Let me be blunt and say that this attitude is exactly why nobody ever tries to change society. Instead of assuming that because you're one person you don't matter, why not take the attitude that you're one person and what you do has an impact on everyone around you?

You can't change the world by treating everyone well but you can sure as shit make all their days better, and that's what we should be doing. If you want to live in a world that isn't isolating, stop isolating the strangers around you.

This is usually where someone brings up Fred Rogers. There are multitudes of inspirational people. Fortunately/unfortunately the digital age has knocked a lot of saints off their pedestals. Hopefully, the dust will settle and more will rise up to take their places.

I generally agree with you that people are apathetic and assume that something can't be done simply because it's hard or they don't feel like trying.

That said I think there's an element of truth that society generally creates incentives that can lead to outcomes nobody wants [1]. You can get equilibriums where without effective coordination people are trapped, sometimes the trapped state can prevent effective coordination itself.

It's not an easy problem to fix.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

This isn't an easy problem to fix systemically, but we need to be making different decisions as individuals. Society changes in the little decisions we make every day, and not by leaps and bounds through fiat.

When people chose to smoke pot, knowing that it was illegal, they were normalizing it. Those were small decisions by individuals that snowballed into legalization. Gay marriage and the acceptance of homosexuality followed the same pattern, where individuals decided to be more accepting, and that snowballed into societal acceptance.

Society is made up of individuals, and we are part of society. Throwing up our hands and abdicating responsibility doesn't serve anyone.

Coordinated human rights movements have made major improvements to the human condition. That's of course not to say they are easy or always successful, quite the contrary.

The Enlightenment/democracy, abolition of slavery, civil rights movements, unions/labor rights movements are all examples of humans consciously improving their societies.

While I agree with the fact that the Enlightenment helped to get rid of some harmful superstitions, I think it also contributed to the mechanistic industrial mindset that ended up causing a lot of harm e.g. colonialism and eugenics.

Great list though, maybe add on reproductive justice and climate science.

No one has absolute control, but it can certainly be nudged in certain directions if the will is there and the population is relatively unified, something I don't foresee happening in the West for a very long time.

Isn't that saying the same thing as the bumblebee beach ball analogy?

Had never heard of that before, but after reading I'd say it's exactly that.

Getting the bumble bees back to a state of working in the same direction so we can be competitive with countries who've already achieved that is the tricky part.

What do you make of wars, revolutions, and protest movements then?

Very few people want to have wars, yet they persist, which kind of proves the GP's point.

People that profit from wars "want" wars. Presumably that means there should be ways then to remove profit motives from wars. Because the majority of people don't want wars, one might assume that it should even be theoretically possible to make that happen in a democracy, at least.

Maybe the people who wanted them got their way, sometimes.