What issue in society do you think is near impossible to fix?
What issue in society do you think is near impossible to fix?
Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it's so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn't think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn't and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we've been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it's not a problem.
I think there are plenty of things that can't be solved, but nothing that can't be improved.
Homelessness, there are just some people who don't fit into modern life - maybe they can't be housed, but conditions could be improved.
Poverty, there is no complete solution that won't be worse than the problem (yet) but things could be so much better than they are with the means we do have.
Pollution, there is probably no way we can live with our current technology without causing pollution but again - we could make substantial improvements with the tech we do have now.
Populism
This is as old as the democracy itself, and we still don't know how to fix it. People are so easily driven by their emotions and stubborn about their political opinions that you only have to exploit cynically their low instincts to take the power, especially in a crisis context. And once populists are in the power, they hardly give it back.
Human nature. Itcwas necessary to beat out the other species, but it didn't evolve with society. Many of the things other people have mentioned are really just unevolved human nature. Greed, selfishness, racism, crime.
Religion amd the fighting it causes in it's name
Antivaxxers and weaponized disinformation that leads to that as well as other problems. I'm not talking about the vaccine hesitant who come around with more education by their doctor, or even the dumbass delayed vaccine schedules they want to do for no sensible reason, all it does is make your kid cry more times than they'd have to, I'm talking about the ones who completely believe in Andrew Wakefield's shit study with the twelve kids at his son's birthday party which for some reason they rely upon as the gospel. The ones who are now turning down vitamin K in their newborn so they risk bleeding into their brain, and believe measles isn't a big deal, just another childhood illness. They're absolutely insane and fed a diet of this continually by social media dumpster fires like Facebook. As far as I am concerned, Mark Zuckerberg should be tried for war crimes and genocide at the Hague. Here is a comment I saw the other night from one of the plague enthusiasts, which also makes it very clear they don't care if non-white children die.
I worked in an ER ten years ago, and while the insanity that has onset with these people since the advent of COVID did not yet exist, there were still some who bought into this nonsense, and they'd come screaming in with their kid who was going downhill fast with whooping cough or whatever, and they are always the most obnoxious pushy people about getting their kid seen RFN. And the thing is you have to because an unvaccinated child has no immune resources to rely upon in their bodies, which one nurse describes as "going to the well", ie a normal vaccinated person's body fights back against infection by doubling their heart or breathing rate as their antibodies kick in. A child with no immunity immediately begins to go under and has no such help from their bodies. And the parents are always massive idiots and ask stupid shit about why you aren't treating them with intravenous vitamin C or doing a CT scan (which there is no reason for) or whatever else they pull out of their primitive forebrains full of garbage. A child with Hib epiglottitis is not going to be able to be intubated and is going to need a tracheostomy, and these parents simply don't or won't understand it.
Homelessness.
Looking beyond the argument that some people prefer the freedom to following any of the rules required by most of the organizations that might provide help.
It’s not that hard to fix, but there’s little will to tackle it properly. Homelessness is a local problem, and the NIMBY solution just exports it to another locality. If a locality solves it for their local population, they’ll then get overwhelmed by the NIMBY localities “solving” it with bus tickets. The only real solution has to come at a federal level, and there lies the lack of will. Federal government sees a local problem and refuses to help since there are local governments.
Assholes.
OP is apparently unaware that society would not exist if it weren't for alcohol.
Probably that many people are like exclusively emotion driven. I don't think we should all be like purely logical Vulcans. Emotions are very fast and can be a good survival tool. Like if you're waiting for the train and a bear wanders onto the platform, you don't need to wait to logically evaluate if it's a threat. Just run.
But people rely on emotions for everything. We all do this. So you have like someone telling you something factual and uncomfortable, and you just reject it.
"Eating meat is bad for the environment and is cruel to animals. We should all eat a lot less meat" makes a lot of people's emotions flare up. The facts don't matter. They feel like they're being insulted, that the other person is a blowhard, blah blah blah.
The oatmeal did a comic about this, actually: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
I think this is why we can't have nice things.
japanese preferring natto over peanut butter
I don't really agree anything is impossible to fix. Maybe I'm optimistic but I think with enough time things can get better. As far as I know alcohol is much less common among younger people and there are more people avoiding it entirely now. Or maybe by impossible you meant really difficult.
In the US and Canada?
Car dependency / Car centrism.
Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.
But uh, in general, we've got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.
The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.
Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.
Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don't matter if you don't own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.
Guns in America. The need to act inspires fear on part of enthusiasts to buy more guns, ammo, support politicians that bolster stonewalls to any legislation that could make the country safer from irresponsible gun owners. The lack of meaningful action while this is happening shows how screwed the nation is as a gun cult continues to grow and grow.
The idea that people in charge should be better, so their actions can't be questioned; rather than that they should be better, so their actions should be scrutinized. It's so backwards and it enables nearly all of the worst abuses of power. It might be harder to fix people being attracted to power or being straight up malicious, but if we could solve the authority problem, then those would have a safeguard in a lot of scenarios. It's so close to being solvable, too; people grow up experiencing misuses of authority that hurt them, they should understand the problem. But somehow it still seems so prevalent, that authority is treated as being above questioning or consequences. I hate it. But it is possible to change.
alcohol is especially hard to ban because it's just sugar and yeast, and you can even use natural yeast if it gets banned, and you can use fruit if sugar gets banned. While with drugs some tyrannical empire might be able to ban every single lab-related equipment and chemical (and even then, you would be surprised what people can make by themselves without anything else other then natural resources, I mean that's how we got here as a species), alcohol is such a simple recipe that it's just plain impossible to regulate effectively, and the current way of having it cheap enough that people don't brew their own but expensive enough that the 99% of the population doesn't turn into alcoholics is good enough
Nearly every societal problem has a solution, but you need a medical / buddhist / marxist / approach (probably a lot of other disciplines / lenses use this approach too, those are just some ones that more or less follow this).
- Correctly identify the actual problem.
- Find the root cause(s) of the problem.
- Name / describe the state without that problem.
- Outline the cure / steps to carry it out and reach that goal.
The only problems that aren't solvable, are things that would break the laws of physics.
As for drugs / alcohol use, lemmygrad and hexbear have a lot of good threads on drug / alcohol use, and how to view it, and handle it collectively. The USA is probably the worst example of a country to look at for alleviating the societal ills brought about by alcohol and drug mis-use, so its good to look at how socialist countries have tackled it throughout history. If you can't find a thread I'd recommend asking over there, because you'll get a lot of good answers.
It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.
“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.
Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.
But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).
This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.
Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.
When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.
And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.
For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.
That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.
Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.
Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.
And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.
But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.
We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.
This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.
This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.
We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.
But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.
These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.
Greed.
America is a great example of this.
anything harder than wearing masks
I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.
I understand the point in OPs post, but I disagree with it based upon evidence we have available to us. I think first and foremost it is important to mention (I dont have the studies linked but it shouldnt be hard to find) that teenage drug use overall is trending downward, with that including underage alcohol use/abuse. If younger generations use it less, the problems caused by alcoholism will be less prevalent as time goes on. Secondly, weve been putting up with drunk drivers for a while but (as our younger generations have been told for about 20 years now) the consequences for drunk or impaired operation of a motor vehicle have become more and more severe. I do believe alcoholism is something that can and will be phased out given enough time. The only thing that is still a mystery is what vice is going to replace it, and whether it is going to be better or worse.
None. Society is constructed by us, including all of its "issues". We built it all.
“Random” events of “evil”. Basically I think we’ll never reach something like 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 stealing for little greed and so on. Or even 0 addiction (edit: i'm not including addiction to the previous list of crimes, i wanted to add it as another class of issues for we will never reach a true 0)
We are very very far from the ideal situation tho, there is a looot of margin of improvement
Like your alcohol thing in the post: ban only makes it worse and still now you (as US, not you OP) have a very weird relationship with alcohol with the thing that minors cannot touch it and people have to drink from a paper bag lol. Let’s say that you are not really trying hard to improve the situation. We’ll never reach 0 alcoholists but society is not in a good shape and alcohol is cheap so ye
I have wondered this about certain harmful cultural values. Culture seems to be the "great enabler" when it comes to things we would wish would change about people (think of Japan's habit of overworking people or Greece's penchant of old inequality). And the fuel of the flame there is going to take a gamechanger to douse.
You know that thing, when you’re walking through an isle in a store and each person tries to step aside and so ensues some of the most awkward moments? That.
The limited scope of human attention and the ineptitude it creates in governance is impossible for a mortal being to fix in our finite existence. We will eventually formulate an AGI that can address this primal flaw, but defining who or what is fixing the issue becomes an unsolvable philosophical paradox in the idealized fantasy world of philosophical definition.