The greatest problems of history have been solved so why isn’t it changing?

When I was growing up poverty, hunger, sickness and homelessness were giant problems and we were told solving them was a mystery no one could solve. Good news everyone! After years and years of research I’ve found that they have already been SOLVED!

Poverty has been solved, hunger has been solved, sickness has been solved, homelessness has been solved, peace has been solved!

There are people and societies that have already solved these issues or have ideas that will solve these issues.

So why do we still see these problems in society?

Why are there 5000 families a day putting up tents a block away from their homes sitting empty in the wealthiest country ever in all of history?

Well, first some things are changing but it takes time.

Second, we are going through a global transformation.

Automation, outsourcing, borders, enclosure, industry, machines, computers, internet, electronics, weapons, technologies, ideas, communications, education and so much more have all progressed tremendously in the last 100 years while human evolution has happened over millions of years. Our economic models and our power structures are all obsolete.

So if the problems have been solved why aren’t things changing? Why aren’t the people in charge making these changes?

Here are some generalities but all part of the problem:

• The people in charge or people with power don’t want anything to change. They are benefiting from the way things are.
• The part of people in charge or power who grew up in capitalist societies have had their minds overcome with how to make money, how to do business, how to make a profit, how to acquire companies, how to increase their stock values, how to increase their net worth.
  They have been told that your net worth is your life worth (and if they believe that what do they think of poor people?). They’ve been told that their wealth is their value. They’ve tied their self esteem and identity to their stock price. What matters to them is how much money they have or how much they can make.
  They have been indoctrinated with a messed up value system.
• The people in power are old, who have crystalized their belief systems. They are stubborn and rigid. The leadership are a gerontocracy.
• We are in an oligarchy and plutocracy where the oligarchs make decisions for their own benefit over the benefit of the people whom the leadership is beholden to
• Imperfect people who lived in the past have set up a society that isn’t fair for everyone but a society that benefits them the most.
• The people in charge don’t see the problems or that there is anything wrong in the way society is setup
• The people in charge are psychopaths. They have impaired empathy.
• The people in charge misdiagnose poverty. They blame the poor for their poverty (victim blamers). Poverty is not having enough. 80% of people in the US live paycheck to paycheck without enough to cover a $400 emergency. There are working homeless; people who can’t afford homes or apartments working one or two jobs yet living in a tent or a car.
• The people in society are mystics or spiritualists. They believe in invisible things like angels, ghosts and magic thoughts. They think magic thoughts will help people out of poverty.
  Of course that’s the reason for poverty and homelessness. It’s not that we live in a society where land lords can set any price they want for rent and that they have increased the cost of rent year after year until it rent costs so much that no one, not even full time employees, can afford it.
  People are poor because they don’t listen to ghosts and because they don’t think magical thoughts! — last I checked you can’t pay rent with magic thoughts.
  Again, society is setup in a way that benefits capitalists (land developers and real estate agents) with an unfair advantage and neglects others without property. And again, you can point specifically to points in history where this happens (read the Faircloth Amendment).
• They don’t care about a problem until it affects them. And if they are uneducated on the topic and their disposition they may victim blame rather than listen, research or attempt to understand.
• They make decisions for people without including them in those decisions
• The people in charge are lazy. They know the problems, they know the solutions but they don’t want to do anything to solve it. It’s not affecting them so it’s not important to them.
• They dismiss the importance of the problem. Yes it’s a problem but it’s not important. They can fix it on their own if they really wanted to.
• They believe that, generalize and project their skillset and abilities on others. “If I can get out of poverty, or start a business and make money than anyone can.” No they can’t. You have your education, networks and connections, and so on. Others don’t have the privileges you do.
• The people with power and money have gold fever or dragon sickness (see The Hobbit). They have what Native American tribes call weitka a disease or possession where man eats other men. Nearly every congress member is a millionaire. Of course they know what it’s like to live poverty.
• They’ve sold out to their donors. They are loyal to businesses and friends rather than the people or the truth.
• The real stories have been erased from the media
• The ideas of solidarity, empathy, compassion and so on have been erased from media
• They have scarcity mindset even, the wealthy
• The wealthy lose their sense of empathy as they grow in wealth and can’t tell their actions are cruel or don’t care
• They know they are cruel but their is no consequence to them
• They live in a bubble, detached from reality,
• They are treated as celebrities, put on pedestals skewing their perception of themselves and their duties and praised
• They are comfortable and complacent

The questions more better might be why are people selfish? Why are people greedy? Why are people self-centered?

The people in power do not know how the people without power feel and have had no reason to change that.

Some societies and countries are doing much better than western nations.

Capitalism discourages solidarity.

The problems we were told were unsolvable was a lie. They are all solvable. But if you have to work in the western capitalistic with socialist programs framework below are some answers.

Note: These are ALL possible within existing budgets.

How to solve homelessness
— stop blocking people from building homes, provide housing as a right, rent control and unconditional basic income

How to solve poverty
— restore the commons, do a global unconditional basic income, unconditional housing and unconditional health care

How to solve hunger
— it would cost $20 billion a year to end world hunger

How to solve illness
— universal health care is more affordable now than private health care. it would save money across other spending programs

All but a few of the suggestions above are being done in other countries, have been proven to work and cost less than what we have now.

We’ve been lied to that it’s not possible.

The problems exist, the answers already exist,

-the problem is that the people responding to hearing about the problems.

And what they are thinking is,

“Should I care about the distressing story I’m hearing about? Are there more distressing stories I’m not hearing about?”

In their minds they are saying,

“Should I care about this issue?
Should I dismiss this news?
Should I ignore this news?
Should I deny that these problems exist?”

If they don’t want to know the truth they will keep in denial as much as they can lie to themselves about it.

See my other post on How to Respond to things you don’t like:

How to respond to things you don’t like hearing

Responsibility

“You can’t blame people at the top for everything!”

Yes, you can. You can blame people at the top when they don’t ask the people at the bottom.

Imagine if a general of an army during a war was not asking his men in the trenches what’s going on.

Here’s how you can save yourself if you are a leader in a hierarchy.

If the people at the top don’t know what to do or what they do isn’t working (and it isn’t) so the people at the top ask the people at the bottom what they need and people at the top do it exactly (not 99% but exactly) as the people at the bottom say and it doesn’t work then the people at the top can absolve yourself of some responsibility. You can say, “Look we gave it shot. It wasn’t undermined, it was planned out how you described and it worked or didn’t work.” But now you know.

But if the people at the bottom tell the people at the top what to do and you don’t do it and there’s no other option then you can blame the people at the top for all the pain and suffering they are causing and hold them responsible.

See my other post on how those in power are responsible when they prevent people from their own survival.

Really what we have is messed up and based on imbalanced power dynamic relationships through every part of society:

• master / slave
• royalty / peasant
• boss / worker
• employer / employee
• property owner (rental income) / propertyless renter (rental expense)
• privileged / disadvantage

You should always include people who you are making decisions for who are affected by those decisions and never have people in power who aren’t affected by those decisions.

Until you address this power imbalance you will always have one person who has power over the other. You need something(s) in society that will give everyone the power to say no.

Summary

The problems are already solved. It’s the people who are hearing them that are the problem.

See the part II of this article in the 3 types of people that prevent to social progress and growth:

The 3 enemies to progress and maintainers oppression

This post is a work in progress.