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(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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I've long ruled that I cannot play or win by competition but collaboration. I, for one, believed my parents and teachers and ministers when they suggested we were trying to live in a society rather than a circus of gladiators massacring each other to the delight of elites.
There's a cute bit in the John Scalzi short story Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth in which the announcer (not the principal) expresses well wishes to, and high hopes for those students soon to be graduating, but noting one species who will, after graduation, be bussed to the downtown stadium to begin mating challenges that will leave nine out of ten of you dead... That's us. That's what we do. Jobs are fought over by dozens of qualified applicants, each of whom face hunger, the elements and law enforcement if they lose. We're playing musical chairs like it's a Squid Game.
I refuse to live in a society where, in order for my success and comfort, a dozen others must suffer and fail. I'm not, to paraphrase Vonnegut, a tin solder some rich kid got for Christmas. What greater glory is there in being a disposable, interchangeable, replaceable part in some billionaire's vanity project over choosing my own fate? If anything, the mess my corpse might leave on some state building's marble floor could serve to express that no, the system cannot continue as it does.
As it is, I do have reason to live to see tomorrow. There are people who care about me, who would grieve and suffer if I were to vanish. There are people who depend on me for emotional and practical support when I can't be there financially.
But we all do live in precarity. There are crises being managed in every ring of this circus. And for 80% of the US, this is normal and accepted.
It's is going to be an It's A Wonderful Life Christmas for my household and family in 2023; either things miraculously come together if luck comes and meets our efforts half-way, but we may find ourselves like a trapeze acrobat plummeting through the air unsure if there's a partner to catch us on the other side.
Whether I am caught safely or plummet without a net, the rest of the world will see it as all part of the show.
Yeah, I'm not keen to blame the degradation of either labor power or the communal ethic on the working class when we have actual accounts of organized efforts of the ownership class conspiring to change US culture into the property-is-sacred crap that it is today.
Nor am I going to think of the system as some anthropomorphic opponent who is besting me at sports. The system certainly isn't winning, what with establishment resorting to fascism in order to preserve the current power structures, and meanwhile the species is driving a global extinction event which puts even itself at high risk within the next few centuries.
In the States, every year over 40,000 men and women kill themselves successfully, that is, they die as a result, and we track that it wasn't accidental or homicide. Another 120,000 in the US try and fail but end up in the hospital, or being caught in time. None of these people care about whether the system wins or loses. They care that their own misery stops. And the US and state governments care about as much as 4Chan edgelords that we off ourselves at a higher rate than Japan (though to be fair, Japan is actively seeking to change centuries of culture that regards suicide as acceptable).
Mutualist organization takes time, and it's not going to do anything for people in need today. If not letting the system win works to keep you alive to see tomorrow, that's great. But it's not an argument for why to go on living when our resources have run out and we're now exposed to the elements.