There’s no winning. Any time humans organize the coordinators have both the power and self-interest to corrupt the organization to serve them as individuals or sub-organizations more than the collective, and humans spontaneously self-organize without a pre-existing organizational structure, so it’s not like we can avoid it.

Best we can do is try to make people more independent from each other, quietly act independently, and occasionally remind those with power that taking away people’s individual agency has consequences they’d find undesirable.

Plus, the linux transition process is a lot easier these days. Most the open source programs have a windows version for you to learn on. There’s the linux for windows subsystem to learn the terminal basics. Linux Mint broadly mimics Windows’ interface. Installing linux isn’t the massive challenge to set up that it was ten years ago. I don’t even have windows partition these days.

Honestly, if someone is a Windows user it’s probably easier to slowly transition each of your programs to the open source versions then make the leap to linux than it is to learn Mac’s set up.

Maybe if you don’t know what capitalism is. A lot of people seem to confuse capitalism with markets. It’s had to imagine a world without markets, but capitalism is just an ownership system. It’s easy to imagine a world made up of cooperatives. It’s basically the same world we already have but everyone gets paid more and there are no shareholders.

There’s nothing stopping people from working for or with cooperatives or not working for or with corporations. It’s just that most people can’t be bothered to care. If everyone stopped buying from corporations, corporations would die pretty quick. If everyone bought from cooperatives, they’d be a lot more stable. We’re only picking winners and losers via government contracts. The res of the economy is a free for all.

Regardless of whether it’s arguing power corrupts, evil seeks power, or evil is more visible; this notion that evil isn’t pervasive is inconsistent with my lived experience. It’s not even that bad systems force mediocre people into taking several banal actions that culminate in mass suffering – that does happen, but there are a lot of just straight up bad people at every level of society. Even in the best communities I’ve been a part of there is a shockingly large number of selfish, egotistical pricks. Perhaps it’s a product of individualism without enlightened self-interest or an inability to see things from multiple perspectives, but the result is the same: suffering and conflict are pervasive throughout every level of every society.

Call it evil, call it economics or politics, call it whatever you want, but humanity seem to work best when we keep each other at arms length. Help each other, yes, but put a large amount of effort into not interfering with each other.

Whether it’s Health-Insurance, Nazi-Trains, or Shareholder Value; I found the “banality of evil” to be a pretty compelling argument.

I’m homeless, so I notice it more, but it’s insane how often society pressures you into giving away half your salary to a bunch of parasites. Like, people are so concerned if someone is sleeping somewhere they “shouldn’t” be sleeping or if lights are off at night someplace no one bothers to turn off lights. Like, just leave people alone.

I guess a lot of homeless people stink or make messes around them, so I understand where the prejudice comes from, but if people stink advocate for free bathhouses, and if they litter do anti-littering campaigns or something.

Just the way we like it.