It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when they’re only enforced to protect the wealthy…. Then some sort of collapse, fragmentation, and/or dystopia usually in conjunction with war, purges, and killing in the name of tribalism.
History seems to rewind the cassette and record right over the top with the same old song.
It’s called corruption and yes every institution eventually becomes corrupt.
The trick isn’t to give up, but to constantly renew the institutions by being present and alive and talking openly about what’s wrong, how to make it better, etc.
Not if we can solve the billionaire problem
While I wholeheartedly agree, we need to “solve the concentration of power in the hands of the few problem”. Even if you simply said all the stocks and shares of current billionaires can’t have money lent against them (or however you want to address this without taking half the economy with it), there will just be a new class of psychopathic narcissists to take the place of the current ones. I feel without some kind of set of laws which enforces continuous dilution of power by somehow spreading it across more people and randomising who is allowed to influence what (which can only really be done with computers or AI) these cycles will repeat themselves ad infinitum.