Culture

The Solution To Society's Problems Is Not Political

We’re living in a historic moment of time where more people than ever before are feeling the shaking of the foundations of our democratic society.

By Robyn Riley5 min read
The Solution To Society's Problems Is Not Political

The idealism many have staked their entire worldview on is for the first time showing signs of decay among the common person. Whether your team is left or right, red or blue, it’s clear to see that politics isn’t the answer to society’s current problems.

The Government Isn’t Going To Save Us

Many of the people who voted for Biden are in for a rude awakening in the coming four years. Gaslit by the mainstream media, many believed that voting blue no matter who was a much better situation than allowing Trump to have a second term. As Biden prepares for possible war in the Middle East and is not moving forward with gusto on the issues so many progressives hoped he would champion, they’re finally getting the message that they’ve been duped yet again.

Politicians on both sides pander to our sensibilities, knowing exactly the right hot button topics to hammer on. 

The right is feeling demoralized by what they believe to be a stolen election (or at least, a heavily influenced one); the left is finally having the veil lifted from their eyes that Democrats are not the “good guys.” We’re all left adrift once more without actual representation and never more divided from our fellow citizens. 

The politicians on both the left and the right pander to our sensibilities, knowing exactly the right hot button topics to hammer on. They speak to our deepest fears and sincerest hopes. We have our emotions moved in support of them, and for a moment we feel relieved that maybe someone at the top really does care and think like we do. But without fail, once elected, it all goes out the window, and the fever of emotion created by campaigns fizzle out into the ether and is replaced by our regular programming and Netflix. 

This is the first reason why we should come to terms with the fact that we can no longer entertain the pipe dream that the government, regardless of who is the president, is going to save us.

Powerful Lobby Groups Control Politics and the Economy

It’s worth mentioning as well that both the major parties are controlled by the same shadow government and powerful people behind the scenes. Powerful lobby groups from some of the richest corporations, individuals, and even countries control not only the narrative we see in the news but geopolitics, the stock market, international trade, and, yes, even the politicians we elect. 

They do this by funding their million-dollar campaigns in exchange for favors in the future. There’s no way individual citizens can compete with that. More than our elected officials represent us, they represent the powerful investors and oligarchs who hoard power and strip away more of our freedoms every four years. 

The Media Manipulates Public Feeling for Their Own Interests

The media also plays a role in the demoralization because many of us can see straight through the pantomime that is modern journalism, but unless we have large platforms of our own are mostly powerless to combat false narratives in a meaningful way. The media works to prop up phony politicians, whose only objective is to maintain and perpetuate the status quo. 

The public can be pushed into a total frenzy or gently soothed into calm indifference by the media.

The public can be pushed into a total frenzy, as we saw during the BLM riots, or gently soothed into calm indifference, as we saw with the Jeffrey Epstein story. These effects are easily produced by either running a dramatized story across every major mainstream news platform for days on end or conveniently ignoring it altogether and painting any online news coverage as “conspiracy.” We don’t have a free press, and the press doesn’t work in the interests of the public or democracy. Without a free press and only a glorified propaganda machine, we can’t for an instant expect our democracy to function as intended.

The Government Can’t Fix a Loss of Meaning

We must dispel this idea that government exists to serve us, that its purpose is to bring to fruition the will of the people. This is the equivalent of a fairy tale for grown adults who are too emotionally immature to face the reality that the government doesn’t care about them and it never will. The government’s purpose is to expand its reach, control, and power, end of story. If we’re to think about the government in this regard, we see that it’s not failing us because of incompetence or bureaucracy. It’s failing us because the people at the top care only about their own benefit and no one else’s.

On the ground in some of America’s big cities like LA and Chicago, we see abject poverty and suffering. Marriage and the creation of new families are on the decline, violent crime is on the rise, there has been an explosion of interest in online prostitution via OnlyFans, and thanks to apps like Grindr and Tinder there have never been higher rates of sexually transmitted disease

People are in debt, addicted to drugs, living materialistic lives. They have lost the wisdom required to direct their own lives in a positive and meaningful way. We no longer have the same robust neighborhoods, communities, and social trust that once made living in America so desirable. 

Humans Were Made To Be Producers, Not Consumers


We can’t vote our way out of these problems, no matter how many people would like to drop their existential suffering at the door of big government and have someone else tackle the challenge of survival for them. The problem is these cultural regressions are of a spiritual nature. They can’t be fixed by electing the right politician, and even if we did elect the “right” politician, we can’t reasonably expect reversing social and cultural decay to be of high priority to them. These things are happening because we have allowed ourselves to become mere consumers instead of being producers.

We can’t vote our way out of these problems because these cultural regressions are of a spiritual nature.

The modern money-driven world we exist in is designed especially to illicit our desire to spend, accumulate, and consume. The texture of life has been altered to make us mere numbers on someone’s balance sheet. Of course, commerce and trade will always be an aspect of life, but for many it has become, not just the focus of life, but the purpose of life. 

The human spirit is dulled in this modern environment because human nature in essence is productive. We were made to be tradesmen, gardeners, parents, artists, and good samaritans. When the creative essence of life is removed and in its place we put the hollow satisfaction of materialism, it’s to be expected that we end up with a kind of hopelessness and malaise in the public.

We Need To Get Back to Subsidiarity

When the Founding Fathers of the United States signed the Constitution in 1787 there were roughly 4 million people living in the entire country. That’s half the population of New Jersey today. Governance at the federal level will never be able to represent or support a population over 300 million and growing. Politicians will have you believe that every vote counts and that you the little guy has a real say in the future of your country by casting a vote for your president. The reality is that this choice is almost always the lesser of two evils and regardless of who is elected they very seldom have the interests of regular citizens as their goals. 

Whoever is closest to the problem is usually the best one to fix it. 

Subsidiarity is a principle of organizing people and communities which posits that governments that are as local and small as possible are far more effective at producing harmonious and functioning societies than any centralized authority ever can be. We have lost touch with the role we all play in creating habitable townships by being active participants in community, organizing and focusing on municipal representation over the spectacle of federal elections

We Need To Recenter Our Lives on Purpose

We’ve never been more divided, and that's exactly what those in power want. We must stop playing into the hands of oligarchs who seek to control us by pitting us against one another and continuing to dangle the carrot of hope that the answer to our problems is political. It isn’t, and while that may be a slightly horrifying realization to come too, acceptance is the first step to finding the remedy. 

In order to bridge the ideological gaps that have been created in the public, we need to depoliticize everyday life. The personal doesn’t have to be political, and anyone who can’t separate the two is not likely to be a person seeing reality as it truly is. 

Something that we in North America have forgotten and lost touch with is that the center of our lives and our culture should be striving towards something higher than oneself and the material world. We need a constant reminder of our mortality and how ethics, wisdom, love, beauty, and a shared belief among our fellow man are virtues that should be protected and that benefit us all. 

Closing Thoughts

We’re possibly entering a time where things will continue to disintegrate, and there will be no turning our culture around as too many people have been hypnotized by the glittery lights and the celebrity endorsement of pop-politics. Those of us who can see reality as it is can no longer delude ourselves into believing that we can vote our way out of problems that have arisen from mass worship of political or economic ideologies.