The problem of lack of political analysis.
There is a ghost that roams the world. And the problem is that nobody today has the faintest idea what the fuck is. We all know, after all, that something is going wrong, both in the world of economics and in society and in the world of politics, but nobody knows what to say, and especially everyone stops at a vague feeling that things are going the wrong way.
The problem with vague sensations is that a vague sensation of this kind pushes people to change, but the feeling itself is not enough to push the masses in a precise direction. The result is that the masses are distributed randomly in all directions, from the Nazis to the Communists, from the ecologists to the most negationist Alt-Right, and so the average value of their effort is zero.
The problem did not arise in the past because ideologies existed: ideologies provided, about a global and general analysis, and therefore they could direct in the same direction all those who felt that "things were not going the right way".
Today's problem, that is, we are not going beyond the vague feeling that things are not going the right way. But we are not able to establish a priority order of things to do. Is it more important to stop fires in the Amazon forest, or turn off all endothermic cars? A scientist would tell you that yes, we could also do without the Amazon rainforest if we shut down all cars forever, whether they are petrol or Diesel. But in the absence of a serious analysis, one would say that the problem is to save the Amazon. In this sense, we all know that our lifestyle is not sustainable, but we lack an analysis that tells us how to proceed. And a little girl who uses a boat to go to New York to make a speech that the world will see on Youtube will certainly not be the solution: it's just an example of how a certain feeling can be channeled in the most irrational and inconclusive direction if you don't do in-depth analysis.
I do not have the means and the skills to do these analyzes, but I can imagine the most urgent questions to be answered.
The first concerns the founding values of society. If we ask about what a society should be based on we get values of all kinds, from freedom to justice to brotherhood. All this is very beautiful because they are very beautiful values, but liking, chocolate and touching the tits are beautiful things; however we do not base the company.
So, the fact that we want freedom, justice and brotherhood, as well as we want sympathy, chocolate and touch the tits, does not necessarily imply that all these things are values on which to found a society: if you know a country that has sympathy, chocolate and touch the tits on the Constitution, tell me. I will be very grateful to you.
And the problem of modern societies is precisely this: in the definition of the founding values, the things that are desired as results have been put. But you can't say that pancake is the founding value of agriculture; at most you can say that you expect the pancake from agriculture. The wrong idea of modern societies is to use as foundation what one wanted to get: then in the Italian constitution it is written that the country is founded on work. Because everyone wants a good job, but the fact that everyone wants a good job is not enough reason to put it into the constitution, otherwise in Germany the constitution would mention beer, bratwurst and big black cars.
No one has ever asked what the "founding" values of a society should be: everyone wondered what the results of a certain organization should be, and then adopted them as founding values. We see the result in the West: nations based on freedom have been built to discover that a nation founded on freedom is just another shopping center.
Some nations have persevered with equality as a fundamental value, only to discover that a nation based on equality is just another museum of rights, to be visited when you are on a school trip and it is raining heavily.
As if that were not enough, when the desires were used as results, and the constitutions were written, abstract values like freedom and equality were used: but if it was intended to use an abstract value because one wanted to obtain it in practice, then it would have been better to define, in the constitution, what freedom is in practice.
The lack of analysis on fundamental values is the first catastrophe. We need, and urgently, a serious analysis on what fundamental values can be, and which of these should be: the practical result should be pursued, if anything, within the general values. To adopt freedom, to touch the tits, fraternity, sympathy, equality and nutella as fundamental values only because they are things that we like to have was not a good idea.
The other point that nobody is analyzing is, once and for all, what the "people" are, what the "nation" is and what a "government" is. When I read the analyzes made by political scientists it gets cold: it comes from commenting "but here it rains axioms".
What has been done so far has been to define nations as elements of some whole, or as elements themselves. The result is that everyone has racked his brains by pulling out quantifiers and qualifiers of all kinds, from the geographical extension to the strength of the army. When we tried to define "the people" we tried to define it as a whole, and therefore to find something that unites all the individuals of a people, some class of equivalence that could create "the people" as a class of individuals united by the same property. In this catastrophic cauldron the lineage, tradition, history, language, and other details that are showing themselves to be completely irrelevant, and that were also in the past, are over.
The problem is that the definition of "people" is, by using a first-order logical universe, completely impossible, if not paradoxical. But a second-order definition is likely to become incomprehensible to most: small stuff, if we consider that the most do not know the history, the tradition or even the language of their "people", without mentioning that they know their ancestors for not more than 3 generations. And even when they dig to find out about their family tree they discover that yes, you can pass on the personal details of your ancestors, but you're not handing down any legacy, no message, no content. What did your great-great-grandfather teach you? What did he think? What did he believe in? What did you learn during your life? Boh. Maybe you know what his name is, but you haven't passed on anything he learned. In practice, it is lived for nothing: in these conditions, "history" and "tradition" are empty words.
