained almost unchanged, but these actual numbers are ignored in the discourse.
Things like universal health care, large scale social security and free universities were barely contested in their creation, compared to what even suggesting a tenth of such projects would have led to had this been done today.
This is also to say that the kind of social democracy we have here is completely stagnant. There is enough love of the welfare state that politicians can't remove the institutions, but it is also completely impossible to establish further such things. That we have the public institutions that we do is purely a matter of historical circumstances; the threat of communism and particularly the Soviet Union. Anything scaled back is never recovered, unless it happens to become the main focus of the left coalition for an election and they win.
I think the best thing you can do, if you can stomach it, is watch a couple of his "Maps of meaning" lectures and notice the kinds of things he likes to repeat and focus on. It is very fascinating to me that his very odd ideas that were not popular in mainstream or in academics eventually became widely known after his rise to fame from the whole "refusing to use pronouns" thing. I'm sure someone could follow his path from a rather respected clinical psychologist to what is really more of an anthropologist through his career, while at the same time moving from being a more typical academic in psychology, to being completely niche in what he later worked on.
One thing that is important to understanding him is his idea of truth being what best serves society, which resulted in that particularly odd talk with Sam Harris.
I think it's clear that Peterson doesn't really believe in God, and has given up on truly believing in him as something existing in the way most people would understand something to exist. But he cannot give up Christianity because of his idea that Christian values are necessary for the society he wishes to live in, and he does not wish to pull these values out of Christianity, but instead find a way to salvage the whole thing.
This can be seen in what his whole academic career is based around; mythical tales that supposedly can be found through time in every society, with particular moral learnings attached, and so are given a universal characteristic of being good and true by the fact that they exist in every society alone. This allows the "truth" to be what can replicate these universal ancient wisdoms best through western society, and this happens to be Christianity.
The core of Peterson is really his attempt to solve his existential dilemma of lost faith, doing so by making Christianity a part of something larger; tying all history and spirituality from across the world into one universal meaningful whole.
He also has this weird thing about wanting to avoid being dominated by alpha 2 year olds and 5 year olds, he keeps mentioning this in his talks and in that one longer part he wrote about a kid trying to dominate him and his daughter at a playground where he fantazised about assaulting the kid.
Also he keeps talking about how pain is the only true thing that lets you know that you really exist and that it is unlike any other feeling. He has a negative philosophical worldview where avoiding pain is the most essential thing, and I'm not at all surprised that this could lead him to using drugs and into deep depression, not to mention creating this whole bizarre world view of universal truths to give meaning to existence.
I think what gets to me with these kinds of things is not so much the scale of the issue, but the denial of it as a problem or the acceptance of it as something unavoidable. Even for people that have cared at some point, the difficulty in finding a solution on a personal or even societal level, leads them to have to conclude that it's not so big a problem after all. Like googling articles that confirm that drinking wine or eating chocolate is actually healthy, because your inability to give up the habit makes you feel bad.
A constant active awareness of the immense suffering and inequality around the world isn't healthy, but the opposite of convincing yourself that it's not a problem at all makes any sliver of a solution less likely. The purest ideology allows us to believe that since problems can only truly be solved in one way (market forces, liberal democracy) that suffering or death occurring under the mandate of such forces are 'natural' and unpreventable. In fact, to take direct action to solve things like poverty outside of these forces, is to challenge the natural order. And like some kind of trolley problem morality, direct interference now makes you responsible for the situation, whereas the deliberate neglect before was more wholesome and good, as you adhered to the natural laws. This is why China's Xinjiang policies are unforgivable, being direct actions, while hundreds of millions of starving Indians under deliberate neglect is not, even though the suffering and death born from the later is incalculably greater- even assuming the worst possible accusations against China are true.
I think the full acceptance of the situation of the world, and the realisation that you are personally unable to fix it no matter how hard you dry, either leads people down a path of denial or self sacrifice (think eco-terrorism or devoting yourself to work in a hospital in the exploited world.) My personal cope is to follow an ideal of living a life such that if everyone in my position did the same, it would see the improvements to the world that I hope for come to be. This is towing the line between action and inaction, of denial and self sacrifice, but it's the only way I can think to live a relatively 'normal' life while recognising the vast suffering adjacent to it. Though I am not sure if it's the right thing to do.