I would like to have a clearer vision of social progress.

Do you ever get the feeling that different forms of progress are in competition? That they are, in fact, interfering with one another?

Progress is subjective. But could it be objective?

Is there a (better) way to translate the disparate interests of a diverse population into collective decisions? Of course there is voting. But people are clearly not happy with the current status of voting. Otherwise there would not be so many people disillusioned with democracy, or driven to plot its overthrow.

In most democracies, people elect representatives. Those representatives must follow their leaders, usually—although this varies with the institution. Leaders are chosen by party members, usually even less often than in civil elections. Citizens have very little say in decision-making, except for ocassional bursts of loud complaining, which raise the spectre of getting voted out at some later date.

One alternative—often touted, rarely adopte—is direct democracy. But do citizens want more responsibility, and to vote on issues more often?

As with most things—to quote an eco-terrorist—most people want to eat their cake, and have it, too. [Ted Kazinsky used the popular aphorism in this unusual reversed form, and I prefer it. Kazinsky was a genius with the soul of an activist, but torturously twisted.]

Everyone wants progress of some kind. What varies is how many people they are willing to consider in their pursuit. We all vary in our degree of generosity and compassion. But some of us, while admitting our selfishness, really want a society built on systems—and run by leaders—who are wholly compassionate, and have everyone’s needs at heart—including non-human persons, and even the selfish and evil amongst us.

Building a society that can serve everyone is the ultimate definition of progress.

But no one really knows what that looks like.

For the pragmatic amongst us, there is no reason to visualize the end game of social progress. There is no time, when real people are suffering. They believe that we must alleviate their suffering now, and that all efforts should be devoted to that.

Unfortunately, they play a game of whack-a-mole, and they are always losing. You cannot fix the system by heroically policing individual defectors after the fact. Defectors—whether individuals or conspiracies—must be prevented in advance. The system must have an immune system to protect itself. Pragmatic activism is little more than battlefield triage. It is not a strategy for winning.

Strategic thinking is rare. It is so rare, now, as to be practically extinct. Everyone seems to be in short-term tactical survival mode. Except in the ranks of the anti-progressive sociopathic monsters. Those maniacs seem to have the patience and ten-thousand-foot view necessary to play a real long game. Which is why they have made so much progress in so many places.

In their own terms, they have made great progress. They have taken control of many of the levers of power, from the local police and sheriffs, to the supreme courts and military high commanders. We are facing the real-world equivalent of the supervillain group Hydra. They aren’t quite the suicidal zealots of the comics, but many are just as fanatical in their devotion to their ideals. They want complete destruction of their enemies, subjugation of lesser peoples (and, for the leaders, also of the normies), and dismantling of fair and just political systems. They want complete domination, for its own sake—for its pure sadistic joy.

So, of course, those opposed to that should devote whatever resources they can to opposing it. But simply fighting in the street, or in social media, will have negligible impact, other than to inflame a feeling of righteousness, even as they get bludgeoned and hauled off to jail—or doxxed, flooded with hate spam, and even swatted. (“Swatting” is slang for falsly calling the police on someone’s home under false pretenses, such as taking a hostage or running a drug lab, triggering a S.W.A.T. raid that might get them killed.)

The biggest threat to progress is extreme concentration of power—especially economic, but also ideological or cultural: anything that can harness large numbers of people to do one’s bidding—in private hands. Such private power is a threat specifically when the government has bound its own hands, such that it cannot restrain that private power from acting against the good of the people.

Part of that threat of concentrated power is that it infests the government, whether in the executive, legislative, bureaucratic, or other branches—or all at once.

Concentration, in social power, is equivalent to coordination. Coordination is achieved through two main means: money and ideology. (Religion is ideology reinforced by supernatural mythology.) Money itself is a symbol of ideology. On need not believe in the ideology (markets) to get utility from money. But it is a very basic and generic ideology. Many others build on it. But mostly, it is one of the pillars of most current social systems. It is hard to live without money. One can thus abuse money to attract people to a different ideology, even a pathological one. (Simply offer more money, or do an ideological bait-and-switch.)

Small steps in progress only work against a background of sufficient justice. Complaining about injustice does nothing to address it. Meanwhile, fixing single issues of injustice does virtually nothing to solve its systemic (culture) causes. The injustices will just keep coming, no matter how loudly we complain, or how many go on marches. There is just as much chance of making the situation worse, as the normies will get scared by the sight of unruly mobs, which represent disorder and violence and death.

The only real way to achieve universal progress in justice is if the majority of people who participate in government—from the voter to the highest office—care about and want it, even when it comes at a personal cost. Which, for those who have power, is always.

The challenge is always that of who to give political power. Because those people will have to sacrifice their own potential power for the good of their constituents. And they will have to make enemies of those who would corrupt them and the state for their own private benefit.

Who is willing to make enemies of the titans of industry? The heroic visionaries who bring us so many wonders of technology and convenience, of excitement and fun? Who make us happy, if only by keeping us intoxicated?

But that is what we must do. It is what we must all do.

Yet, such defiance of the techno-industrial demi-gods is not a very popular attitude, at the moment. Perhaps it never is. Most people want a steady paycheque, and to spend it on whatever gives them joy. They will conform to almost any ideological bullshit in order to get it. That’s about as far as their analysis goes. Stimulus-response is the normal approach to life. Who but a weirdo wants to waste time contemplating abstractions and what-if scenarios?