Responsibility and culpability. Who a society holds accountable, who a society holds at fault, and how a society treats those it sees as fault. For most of human society, this has always been part of the main struggle. History gives us example after example of a time where a society made a scapegoat of someone, and people stood idly by as a miscarriage of justice occurred. This is for several reasons. Deep seated bigotry such as racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia with no basis that gets spread through fear manufactured at the very top of society. We see it in society right now with the ongoing persecution of transgender and LGBTQ+ individuals in America. We see many people fighting this, but we also see many bystanders. Many people who believe passively bigoted thoughts or buy into the fear mongering narratives that are pushed by many right-wing politicians, and media outlets that spread misinformation that are bought and paid for by billionaires with pockets lined by the oil industry.
The deep-seated issues within society create this issue of people becoming bystanders to injustice for the same reason that it creates these issues of injustice in the first place. Fear and control. When people are scared, they act out, or they cower. And when there is an ever present media that is constantly fear mongering then it makes people act out against whatever group the media is telling them to be scared of, or they do nothing to stop those who act out since they either agree (either actively or passively) with the people acting out, or at least they don’t disagree or are completely apathetic especially if they aren’t part of that community or group. It would be an easy thing to say that all we need to do as a society to fix these issues would be to fight injustice wherever it is, and that that’s the solution to how we create a more caring society. But that seems too easy of an answer. To simply say we need to fight injustice is too broad. What we need to do is to understand that our society inherently promotes greed as a necessary value in order to get ahead. That is what needs to be remedied. The fact that our society does not reward empathy, sympathy, charity, and general social concern. This combined with the fact that we are living in an age where people are more isolated from each other than ever, not a reference to COVID but the pandemic certainly didn’t help, is it any wonder that people still do not empathize with others. I will not make a statement and act as if people in some other time period had more empathy, those times in the past had similar and just as numerous issues as we have now, it just took a different form. We are living in what is seemingly an age of indifference. An age of indifference that is fueled by how our society fails to reward charity, requires greed of people, and is so rigidly hierarchical that over the past 200 hundred years of living in our profit incentive-based society, the gap between those who work for a living and those who own things for a living has only become greater and greater. We have attempted to remedy this hierarchical state of being with democracy, an inherently egalitarian political system, but especially in recent decades in America, we have chosen to sacrifice democracy time and time again in favor of our economic system. Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this is the Citizens United ruling in the early 2010s which allowed corporations to donate money as if they were independent citizens, as opposed to massive, most likely tax-avoidant companies. And many people blame the turmoil we’ve seen over the past decade on particular people. The right blames Obama. The left blames Trump. But in my view, most of the politicians we’ve had for the past few decades in America, with either their total callous disregard for the working class, or outright hatred of the working class, have divided and conquered the consciousness of America’s citizens into misinformed Americans. Not just on the right, but those in the center left Democratic party are in many ways equally misinformed about the state of society, and what the problems of society are, and what their solutions should be. While the Democrats did not storm the Capitol, over the past 3 decades the Democrats have shifted social and economic positions to be increasingly more centrist while the Republican party has moved further and further right. This continuous movement towards centrism for the Democratic party has allowed for worsening conditions for basically all Americans as Republicans continue to choose an agenda that actively harms people.
The solution to creating a caring society is to have a society that is based on community, not on individualistic greed. The solution to creating a caring society is to understand that the callous disregard of our fellow man for reasons that we feel we need to be ahead of everyone else is inhuman and unamerican. The solution to creating a caring society is to understand that as people we exist as those in the working class, and we should not divide ourselves among race, gender, sexuality, or any other label that society gives us in order to divide us. While these things are still important to remember, we must understand that we are a community, a local community, a national community, and a global community. And this is how we create a more caring society.
