this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Pacifism, like democracy and capitalism, are functional only if everyone participate in them in good faith. There was never in human history a group of people where everyone participated in something in good faith.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately. It seems a pretty intractable problem that we're surrounded by so many bad-faith actors. How do you ever, ever really progress like that.
you act in spite of the bad faith actors and hope you get enough people to follow your momentum
Progress isn't driven by peace and cooperation. Most of human inventions, improvements, everything you may call "progress of civilization" boils down to "how can we fuck over other people for our benefit". No matter what kinda change you may try to call "positive progress" it was really someone profiting by fucking over others.
Get rid of capitalism
Changing the socioeconomic system so that bad actors are not incentivized would go a long way. Remove the profit motive, and these greedy psychopaths are reduced to mere assholes, who can safely be ignored.
Progress happens in spite of them, aye. Feudalism led to capitalism, while it is flawed, I'd say this is an upgrade. Capitalism originally embraced slavery, and while some aspects still exist today, mostly all capitalist governments have put massive blocks on it. Monarchism led to constitutional monarchism, the beginnings of the rule of law. Through this rule of law, democracy could be organized.
What the next steps are are entirely up to your opinion, yet I feel things will on average improve. There will be setbacks, yet onward we go.