The definition of government is, then, a logical catastrophe. All definitions are functional ("what should be occupied") or practical ("what benefits should we derive from them"), up to procedural issues ("how should it work") but the point is that these functions apply equally to a board of directors, an empire, a mental hospital and a feline colony. In all cases, to define some management you must answer these questions, but the assignment of these qualities to a specific entity is not as immediate as it seems: if I read the definitions of the best current political scientists, the ideal solution seems to be that of use the cat girl of a feline colony as a government.
Another catastrophic problem is that we are using concepts such as "people", "state", "government", without ever having clearly defined what the hell they are and automatically attributing them to the nation, and attributing one to each nation. (because a nation cannot have so many governments, for example one for women and one for men , it is not clear).
The result is that today these concepts are under stress due to globalization, but if tomorrow the Zuckerberg of the situation proposes to you to transform Italy into a giant feline colony, you would not know how to explain why "people", "nation" and "government" should be preferable to being a gigantic herd of self-centered, hairy slack pander fed to free-hold by huge loving mothers.
The last question is: on what planet we want to live. We all feel that we are administering the planet the wrong way, but without a true rational analysis of the problem, we will end up applauding a young girl who goes on a boat to New York, in order to deliver a speech that the rest of the world will see on Youtube.
In this sense we know that something goes wrong: if we lack an analysis, we are going to crash into anything that looks good to us. For example, we are fighting for African countries to save biodiversity by saving lions, rhinos and forests from anthropization. African countries, however, could ask Europeans why the black forest, which was once immense, was lost, why all the big cat species living in Europe have become extinct, and why they have become populated for whole the continent. Why us yes and they don't? Moreover, the Brazilian president could point out to Westerners that the country that cuts the most trees in the world is the USA, not Brazil. Why can Americans cut trees at devastating rates and should Brazilians protect every tree?
We will never answer these questions if we do not start with serious analyzes: where do we want to live? Does it really make sense to live in cold countries, at enormous energy costs, when there are vast hot and semi-desert areas, where we would have no heating problem? What the fuck are millions of people doing in Norway when there are many uninhabited places today where they could live without ever turning on a radiator in their lives? Do we really have to waste energy living in mountainous places, when living in flat places would save energy?
And mind you, technology doesn't solve the problem. Technology solves technological problems, but makes no choices: the customer does it. I'll give you an example:
I went to a congress a short time ago, where they explained how the IoT can save 30% of air conditioning in a skyscraper.
Now, watch the idiocy: a skyscraper is nothing but a large greenhouse. A building with transparent walls whose physics consists of absorbing heat and holding it by the greenhouse effect. Who builds a greenhouse, that is a skyscraper, is aware of building a greenhouse and knows that it will have the physics of the greenhouse: when the sun comes, the temperature grows.
After designing a greenhouse, these architects' hairdressers discover that having built a greenhouse, the greenhouse behaves like a greenhouse, that is, it requires air conditioning to remain livable. At that point, technologists arrive and fix the problem using IoT, making smart greenhouses, we can reduce the need for air conditioners, to consume only twice as much as a stone building, and only four times as much the same living space built underground.
In reality, someone would need to say: "but really millions of people have to work in a greenhouse, with a winter dress code even in summer, instead of building buildings that are not greenhouses and dress light in summer?"
Same thing with cars: since endothermic cars pollute, we are reducing pollution by using electric ones, but nobody has ever tried to calculate how many cars really serve mankind.
We are rushing to "save the planet" without ever having decided who should do it, how it should be done, how much should be done and where it should be done. The result is that if the automotive industry tells you that the number of cars has to double, but so much are electric, none of us can calculate whether this is good or not.
Therefore, something needs to be done to analyze and provide answers to these questions. They must be rational answers, and the analysis must be lucid and systematic, otherwise we risk pursuing the admirable goal of becoming a giant feline colony powered by solar energy, based on the values of chocolate, touching tits and sympathy.
A construction that would respect the wishes of almost all political thinkers from all walks of life, ecologists, followers of Any Rand and almost all philosophers.
Which makes you realize how many dickheads we've believed so far. Only now the knots come to a head, and all the pseudo-answers we have in mind are not working, because nobody has ever analyzed the problems before.
And so it would be time for someone to endeavor to respond rationally, at least to basic questions.