Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
In sweden they raised the price of alcohol 10 fold making it a luxury good and not something to drain your sorrows with. I think the hardest problem to solve is human greed.
Greed is the biggest issue we have in this world right now.
It should be made to be a mental health disorder that must be treated professionally and by taking away the money not needed to operate their business.
Kill tax breaks and strip the rich with 90% taxes on everything over 5 million dollars of any money they make even capital gains and investment income.
Own one home pay regular taxes, own two double the tax, own three triple the tax and so on until no one wants to own more homes. Same goes for corpos that rent to people at above market rates using software to drive rental prices up.
Greed must be made to be shameful and punishable not accepted and desired. Robber barons like Musk and Bezos should taxed into non existence.
Top 5 earners get publicly executed if they own over 500mil.
I think the ancient Romans would make their richest people pay for the construction of warships. You would only get out of it by pointing to a richer person to pay.
Do that but not for warships, pay for infrastructure repair, all those roads and bridges that keep the economy going need to be brought up to today’s standards and new bridges built to replace ones that are crumbling. Their wealth could not have been built if not for the roads and tracks that are now crumbling beneath years of cuts to local and state/provincial governments.
Cyberbullying
Not a single judiciary system is able to tackle a phenomena that can happens from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world an can imply a handful of thousand of persons. Big tech does not have legal obligation nor financial or ideological interest to tackle it because forcing them would be unconstitutional. The rare cases where justice give a fuck about it, you get at best the condemnation of a bunch of nobodies after years of legal procedure during which the bully continues, and most of your bullies are still unpunished and free to launch a punitive expedition.
Impunity of members of UN security council
If a UN resolution is vetoed by at least one of the members of the UN security council, the said resolution is thrown in the trash. That means that if a war crime is serving the interests of at least one member of the UN security council, its full impunity is de facto guaranteed. Even worse: some of the members are notably war-thirsty and 2 of them aren’t even democratic. And there is no way to change this way of functioning because it also can be vetoed by the said members. How many crimes have been made possible because of that?
I think there are plenty of things that can’t be solved, but nothing that can’t be improved.
Homelessness, there are just some people who don’t fit into modern life - maybe they can’t be housed, but conditions could be improved.
Poverty, there is no complete solution that won’t be worse than the problem (yet) but things could be so much better than they are with the means we do have.
Pollution, there is probably no way we can live with our current technology without causing pollution but again - we could make substantial improvements with the tech we do have now.
Human nature. Itcwas necessary to beat out the other species, but it didn’t evolve with society. Many of the things other people have mentioned are really just unevolved human nature. Greed, selfishness, racism, crime.
High impact youth sports. Destroys joints, destroys brains, destroys futures, but if you suggest getting rid of them, you’re a cultural betrayer.
My kids will not be playing football what so ever because of this
Alcohol abuse is a symptom of trauma. Trauma begets trauma. That’s the thing never solved. Take away alcohol, it’ll find another avenue.
Not to mention it occurs naturally in rotting fruit. It would be like attempting to ban photosynthesis.
Are we gonna outlaw yeast, too?
Stay away from my bread.
Believe me someone will try.
Eventually biology itself will be banned because of how un-controllable it is. All that will be allowed will be silicon components manufactured by a central authority or assembled under centrally-approved code.
Weed is illegal in many parts of the world, as are psychedelic mushrooms.
And those are even harder to make consumable than fruit literally fermenting on a tree, or yeast getting into some sugary drink.
So unless we’re gonna get rid of leavened bread and cut down every Marula tree we’re not getting rid of alcohol.
Mushrooms just grow here in the grasslands. Only problem is harvesting season is mostly in the autumn. So you need te dry them.
But (magic) mushrooms growing in the wild are pretty common in north-west Europe. ( The species is found in a lot of places psilocybe semilanceata ) of course there are many more and you don’t even have to wait to get fermented.
Still even I can just pick them they are still not allowed here (in the Netherlands)
True, but yeast spores are in the air, and if you leave an appropriately sweet and sterile liquid open it will just… make alcohol. They use this technique in Belgium to harvest wild yeast for Lambic.
So until magic mushrooms start showing up inside my house I still don’t consider it equivalent.
In NL there’s a loophole: the fruit (paddo) is illegal, but the mycelium (truffle) isn’t.
During prohibition in the US, there was inoculated fruit juice being sold with the warning like: “do not leave unattended for 2 weeks at room temperature, as it may ferment”.
Sometimes alcohol abuse is just addiction. Trauma soon follows, though.
A person chases oblivion for a reason. In my experience.
I believe that has been your personal experience, but that’s not the case for everyone. Addiction isn’t rational, and alcoholism wears a lot of costumes.
