flâneur

Abundance as a Sense-making Framework

modernpower.substack.com · 3,123 words · saved by 1 readers

If I could wave a magic wand and make one change in society, it would be to wash away our learned helplessness as citizens. We live in a democracy. We possess immense amounts of financial, human, and social capital that we could channel toward better collective outcomes. And yet we feel nihilistic about a system that doesn’t produce the results we feel are possible. We complain about traffic, without realizing we are traffic. Complaining about traffic : being one of the cars that form the traffic :: complaining about government : being one of the citizens that form the government. What feeds our nihilism? We don’t understand why we get bad outcomes, and thus don’t know where to direct our energies to improve them. There are a set of common answers to the question “why do we get bad outcomes?” which attract various degrees of support: One party is the problem—The problem (from a left-of-center perspective) is Republicans. If the GOP had less power, we’d get better outcomes. The two-part

If I could wave a magic wand and make one change in society, it would be to wash away our learned helplessness as citizens. We live in a democracy. We possess immense amounts of financial, human, and social capital that we could channel toward better collective outcomes. And yet we feel nihilistic about a system that doesn’t produce the results we feel are possible. We complain about traffic, without realizing we are traffic. Complaining about traffic : being one of the cars that form the traffic :: complaining about government : being one of the citizens that form the government. What…

related reading