What do you think the future of global society looks like?

[Shadow1980]

Jesus H Christ. I show back up for the first time in months and one of the first things I see is a thread where the first reply is some asshole spewing Nazi shit. At least that account got nuked quickly. Maybe I was right to stay away for so long. Honestly, between the lack of concrete sales data (we're down to just Famitsu now) and years of dealing with toxic fans on this board (I've had the distinction of been abused, demeaned, and belittled by Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, and even Star Wars fans), I sometimes wonder why I bothered sticking around for so long in the first place.

Anyway, since I'm here I might as well add my own two cents.

Honestly, it's hard to say. It could go either way, depending on just a few variables like the outcome of specific elections. It's easy to be cynical about the world today. There is a moral rot at the heart of society, but it's not what conservatives think it is. No, the real moral rot is bigotry, economic greed, and the ignorance, laziness, and complacency that enables such evil.

The profit motive poisons everything it touches. Every single thing in our lives, from our health care to our food to our housing to our transportation to our entertainment and even individuals themselves, has been commodified, their worth determined solely by how much profit they can generate for shareholders. Serious systemic problems regarding the environment and public health & safety aren't being dealt with sufficiently, mostly because we continue to prioritize profits above all else. Nothing seems to get done unless it involves someone making money. Also, actually fixing problems is haaaaaaard, and there's little political willpower to do anything about it. We even have legions of pundits who make money hand over first telling people that the relentless pursuit of profit is good, that the problems caused by capitalism aren't actually problems, and that anyone proposing solutions to or even merely acknowledging said problems is a Big Government socialist ("socialism" being just another word stripped of any real meaning, serving as little more than a political slur to be used in propaganda).

Perhaps the most pressing issue we face is climate change, but we struggle to make any progress because oil companies and auto makers stand to profit, and because countless millions of people are complacent or even actively hostile to solutions to our problems. For example, there's no shortage of people who listened to too much Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson or whoever and thinks their God-given right to drive a 3-ton lifted pickup 20 miles over the speed limit is more important than the lives and safety of others, that electric cars and bicycle lanes and walkable cities are an evil plot against them, and that anyone who says otherwise is a godless commie trying to take away their Freedom™©®. Even things as simple as indoor smoking bans in public places or being asked to wear a mask during a major pandemic are treated as part of a slippery slope leading all the way down to the front door of a gulag, because "fuck everybody but me," apparently.

Evil continues to thrive and be normalized outside the economic sphere. This is especially pronounced on the right. It's pretty obvious now that fascism never died. It just went into hiding and is trying to regroup and try again here in the 21st century after nearly everyone who was alive to witness the horrors of fascism has passed on. Even those who aren't true believers in fascism are frequently enablers, repeating bigoted talking points because of their need to have some marginalized group (typically POC, immigrants, or LGBTQ+ people) to cast as a scapegoat and give their followers an enemy to be outraged at for simply existing, with various conspiracy theories being conjured to explain and normalize things that had for decades been considered outrageous. We saw this with the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, which originated in white nationalist and neo-Nazi circles and ended up getting parroted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson with all the overtly antisemitic parts excised (because fortunately that still doesn't sell for most conservative Christians). Racism and bigotry simply get passed down generation after generation, in some form or another, and the cycle of hate continues, enabling the continued existence of various forms of right-wing authoritarianism obsessed with the idea of returning to some imagined "Golden Age" that we'd still have if it wasn't for "those people."

Here in the U.S., we see this where people born well after the end of Jim Crow are still spouting racist crap when they think there's nobody around to object or when they're able to hide behind the safety of the anonymity of the internet. We somehow still have people pissed that the South lost the Civil War almost 160 years after the fact. I've seen people my age and younger waving Confederate flags and heard them say they'd disown their own child if they were in an interracial relationship. You don't have to go far online these days to hear all sorts of outrageously racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, or otherwise hateful language. Our recently-banned guest showed just how comfortable a lot of people are these days with spewing Nazi or Nazi-adjacent bullshit on whatever public platform they decide to create an account for (unfortunately for him, there are still places that rightfully ban that garbage). And it's not just online, either. There are still plenty of well-known talking heads as well as elected officials who have made their careers out of exploiting fears of "The Other" and leaning heavily into authoritarian politics. Conservative outlets ranging from The Daily Wire to Fox News traffic in hate, historical revisionism, science denial, and conspiracy theories, all intended to keep their audiences in a state of perpetual outrage.

Conservatives want to win their "culture war" by any means necessary. Project 2025 is just the latest and perhaps most heavy-handed example of a right-wing platform that explicitly calls for criminalization of things that offend conservative sensibilities. They won't be satisfied until the social status quo is back to where it was back in the 1950s, when women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people had few rights and were treated like third-class citizens at best. They don't care about freedom, at least not the abstract. To them, "freedom" is a privilege reserved for white cishet men. And because of America's shitty electoral rules and a government ill-equipped to deal with hyper-partisan dysfunction, conservatives stand a good chance of turning this country into a de facto theocracy where LGBTQ+ people are forced back into the closet under threat of imprisonment (or worse), women are forced to be little more than baby factories, and anything deemed "woke" is considered unprotected by the First Amendment and therefore subject to being banned outright. Ron DeSantis' Florida is just the tip of the iceberg of this aggressive push into naked authoritarianism, and the MAGA movement is the primary contributor to democratic backsliding in this country, just as the rise of other right-wing authoritarian parties is catalyzing democratic backsliding in the much of the rest of the developed world.

Fortunately, there's still a lot of us that reject that, that believe in love instead of hate, equality instead of rigid hierarchy, freedom instead of entrenched authority. There are people who actually acknowledge longstanding systemic problems and say something should be done about it, not stick our heads in the sand because of some deluded notion that our nation or our "race" is somehow better than all the others. We actually believe that people shouldn't be treated like shit because of things they can't help, like their ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity. I'm not going to pretend the left doesn't have its own issues (NIMBYs, "I refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils" purity tests, and even the occasional Tankie bullshit), but at least they recognize injustice and want something done about it.

The fact that there are people willing to fight for the right thing does give me a glimmer of hope, but progress is always an uphill battle. It took us literal millennia to start throwing off the shackles of absolute monarchy, to abolish slavery, and to otherwise have a world where at least some nations have some modicum of political and social equality and where everyone has at least some say in their government. Progress can be easily undone, and there's always people who want to drag us kicking and screaming back to the past, but we know the cycles of hate and ignorance can be broken, and even if it's only done one person at a time, it's still a good thing. The best thing we can do in the immediate future to prevent any backsliding at the national level is by beating an egomaniacal former reality TV host in November's election. Fingers crossed for a Harris–Walz win.