Explain pls
I’m not OP, but I am a former alcoholic, and the son of a woman who drank herself to death.
In many cases we have severe untreated mental illness, often inherited and/or from childhood trauma. We are generally suicidal. Getting black out drunk (chasing oblivion) is better than living with your thoughts and emotions.
Anecdotally, I’d like to add that most of the many alcoholics I’ve known have very strong empathy and emotional intelligence. The sad state of the world certainly contributes to some people’s alcoholism. I know it did with mine.
For many reasons, alcoholics choose to kill themselves slowly with alcohol rather than a faster way that could cause even more grief and pain to the people around them.
Studies have shown that not all alochol abuse is trauma-related.
That’s an interesting article. I appreciate that they mention that the studies may be flawed because they attained wildly different data, probably due to methodology. They also mention that people with personality disorders are often not caught by these surveys.
Did you not read it? Personality disorders ARE caught by the studies. The article references a 2020 study by Elizabeth A. Evans et al., which explicitly examined the prevalence of personality disorders among people with opioid use disorder. It states, “55.1 percent of women and 57.0 percent of men with opioid use disorder were found to have a personality disorder, such as borderline, antisocial, etc." Also, the article mentions findings from 16 studies on antisocial personality disorder among people with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Seven studies explored borderline personality disorder in AUD populations, with prevalence estimates ranging from 6–66 percent and a median of 21 percent. These wide-ranging results reflect the inclusion of personality disorders in the research.
I’m certain you misspoke?
The first half of the article focuses on the biggest study, the NSDUH
SAMHSA’s annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). NSDUH does not measure different mental health conditions individually, and probably fails to catch personality disorders.
That’s where I saw the information.
That’s one survey, you said “these surveys” (plural) which is why I was confused.
I was mistaken. It is the biggest and most discussed survey though so I still think it should be mentioned.
Getting consent to creating a life from a unborn child. Every human being was raped into existence by their parents.
Rent is due in 7 days.
I don’t know if that’s a problem with society so much as it is a problem with reality.
…or a problem with time and sequences of events.
Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.
Most don’t not just from some technicalities but because parents or otherwise we have a biological urge to consent to being alive and make live being.
The consent is from our nature and only extreme circumstances makes it otherwise.
Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.
I don’t know if that’s true. I shot myself in the head once and just woke up like nothing had happened. I suspect life might not be as fragile as it appears from the outside.
It is surprising how resilient we are. Getting shot in the head is an example, we often underestimate the chance of survival.
Unfortunately it doesn’t prevent all suicide.
Not true, police come and lock you up if they catch you trying to stop being alive
skill issue
What do you mean the police?
Isn’t the hospital and medics the one who cares for suicidal people?
Putting them in jail if that’s what you mean is pretty barbaric.
Again though the police can’t detain you indefinitely. What stop people from doing it is being cared for the reason they wanted to in the first place.
Isn’t the hospital and medics the one who cares for suicidal people?
not in America, where hospitals aren’t free and a call to the suicide hotline will have the cops going to your house
This is so fucked. Yet another way the criticism Luigi brought is relevant.
As destructive technologies advance, any level of crime will become unacceptable, because eventually it will take only one person to create (for example) a bio-weapon to kill 10% of planet population. I predict we will have to design every new baby to fit into society, and ban humans with destructive impulses from being raised on Earth. Mandatory eugenics for the whole planet. Reserved free-range fuck-around planets for dangerous organic humans. Blowing up a Mars dome hurts only a few, because connecting tubes have air locks, and viruses can’t survive outside. “Blast your prehistoric frustrations away in our all-out war park!” -God of War Inc., Mars.
Fix poverty and you fix crime. I mean there will always be people with severe mental disorders that make them violent or deadly, but this could also be potentially handled by making complete mental health check ups part of universal healthcare. People who are likely to become violent could be separated from the population and potentially cured.
I remember the case of a 6 year old girl who was adopted from a situation of severe abuse, violent, sexual, and neglect. She became a violence obsessed psychopath. She kept trying to stick needles in herself along with other self harm behaviors. She attacked her adoptive parents with a knife. After this they locked her in her room at night and put a lock on their bedroom door. She attempted to kill her brother, and tortured and killed animals.
There is a documentary about her called Child of Rage. Warning - this is extremely disturbing.
Eventually, as no progress was being made, she went to live with a therapist for intense behavior modification therapy. She was cured without the use of drugs. Now she is a successful RN and author.
I went way off track here but I wanted to reemphasize that poverty is the source of the vast majority of crime, and even the most broken psychopaths can be cured.
End poverty, end child abuse, end crime. End capitalism.
Ending poverty would certainly help, but I disagree that crime would be fixed. People commit crimes for many reason that aren’t related to poverty. Envy, hatred, love, sexual desire, religious fanaticism, political extremism etc. Crimes like murder and rape often have motives completely unrelated to financial status. Not all perpetrators have severe mental disorders either.
