It’s easy to think that since socially constructed systems are the cause of so many of our issues that the problem to be solved is a few very powerful people conciously choosing to conduct them. If we dismantle the Racism council, the Capitalism council, and the Genocide council there would be no one to run racism, capitalism, or genocide. This is the plot of a fantasy novel, not reality.

The reality of our socially constructed systems is that they are systems. No one is in charge of them, there are only different levels of influence and endless unimaginable complexity of effecting and being effected by those systems. We have plenty of documentation both descriptive and prescriptive of our systems but absolutely nothing which documents the true extent of all interactions happening in any given system, especially considering how much human behavior is driven by motivations we may not be totally aware of.

Of course there are bad actors. The answer isn’t to get rid of all the “bad guys” though (this way of thinking drives fascism), because that is impossible and actually has the result of providing opportunities for different “bad guys.” In reality good and bad themselves are socially constructed and inconsistently defined. My socialist values that everyone should be fed, sheltered, educated, and loved are not universal. I even think these desires are more or less instinctual but we also have to deal with the world we live in which will lead groups and individuals into ways of thinking which cause them not to consider these goals for anyone beyond their personal “allies” however they define them. Everyone is extremely comprimised including me.

Bad actors in our systems are the ones conducting evil without the willingness to examine what they’re doing. It will forever be a mystery how much of that lack of willingness is a concious choice or a literal inability to consider. Because we’re all so comprimised, even taking every effort we can to resist these systems is not enough even to offset our contributions to these systems. By being a citizen of the US, I am indirectly responsible for every atrocity my government and society has been involved with. To live, I must participate in this capitalist apparatus in some form, and my small contributions along with those of the rest of the workforce enable the capacity for our other systems to harm us and the rest of the world. My labor and spending, in a very abstract way, bolster the social force of capital.

All this is to say we can’t solve systemic issues by pinning the blame on individuals born into a system and not questioning their role in it, especially if that system is to their great advantage. In my experience that is often asking far too much of someone. The blame lies in the systems themselves. Faith in capitalism actually appears to be waning and there is a lot of hope for a more equitable society in the future. Although still horrenous, the hegemonic institutions driving global suffering today are better than the institutions of the 1940’s in most ways. There’s no guarantee that they can’t now develop to become worse than those past systems, but it seems like there are many more of us aware of and challenging these systems that I would like to think ultimately we’re moving toward a more pro-social way of life. Information is now permanently more free and communication over any distance is now trivial compared to times past. More and more people are seeing the victims of their systems as themselves, and I hope that means something.

Interesting take. I wish they expanded on what we needed to do to make those problems easier for us to solve.