For context: The thread was about why people hate Hexbear and Lemmygrad instances

  • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    11 months ago

    Having a mentality of sovereignty won’t change much, if only because it doesn’t fix many of the inherent problems with a global human society. A big downside to capitalism and free markets are mortal limitations. We can’t predict the future or understand the full effects of our actions. We estimate based what information we have, but we can often be wrong even if we have good intentions. The externalities of our actions are basically impossible to calculate, and even when we discover them, we possess the ability to suspend our empathy and ignore potential harms.

    I’m also not a fan of the assumption that we can’t tell others what to do until we put our own lives in order. Sometimes getting others to do things is essential to changing your own life and improving your own situation. On a personal level, you can set boundaries with toxic people in your life or convince others to leave you alone. On a large scale, you can overthrow an oppressive system or change laws that prevent you from living well. Telling others what they should do is not mutually exclusive to making changes in your own life.

    Sovereignty is great and all, but even if widely respected by most, some will not, and those that do must step in to protect it. The way I view it, laws don’t exist for ethically behaving people, they exist because there will always be unethical people, and there’s no way to ensure that any ethical person will always be ethical.

    The fundamental reality is that someone who wants to do good can participate in an evil system. Unregulated global capitalism uses child slaves and keeps people in poverty, all while pumping substances into the environment that harm everyone. You might respect the sovereignty of everyone you meet, but anything you buy can be made by manufacturers who don’t respect the sovereignty of people you’ll never meet.

    Capitalism is too big for its problems to be solved by individual behaviors without changing our current system. We must change it to actually make a system that respect everyone’s anything, be it sovereignty, human rights, or the ability to live.

    • bastion@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Not too big. You just have to have effective individual behaviors. They spread, because they work. Capitalism is currently a leading way of life because it is effective both for individuals and for collectives, at least from a raw, short-term power standpoint.

      But that standpoint is a valid and important one. There’s no need to get rid of capitalism, there’s a need to adopt better ideologies, live by them, and gain by them. …which is what I do.

      The point of sovereignty isn’t ‘you can’t stop other people from being bad.’ It’s that that kind of thinking (though necessary in a pinch) keeps you from addressing the ways you’re relinquishing power to the existing system on an ongoing basis.

      In the end, though, I’m just making conversation, and we’ll both live as we wish. In some senses, we all live by sovereignty anyways. It’s just more effective when you realize it.