I suppose there was Project 2025, and there was that book about the inevitability of Russian hegemony (or empire or something) that Putin liked. Those got attention with influential people. Not sure what to conclude from that.

People support policies that make housing much less affordable (e.g. rent controls) and oppose policies that would make housing more affordable (e.g. zoning reforms). Saying that it's evil politicians that cause this crisis is dishonest - it's what people want.

I could talk about this for hours, and was last night actually.

What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.

Seems subjective. When is the smartness, big smart enough to allow someone to enter the hallowed ranks of "actually a real human allowed to speak for the masses?"

There does seem to be a clear delineation between the people you hear about (the vanguard in our example), and the people you don't hear about (the masses): willingness to create confrontation. Most people want to just go with the flow, live in peace. In a dichotomy I've been calling "choose peace or violence," they choose peace. They choose to see bad things in the world or their life and focus on managing their happiness around it.

I think that this is the default human mode of existence, and that this mode lacks defenses against people willing to violate the default peace. Imagine a bagel line, and someone cutting that line, and when tapped on the shoulder, the cutter breaking into a huge tantrum, and people in line backing down with a "Jesus! It's not worth it, fine." Thus some people learn that they can be much more selfish in life if they're willing to create confrontation and disturb the peace.

When I talk to people about agitation, civil disobedience, or even just unionizing, the most common thing I hear is anxiety. What if the situation gets worse, what if there's reprisals, what if I lose this little bit of comfort that I've managed to be happy with? That slice could get smaller and smaller but people aren't willing to take the step to say "enough is enough" because I think it fundamentally goes against human nature, we have to sacrifice our own happiness on some level to put our foot down and demand or make change. At minimum we have to acknowledge the discomfort or injustice, which is a diversion from our constructed internal peace.

Personally I think people should be allowed to live in peace. Maybe the liberal democrats and vanguardist communists are right, maybe most people shouldn't need to trouble themselves with the greater direction of their society. However I think the stability this promises is false; in fact I think all stability is false. I think this constructed peace that people are afraid to disrupt clearly can be torn apart at any moment, not just by people willing to create conflict, but by a literal earthquake, or fire, or plague. Therefore I think there's a couple societies in history that got it right: ones who distributed the responsibility of society across all individuals in the society; namely the brief period of syndicalized Spain, and the several hundred thousand years of certain tribes of native Americans on the eastern portion of the continent. There may be other societies in history, these are just the cases I've been able to read about so far.

It seems to me that it's possible and necessary for all people to be ready to wake out of their constructed peace long enough to make adjustments together to maintain it. I don't think this is the same thing as them being "led out of it," I think this is each individual being on some level alert to the need to spontaneously say "no, here we wait in line for our bagels. No, screaming about it won't help you, get to the back of the line. Look around: everyone is laughing at how silly you look."