We are not just lucky, we are insanely lucky, even if high population, environmental degradation and resource scarcity (crowding, inflation, warfare) is causing some discomfort. We are luckier than the next generation too.
You and me and a few other lucky people. I own a drumkit. I play guitars and bass. I have a recording studio at home. I have a comfortable apartment and I make enough to buy things I need.
The inherent problem with democracy is that it assumes if the majority of a population is happy, this is good enough.
In such a situation, a government could actively repress 49% of its population knowing that it could always count on the 51% of the people that take part in its campaign of oppression for a vote.
Felicific calculus. The sum happiness minus the sum sadness. Have a positive figure and your books are balanced, apparently.
I'd go so far as to say nothing has improved in the last 50 years in my country or yours. Sure, a bunch of people got rich and some people got richer. But there is still a large chunk of people that have been standing still all these years as life passes them by. They live, they die, their children do the same, struggling to make ends meet.
Where does it end for those that suffer endlessly like this? Staring through the shop window from the outside, I'm screaming myself hoarse that people are being left out for generations together, but the glass is plexi and no one can hear and they don't look outside the window because they're in a shop and they're buying stuff.
Nothing has improved and nothing will improve if you're on the outside of that glass wall. And I foresee a future where discrimination against the have-nots is expanded to push more people outside the glass wall. It's already happening, the creation of a worker class and their masters, who prey on them in ways you would not normally attribute to the word "human" and "civilisation".
These words ceased to have any meaning any more and they've become a choke leash to tell people to conform to societal norms passed down to us by someone else's forefathers. Definitely not my forefathers, just a certain group of people that have a hand in everything from how many dollar bills to print to how to manipulate commodity prices to create artificial scarcities. We could call this group "Illuminati" for want of a better word.
I guess the point I'm driving at is, "Who are we?" I'm no longer satisfied with seeing those Africa ads and donating money and feeling satisfied. I just can't reconcile myself to an existence where I turn a blind eye to large scale repression of people.
I suppose I should clarify that my family lost everything when Communists came to power in my state of Kerala through democratic elections. The idea was to be a redistribution of wealth among the people, but it was all a ruse for those in power to steal and murder and accumulate wealth. I guess a similar things happen in the US to hard working people, except it's more sophisticated -- complex financial instruments designed to make you part with your money and lose your house. And million dollar payouts to keep the powers that be happy as they announce billions of dollars in aid to assist the big fish while driving the poor to desperation.
I apologise if this all seems so disjointed. It's a vast subject and I just get so agitated all the time.