To think that we already live in a dystopian world?

[wheresmymojo]

I've seen a lot of talk about dystopian TV series and possible outcomes of the climate crisis.

But AIBU to say we actually already live in a dystopian world but we're lucky to be in the 'ruling class'?

While we mainly live in our reasonably comfortable bubbles if you actually took things that were happening in the world today and strung them together it would be a perfect dystopian novel....

• BJ in the media offering tax cuts to those earning about £50k while we have 4 million children in poverty

• People being told they are fit to work who then die

• The popularity of cheap clothing which is reliant on large sections of society being in absolute dire poverty to provide the cheap labour (but we don't care and carry on buying)

• The growth of tech companies that have bigger turnovers than many countries GDP and have a global reach beyond any other institution that exists

• The factory farming of animals and genetic modification of them beyond anything nature intended so we can get bigger chicken breasts even if it means the chickens are too large to support their own body weight

• The amount of money pumped into the food industry and levels of obesity while other parts of the world starve

• Wars over oil killing thousands and thousands, even when science says using that oil will contribute to the destruction of the planet

• Rolling back of women's rights in the US so women will have to get across state borders for an abortion if they've been raped

• Arguing about cutting foreign aid while children live by scavenging rubbish dumps in so many countries.

Sorry depressing but it occurred to me that if you put all of this together in a novel it would be pretty clear that we already live in a dystopian world and are just in denial about it...?

I don't have to look the Bangladeshi woman who made my top and who lives in absolute poverty in the eyes

True but people on a low income in the UK cant afford to shop in the more ethical places.

its called the cycle of poverty for a reason.

its hard to get my head round the global economy and how much my standard of living is supported by some people in terrible conditions abroad.

I think we forget that we're all almost certainly in the top 1% of the world.

26 people have more wealth than the poorest 50% (3.5 billion)

I agree OP. I keep thinking that it feels like the beginning of all those apocalyptic movies where they show the back story through news feeds. Very scary

This is quite a defensive way of looking at it though (and quite a Western way).

If believing that things are better now because tens of millions of Chinese are not starving to death is a 'Western way' of looking at things, then I'm happy to take the Western view! *

• Top tip: it's also the Chinese view.

This map is a good way of showing why some people might not think child poverty really exists.

You can live in huge swathes of the UK without coming face to face with it.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist...

"there wasn't much of a middle class before WW1"

I don't think this can be right; I think that perhaps the definition of middle class may have changed, because before WWI there were masses and masses of people for whom all the respectable suburbs round London were built, for instance; all those houses with bathrooms, and a bedroom for the servant and another for the nanny, weren't built for the working class! If there was no middle class, who employed all the thousands and thousands of household servants? It certainly wasn't just the landed gentry: The Diary of a Nobody isn't about someone living in poverty, because they keep a servant, but Pooter wasn't a wealthy man either -- though he lived in "a nice six-roomed residence" (not counting the basement) in Holloway.

Reading the autobiographical A London Child of the 1870s, A London Girl of the 1880s and A London Home in the 1890s by Molly Hughes, and her Cornish mother's story Vivians, shows that there were certainly plenty of adolescents to go to the multitude of not-Public-school educational establishments; heavens, The Mount Quaker school for girls was founded in 1881, and that wasn't for the rich! And the Nesbit books are all about middle-class children. In fact I think that the time of Victoria was positively stiff with middle class people.

Here is an article about how environmental journalism is as dangerous as war journalism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/18/environment-journalists-killed

Yes, I agree with the OP. The UK has had a right-wing take over. People who are at the top won't have noticed or don't care. The rest of the world (outside of the developed nations) is another level altogether.

The UN has noticed. www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/22/un-report-compares-tory-welfare-reforms-to-creation-of-workhouses
The government's response about how some people really like living in Britain was pathetic. That is what inequality means.

