Everexpanding
I think levels of consumption need to reduce and the fact that people ignored where their cheap goods came from has been/ is a problem but I still believe everyone should be able to afford a home, that is a problem that can be fixed by governments.
I know we are living through a huge social upheaval but hoarding of wealth facilitated by governments is not helping.
Yes, reduced consumption is desirable, but barely 1 in 10 would ever even consider doing that as a chosen lifestyle before they have a crisis. They won’t work out where the crises are likely to occur, they don’t see the benefit of planning ahead, and they sure as hell don’t see the benefit of having, for example, wool blankets in a house. We don’t run our heating most of the time. We sit under wool blankets and have wool blankets over the duvet on our beds. I literally don’t know anyone in our extended family or friends who doesn’t think it’s weird that we save money and use wool blankets. Their attitude is why wouldn’t you just blow the money on ramping up your heating if you’re not yet hand to mouth and worrying? I’m like, because I’m saving and I want a house with a garden so I can grow food, and next month or next year I might be living hand to mouth. They just didn’t understand why I live a frugal lifestyle when DH earns £44K. Why don’t you get a new car? It’s embarrassing. Cos it’d take £8K out of my house deposit, or it would add a £350 a month bill to my budget that I don’t already have. That’s why.
You cannot stop people with money from saving it and investing it. They do it because it is a natural human instinct. They are good at it because mommy and daddy taught them to do it. They were taught how businesses work, how governments work, how societies evolve, how influence operates is the real world and how to see it in the changing world their kids witness in the news.
Its a different world view as far as I can tell. They are an insular people who only seem to trust their own kind.
Now, the fact that every single society in the world operates the exact same way, even the ‘socialist ones’. And that every single governmental structure in history has always operated on the same structure to one degree or other, kings and courts, apparatchiks, dictatorships and their counsels, activist groups and their inner circles, boards and their board members, councils and their council members, school boards, housing associations, all of them. You cannot change the way humans have always chosen to arrange themselves.
You can spend your life trying, and if you succeed like Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, you’ll make money and join the party and realise it’s better to make your life better and shore up the future of your children than try to fix anything. The whole fixing anything is just BS that is fed the masses to keep them squabbling why those who understand go one and work together for their way of the world.
The people in the UK could get together en mass and solve problems that they wanted to solve is short order. But you cannot get people to agree and do anything, because they have their own lives and their own agendas, and none of it is important in the grand scheme of things.
If everyone in the UK made it clear they would not work a single day more until energy prices were rolled back to 2015 prices, and that they would starve, and feed eachother and share, and care for one another, but they would not do a single days work in any industry at all until it happened, laws would be written and the mechanisms would be put in place, and it would happen.
Would people ever choose of their own free will to heal support one another? Would they F. Would they ever get together en mass and do as they are told because they were told a scare story about a superbug, and the government were handing out free cash to sit in your arse. Damn right they will. Gimme some of that.
Fear and greed always win out at every single level of society. It’s has always been thus, and always will be, for we are humans, and we know more about the human psyche and how to nudge it than we know about anything else.
Theres a major food crisis in the world, everywhere. Why not ramp up food production? But the response by the people of the world is to reduce food production as hard and as fast as possible? And why? Because they fear the Police will come and cease their farms and because they would rather take the free windfall cash handouts (bribes) to walk away?
Not 1 in 100 actually care about anything other than their own family if it inconveniences then to do so. I’m just honest enough to admit it.