In terms of “fixing” people who are violent, I agree in so far that the justice system should focus on rehabilitation and helping people. In many but not all cases, that can be achieved. But generally those people commit crimes first before they’re identified. You propose mental health checkups to prevent that in the first place, but many people who are in a bad mental place would not voluntarily go to those. So would you make them mandatory for everyone? That would be quite dystopian, especially with the possibility of being locked up without even having committed a crime. That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean by measures that are unacceptably authoritarian. And even then, people would definitely slip through the cracks.
That’s fair.
There’s no problem in society that can’t be fixed. But the problem is there’s too much conclusion without proper understanding
what do you mean
Exactly
Indubitably
I understand the point in OPs post, but I disagree with it based upon evidence we have available to us. I think first and foremost it is important to mention (I dont have the studies linked but it shouldnt be hard to find) that teenage drug use overall is trending downward, with that including underage alcohol use/abuse. If younger generations use it less, the problems caused by alcoholism will be less prevalent as time goes on. Secondly, weve been putting up with drunk drivers for a while but (as our younger generations have been told for about 20 years now) the consequences for drunk or impaired operation of a motor vehicle have become more and more severe. I do believe alcoholism is something that can and will be phased out given enough time. The only thing that is still a mystery is what vice is going to replace it, and whether it is going to be better or worse.
Driving will end long before drinking will
Yeah education and prevention were always the best measure against addictions. But when it’s something deeply ingrained in society it takes time to move on. I like to think society is it’s own living thing, evolving much slower.
“Random” events of “evil”. Basically I think we’ll never reach something like 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 stealing for little greed and so on. Or even 0 addiction (edit: i’m not including addiction to the previous list of crimes, i wanted to add it as another class of issues for we will never reach a true 0)
We are very very far from the ideal situation tho, there is a looot of margin of improvement
Like your alcohol thing in the post: ban only makes it worse and still now you (as US, not you OP) have a very weird relationship with alcohol with the thing that minors cannot touch it and people have to drink from a paper bag lol. Let’s say that you are not really trying hard to improve the situation. We’ll never reach 0 alcoholists but society is not in a good shape and alcohol is cheap so ye
Addiction is often people trying to escape from pain using anything they have available. It’s not evil.
yes, hence why i used a dot before it. i guess it’s not clear and i should edit
tell me if it’s better now :)
oh, ok, thank you
I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.
In Marx’s own idea the point were class warfare is no more is when our civilization can satisfy any needs of anyone.
It would be the ultimate goal of communism, perfect equity through infinite automation of all resources.
Then they would only be art, philosophy, science and social activities.
Except, as long as there’s limited resources, fighting for it is our nature. To the point of having to much if may be.
Considering how little we actually know, how much we are still figuring out today, how wrong we once were, and most definitely still are on many things, about said nature, the naturalistic argument is IMHO rather weak. The argument silently assumes too many things, at least with our current knowledge - that human beings do actually have an inherent nature, that said nature is uniform enough across the whole species to make that generalization, that said nature is inevitable and can’t be evolved past or rationalized against, that it always was the case and will always be, etc.
If humans have a nature, then humans will always have that nature by definition. “We” might get beyond that nature, but it won’t be “us” after that. It will be our descendants.
And not like “sons and daughters” but rather “our evolutionary descendants”.
As for humanity, we exist in a particular set of inescapable challenges, which define what it is to be human.
Definitely true.
I think the hypothesis of a nature both in human actions and society as a whole does have enough merits to be a good starting point.
Were I think there is a lot of unpredictability is on conditions of living and technologies.
Technologies especially, evolve so much quicker than society or human nature.
I would say recently our technologies twisted some of our own nature. For instance how we reproduce in such a controlled way.
Not only this but we do now more than ever things not because of our nature. And it’s also been put into very unique situations.
A great example is social media (including Lemmy itself). We have access to communication so far from us it created very unique communities.
Yeah I feel like human nature is actually cooperation.
It definitely is a big part of our nature as social creatures.
Although we can cooperate with our group and fight against another, hence the consistent wars throughout history.
I think human nature isn’t one sided.
But you’re right in that cooperation is the most effective (and desirable) way of survival.
Human beings. The issue is humans.
We truly need those trisolarians to speed up.
You humans sure are a contentious bunch
You’ve made an enemy for life!
The limited scope of human attention and the ineptitude it creates in governance is impossible for a mortal being to fix in our finite existence. We will eventually formulate an AGI that can address this primal flaw, but defining who or what is fixing the issue becomes an unsolvable philosophical paradox in the idealized fantasy world of philosophical definition.