I think you're right, but I also think the world is better than it's ever been. I don't think it was better back when it was shit for everyone. Fairer? Perhaps. But not better. There are impossibly huge problems with the way it's got so much better for the rich and hardly at all better for those on the bottom rungs (and I include those at the bottom of rich societies like ours) but actually we are seeing progress even in very poor countries. And when countries do start to gain income, they are moving much faster and gaining improvements much more efficiently because it is accessible from richer countries. The countries which are on level 4* today took a long time to climb up from Level 1, but in the past few decades many countries have taken a jump from Levels 1 and 2 to 3 and 4, and we can expect this to continue. We probably aren't using our technology, wealth, knowledge and so on in the most efficient ways (it's mainly directed towards profit, which is depressing) but there are initiatives which are using our resources to improve the lives of people in the poorest countries. And there are differences in how we deal with things like natural disasters today than we did in the past, even in countries without the infrastructure we have on levels 3 and 4.

Have you seen any of the Gapminder/Hans Rosling stuff? Yes there is criticism about how some of it is overly positive, but I think there are some excellent points in there. If you don't want to read a book there is an extremely entertaining and interesting hour-long talk on Youtube called Don't Panic. It doesn't feel like an hour. Or you can have a play around with the Gapminder tools on their website or look at Dollar Street to see how people live at different income levels across the world.

I worry about big, mega-global corporations mainly. I think they already have too much of a hold over people and I don't think we've really noticed. That concerns me a lot actually.

• I'm using the Gapminder levels [[https://www.gapminder.org/topics/four-income-levels/]] rather than labels such as developed/developing. There's a definition with a little bit of reasoning here if you haven't come across it. The UK is (just) into level 4 with the majority of people living at level 4. There is still a sizeable minority living at level 3 in the UK and a very small number at level 2 (probably largely invisible, e.g. illegal immigrants, homeless, etc).

Well that link went weird...

I'll try again

Gapminder income levels

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

I didn't say there wasn't a middle class, just there wasn't much of one. By which I meant it was much, much smaller proportion than now.

In 19th Century Britain c.80% of the population was working class.

70 million displaced people, more than ar any time since 1945. Yes, of course the world’s a better place.

Also it took me so long to write that the thread has moved on... sorry... am tired tonight. Defo reading - that map of the UK children in poverty is really eye opening and absolutely makes a point, especially if you live outside of a city centre or low income area like the Welsh Valleys.

And therefore some 7630 million not displaced. Context is everything.

More than in the last 74 years.

But the world population has exploded in the last 74 years.

www.gapminder.org/answers/how-did-the-world-population-change/

Oh that’s all right then. Fuck 70 million displaced people, they don’t matter.

I didn't say that. Obviously it's awful. But there's no point saying that the numbers are higher than ever before without context. What percentage of the global population is displaced now compared to the past? It might be higher or lower or the same.

It’s too many.

I agree :(

Nailed it OP, great writing too!

Tim Lambert, mojo? It's a nice round figure, 80%. Yes, there were more of the working class by quite a margin; but to say that there wasn't much of a middle class before WW1 seems to me to understate their numbers somewhat. There was a lot of the middle class, ranging in salary from say £100 per annum to £1,000 or more, but even the lower of those two figures is rather more than twenty shillings a week to keep a family of five or more, which was a norm for the poor in Lambeth when the Fabian Society was investigating the poverty and mortality there in about 1910. (Round About A Pound A Week, published 1913.)
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If a little under 1% of the world's population is displaced it's disgraceful and clearly needs to have things done about it, but I'd need to know what percentage of the world's population was displaced in say 1945 in order to establish what percentage might have been displaced then.... And does today's figure include all the internally-displaced in for instance China, or is it only what are called "refugees" and are in a country not their own? I mean, quite a few of the close to 500,000 refugees in Kenya have been displaced from other parts of Kenya, even if the vast majority are Somali or South Sudanese. Do the Kenyan ones count?

We have two massive (and to an extent interlinked) threats in the form of global warming and population growth (increased pressure on eg arable land and fresh water) but aside from that, life for the majority of the world's population is better than it was 50 years ago. I lived as a child in a developing country where childhood malnutrition was common and so was seeing barefoot kids on frosty mornings. Both of those things have reduced and people there are better housed and clothed and have better access to clean water and electricity, vaccinations etc. That's a fairly common story across the third world.

Yes, the planet faces massive challenges regarding environmental destruction, and it could all go tits up in the next 50 years, but by and large there is much less absolute poverty than there was - never mind all the social gains like democracy.

Yes but it has been that way since WW2.