The past few centuries have been carefully and slowly built to disempower people like you and me, and empower the newly-minted elites. It was the period of power consolidation for capitalism, when it fully overtook feudalism and other pre-capitalist systems over the whole planet.

You and me have no choice in how people’s lives are lived. The systems of control built in steer the masses into living exactly as they live.

We might individually live marginally less negative lives, but to completely eliminate our negative impact on the world, we have to completely remove ourselves from society.

The solution is not piecemeal changes and fixes to our individual attitudes and behaviours.

We have to completely change the system. We need to dismantle it and build something better from the lessons we learned.

Recycling cardboard and shopping at thrift shops is not it.

And I’m not sure we have many other options now, other than the old burning down the banks and guillotine routine.

[–] Roggie@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 year ago

But when to not participate is to starve to death, there’s not much of a choice. There’s no public transit for me to use as an alternative to my car, I can’t afford to spend extra $ on stuff that’s healthier and less impactful on the environment.