I appreciate you describing the ground-reality. I’m aware of it and have been living in it like most of the people. It’s good to keep this in front of our eyes while we are dreaming up solutions.
Things are not immutable, systems are not immutable. While not perfectly, but things have been changing. Yes, we also do get the old bad things in new forms. You’ve described some of them already. But we can also agree that progress has been made in bonded slave labor, women disenfranchisement, colonialism, even democracy.
This has to do with the “fixed mindset vs growth mindset” concept used in education. While there is no panacea or utopia, there are good and bad ideas, weak and powerful ones as well. I’m delighted to see how its narrative has changed over time as it interacts with our complex systems. We all need to become aware about complex systems and their properties, if we are interested in making positive changes to the ground-reality.
https://www.tes.com/news/carol-dweck-where-growth-mindset-went-wrong
Let’s jump to a 10, 20 or 100 years in the future. A SuperIntelligent AI entity, more intelligent that the collective human population, is ruling us. Shouldn’t this entity understand the humane aspects like empathy and ethics IF we want it to be good and fair to us? Sure, we couldn’t imagine the possibilities “IT” might and there can be so many other ways “greater good” can be done, but at least right now in our limited human brains, we can agree about the importance of those things?? Also, in their absence, if such a super entity is shaped by the current unhealthy “Anti-Work Demand-Supply” culture, then wouldn’t it learn to define good and bad according to those metrics and patterns? In that case, we’ll just be making the current trends of destruction of nature and degradation of humanity much more efficient and effective - optimizing destruction of humanity!
Thus, we need to start taking our idealistic ideas about greater good and ethics, law and order more seriously than ever. And we need to understand the importance of developing empathy - every conversation might require starting from scratch in this process of “developing empathy”. Without such understanding, we can’t co-operate or co-ordinate properly. And on a scale, I think we call it consensus.
(My aforementioned notes about money and Anti-Work are still pending to be posted, revising them a bit every time I look through them.)