Build guillotines, break things. Germans used to do that circa 1849, etc.

Passivity is an explicit goal of modern media

Just get young people to vote. That’s the issue. Not enough young people vote so politicians know they don’t have to cater for them. If young people voted en masse then politicians would take them seriously.

Our outright fascist party currently stands ar about 19% and our far right conservatives party is at about 32%. That party is also known for talking about literally anything our facist party talks about.

So yeah, we are about to learn what fascism does the hard way. At least currently I am pretty sure that the fascists won’t form a coalition with the conservatives, but I don’t know how long it will stay like this.

Society will have to relearn a lesson like this every so often, because people kind of yearn to offload the mental energy involved in controlling some aspect of their lives to someone else. And while they’ll probably start by offloading or to someone competent and with their best interests at heart, eventually someone who wants to extract wealth from that position will rise in such a space.

Or the Freie Wähler or Bündnis Sara Wagenknecht. There are options for anti immigrant populism now

Design. Keep the poors divided.

Humanity is still coming out of its infancy. Modern science and medicine are only around 300 years old, human flight around a hundred while homo sapiens are hundreds of thousands of years old. A large number of people still have no homes, food scarcity, poor education to the point of illiteracy and the literate read at a average 5th grade level. The old traditions and norms are still trying to claw back at progress. We only live for a short lifespan that means the species has to maintain knowledge across generations or keep relearning the same lessons over and over again and often hurts itself in confusion. The world isn’t getting dumber, but it’s not finding any grip or purchase when trying to drag itself out of the pit of the natural world.

Corporate encouragement.

That is your critique? Like, not that it’s a Bertelsmann survey?

Still wouldn’t discount the data, though, this is a behemoth of a neolib think tank doing a study on the impacts of the policies they’re pushing, with Bertelsmann it’s always the framing and conclusions that are the issue, not the raw data. Maybe they’ll understand that they themselves are the cause of the results, maybe they won’t.

That honestly wasn’t a good idea from the get-go. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad to be in Germany instead of the US, but there are several reasons I’d be open to leave for years now. It’s been obvious we’ve been running into major future problems nobody does anything about. But then again, once you actually look into it, pretty much every country has gone to shit or never has been anything but.

A small list of problems in Germany: political shift to the far right; reliance on a dying industry; avoiding debt at all costs; no investment in infrastructure or any modernization; the inevitable collapse of our pension system; degrading health care; pretty much missing workers in all fields and still hating on immigrants; a crippling bureaucracy overhead for everything; a society dead-set on both complaining about everything and wanting to change nothing.

Don’t worry, if we just not vote, everything will magically right itself.