In which I, your friendly neighborhood (small v) visionary, reveal unto my flock the shocking truth of who is really in charge of this crazy old world of ours.

A lot of people really will not like what I have revealed. As I said on BlueSky :

People prefer to believe they are powerless against the evils of the world because if they weren’t, they would have to disrupt their lives in order to fight them. And it’s true that what you can do is a drop in the bucket. But get enough of those drops together and you get a tsunami.

— The other Michael Bertrand (@fruvous73.bsky.social) August 9, 2025 at 3:01 PM

People would rather cling to the false belief that they are powerless and use convenient socially received dodges like, “but what can one person do?” to hide the fact that the real issue is that they know they should do something but they just don’t want to.

Because doing something about the evils of the world would require personal sacrifice – of money, of attention, of our oh so precious leisure time – and somehow we have become people who are so spoiled that even the slightest suggestion of personal sacrifice makes us bristle with our backs up like a razorback boar and whine. “Why should I have to give anything up when it’s… (insert your designated scapegoat for evil here)” who should do it!

So we, at the behest of our owners, readily accept a narrative of our own powerlessness so that we don’t have to do anything about anything.

Let the bears pay the bear tax!

The problem is that individualism does not and cannot handle problems for which there can only be a collective solution.

One that involves a certain amount of letting your individual identity (and goals and needs and… ) be subsumed into a collective for collective action.

The very question, “what can one person do?” betrays this truth. Why does saving the word have to depend entirely on your own heroism to be worth your time? What is wrong with being one drop in a wave of change? Isn’t it enough to know that you are part of the solution and not part of the problem?

Of course not. Where’s the glory in that? Where’s the fame? The money? The glamour? The sex? What’s in it for ME?

It’s chillingly close to societal sociopathy and it’s not because people are evil or apathetic or stupid, it’s because consumerism caters to us so much as atomized and isolated individuals that it literally becomes impossible for us to imagine anything outside our own individual needs.

And if you accept that limitation, we, as individuals, are powerless to change things.

But we don’t have to remain mere individuals. We are human and to be human is to be capable of banding together for collective action. Most of civilization would be outright impossible if this were not true, though in modern times, collective action is achieved ideally through taxation.

After all, money is labour.

But if we can’t (or won’t) make our taxes do it then we have to do it ourselves and a lot of us just plain won’t. If it requires giving literally anything up, count us out.

Except maybe money. The great thing about money is that because money is labour, we feel like we’re “doing something” without hardly doing anything at all.

A couple of clicks and our money is off to do the work we won’t and we can go right back to a life of toil and self-indulgence.

What a racket!

More after the break.

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School and fun

Patient readers with long memories will recall that I have tackled this subject before, a long time ago, when the world was young and the birds sang show tunes and I could walk without assistance,

You know. The good ol days.

The subject in question is how our childhoods establish this pattern of a dual life where there is school, which sucks, and home life, which is okay.^[1]

A whole lot better than school, anyway.

And this is the received, approved pattern of daily life that gets ingrained in us on such a fundamental level that we continue to see life that way as adults.

We just replace school with work.

And in most jobs, this is the only acceptable way to see things. Woe betide you if you like your job. You will stick out like the proverbial sore thumb and everyone will at the very least think you’re weird and at worst think you’re a suckup trying to ingratiate yourself with the bosses or some kind of emotionally deficient robot with no life.

Even though, on paper, a job we enjoy is what we all hope to have some day. We go to college and spend four years of our life getting a degree with that exact goal in mind.

But not if it’s the wrong kind of job, evidently.

Whether it’s school or work, the line of demarcation is clear and remains the strongest one in our lives and I think this is what gives us this attitude that every heartbeat of our leisure time must be hoarded with draconic zeal and for absolutely anything that doesn’t seem like “fun” to ask for any of it feels like the utmost in presumption.

Including the things that might just save the goddamned world.

I claim no exception and I don’t even have a job. Admittedly, with me it’s more about mental illness making me a hermit, but still.

Imagine if we could break down this barrier. What if we could take the attitude, as some do, that you’ve got to make the most of every situation and that you can enjoy yourself wherever you are if you just hunt for that spoonful of sugar.

Which makes a startling amount of sense, though changing such a fundamental setting in how we see our lives would not be easy.

Imagine going to work with the attitude, “OK, let’s have fun!”.

Wouldn’t that just be the weirdest?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.