Getting rid of apathy is the most important step. Too many people say “I’m not interested in politics”.

Politics is everything, it shouldn’t be considered as a legitimate choice to stay away from it.

I can respect that y’all kind of hate my kind here and I’m going to use this comment to share only the most unobjectionable works that even the most anticommunist liberal should find completely and utterly appealing

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a book about how we have all of the tools at our disposal right now to automate at least 50% of the work that we have to do to stay alive, and thus get rid of that work as a tool of coercion and exertion of power.

How Capitalism Ends is about how the power got to the concentrations it has today, where we can expect it to go by extrapolating that tendency, why there was no other way it could have gone, and what we can do now to start building the next thing.

These are two very good and easy starts to starting to think about this problem. I’m happy to field questions about the works or anything else related.

According to Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, the answer is revolutionary violence.

It’s a fascinating read. I very much recommend the chapter covering the Black Plague. Seems rather relevant nowadays.

Employers lost no time pressuring the authorities to curb the rising cost of labor. Less than a year after the arrival of the Black Death in England, in June 1349, the crown passed the Ordinance of Laborers:

Since a great part of the population, and especially workers and employees (“servants”), has now died in this pestilence many people, observing the needs of masters and the shortage of employees, are refusing to work unless they are paid an excessive salary. . . . We have ordained that every man or woman in our realm of England, whether free or unfree, who is physically fit and below the age of sixty, not living by trade and exercising a particular craft, and not having private means of land of their own upon which they need to work, and not working for someone else, shall, if offered employment consonant with their status, be obliged to accept the employment offered, and they should be paid only the fees, liveries, payments or salaries which were usually paid in the part of the country where they are working in the twentieth year of our reign [1346] or in some other appropriate year five or six years ago. . . . No one should pay or promise wages, liveries, payments or salaries greater than those defined above under pain of paying twice whatever he paid or promised to anyone who feels himself harmed by it. . . . Artisans and labourers ought not to receive for their labour and craft more money than they could have expected to receive in the said twentieth year or other appropriate year, in the place where they happen to be working; and if anyone takes more, let him be committed to gaol.

The actual effect of these ordinances appears to have been modest. Just two years later, another decree, the Statute of Labourers of 1351, complained that said employees, having no regard to the said ordinance but rather to their own ease and exceptional greed, withdraw themselves to work for great men and others, unless they are paid livery and wages double or treble what they were accustomed to receive in the said twentieth year and earlier, to the great damage of the great men and the impoverishing of all the Commons and sought to remedy this failure with ever more detailed restrictions and penalties. Within a generation, however, these measures had failed.

NoBoDy WanTs tO WoRk!!! lol.

“Alpha psychopaths in power”, as you describe them, have always, and still, understand that their power exists entirely at the whim of the masses.

And so conjuring an excuse has preoccupied them since at least the dawn of history. “Ordained by god” was the go-to for several mellenia.

Now, it seems the tactic is just to manufacture division within the working class. Racism, ideological boogeymen (SOCIALISTS!!), xenophobia, rural/urban friction, and increasingly gender/sexuality, sexism… ANY way you can slice the common man into two segments and convince them that the OTHER side is bent on their destruction.

It’s great because it’s a machine that feeds itself. You see the two lines of people screaming at eachother, they manifest through their hatred the threat the other side fears.

As soon as the “betas”, as you put it, stop fighting themselves, it’s game over.

The solution is probably the least likely thing, though. People, even a small dedicated number of them, who can resist the urge to dunk on their ethically inferior “opponents”, and instead treat their “enemies” with dignity… who can view “the other” as a valuable human temporarily on the wrong side of an issue, then things can change. Daryl Davis (the black dude who keeps flipping KKK members) has it figured out.

It sucks because we have an example of how to do it (Daryl), but it’s hard. It’s slow. It isn’t funny, and it isn’t sexy. It demands so much more from you than taking a quick snipe and returning to your own echo chamber for accolades.

So yeah. The answer is plain, but our society does not actually value the efforts or skills that permit it. Possibly also by design of the ruling class.

Liquid democracy is a proposed way to do a direct democracy in a large country. It’s only been tried on very small scales (Google used it to decide which food to get for their cafeterias), so we don’t really know if it would work, but I like the idea.

I’d point out that there are countries which don’t have much corruption or governmental malfeasance. Nordic countries tend to score very well on the Corruption Perception Index, and also have good social safety nets and governments that (generally, for the most part) serve the people. They’re all small countries, though – I suspect that politics becomes an increasingly dirty business the more power a country has.

If you haven’t already, you might want to look into selectorate theory. It essentially shows not only how the psychopaths at the top stay in power, but also why attempts to reform the system often result in a new crop of rulers who are just as bad or worse than those they replaced. (c.f. Cromwell’s revolt, French Revolution, Russian Revolution). A proponent of selectorate theory would argue that the solution is not to remove the psychopaths – it’s to create a system where things in a politician’s selfish interest happen to line up with things that benefit the people. It’s excellently summed up by this video.

In terms of curtailing corporate power from the top down, studying the history of U.S. antitrust law would be a good place to start. Extra Credits has a good series about it.

One reform method that has worked before is unionization. The vast majority of worker protections came about because of labour action. Unions are a lot weaker than they used to be, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. If you can, unionizing your workplace is probably the most impactful action you could take to improve the existing system.

If your tastes are more radical, you could also consider mutual aid societies. A robust one could conceivably Theseus its way into failing institutions, or evolve into a provisional government if everything collapses.