I think most of us are resigned to this situation.
We’re not good at popular organizing. We’re very good at finding ways of othering factions, which the elite are glad to utilize.
We’re good at consolidating power. We’re not good at utilizing that power to serve the public. Hence billionaires don’t even think of charity work except as a means to preserve power.
The human species may be doomed to extinction or a cap on technological progress. We may just be tribal hunters too attached to dominance hierarchy to reach into space and colonize other worlds.
Or we may be stuck in a perpetual cycle where we just form feudal empires that poison the world for another epoch.
The solution — if there is one — is sociological. We figure out a way to diffuse political power so it can’t be consolidated. We fix dominance hierarchy and tragedy of the commons. We figure out a way to teach people that everybody (even the ones that disgust us) are part of the community and deserve regard.
Until we find it, we’ll continue to let elites hold all the resources and poison the earth with impunity.
I’d argue they don’t care because they aren’t issued the resources necessary to care. Our workers also don’t have enough time / energy to parent or to engage in their civic duties of working out what is in their best interests and voting accordingly. Let alone the impetus to imagine a better world and strive for it.
It’s difficult to say if this was intentional all along, or just a happy(?) accident of overworking our labor force out of sheer greed,¹ but it belies the drift of abusive systems towards greater dysfunction, which is why we need ironclad protections against labor abuse.
Not that we’re going to get it necessarily without blood…or with blood for that matter. It’s why violent revolution is on the table since the masses can’t afford the time and energy to conduct non-violent protest.
I’d credit our oppressors for being thorough, but they really aren’t all that bright, so I no longer give them the benefit of the doubt.
¹ We now have studies that show a well-treated labor force is worth the extra expense, from sheer productivity increase alone. Our upper management is just too short-sighted, too divisionist and too paranoid to bother to make their companies worth putting the effort in for, even though optimizing for profit is their job description.