2021: A Fresh Start!

Greetings everyone, and Happy New Year!

Welcome to my blog, also. The other welcome post is, I'll admit, a bit outdated now.

Anyway, this year I really want to hit the ground running with various different things, such as my YouTube videos, fleshing out this blog page, and getting my feet wet with lots of other stuff.

For most people, 2020 wasn't a good year. However, I feel it exposed the deepest ills of our current socioeconomic paradigm, and also brought out the true will and power of communities to come together in this time of need.

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, despite it being the front and centre issue on people's minds right now, people have become more aware of other issues. The initial lockdowns showed just how much pollution the world was emitting, and gave us a glimpse at what a cleaner, greener world might look like. Although unfortunate, people's personal and economic losses have brought their attention to the immense, ideologically founded inequality that is currently present.

It is clear that, as we emerge from this crisis and people are vaccinated, we must not return to the old normal. What does this mean?

For my avid viewers, you may already be aware of this. However, for the newly acquainted, I will give a summary:

Where do you think most of the world's problems come from? If you answered 'people', or 'human nature' or something along those lines, you'd be dead-wrong. If you answered 'politicians' or 'the government', you're kind of getting somewhere, but your focus is far too narrow; same thing applies if 'the CEOs of Apple and Amazon' were your answer.

The problem with this line of thinking is that the onus of the world's problems is placed on an individual or a singular entity, rather than the systems and structures, the current paradigm of which we live within.

So why do people do bad things that negatively affect everyone else? Why do bad things even happen at all?

Systemic thinking holds the answer to this question, but in a slightly different way to what you might imagine. You see, when someone performs an action or makes a decision, they first have to possess the idea of doing such, in their mind. But, ideas don't come from ourselves, from within as Idealists would believe, but rather from our environment, our material conditions. The worldview that states the material world is the prime influence of ideas, motivations, and thus actions, is aptly called Materialism, and is perhaps most prolific in Marxian theory.

But then, what shapes our material conditions?

At least in our current social context, our material conditions and our environment, are, directly or indirectly, shaped by our systems, structures and ways of life. This can include many things, such as our economic model, the way we organise our society and indeed our civilisation, things like culture, education and so forth.

Our current material conditions are quite dire, we face the imminent threat of ecological collapse, to call inequality rampant would be a gross understatement, and we have, as a society seem to have lost touch with each other, the atomisation we currently face has eroded the community as an entity, made people untrustworthy of each other, and sometimes even hostile. And on top of that, the institutions we are all too familiar with never hesitate to tarnish our civil liberties.

In order to rectify these ills, radical systemic change is needed, so that we as a human race can vastly improve our material conditions, and those of the rock we stand on.

This year, and throughout these next 10 years, I want to pursue this as a goal, as ambitious as it may be. The more people who join me along the way, the better!

For newcomers, I will post  a link to my YouTube channel at the bottom of this page. There, you will find much more content, the culmination of what I've been talking about for the past couple of years. 

If you got this far, thank you for reading, and i wish you and I all the best for 2021!

Channel link:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5dC9WFHqsmKD5SqVBo7kWQ