Funny thing is as I opened the keyboard my app crashed. The joke will not let anybody else write itself.

And that, is why we must accept Ludditism where we can, as a way to oppose misguided tech development.

Individualism was constructed by the bourgeoisie as an ideal so that they could freely exploit wage labour. They successfully couched it up in an idea of “liberty” with the help of some really insincere philosophy and tied it to the idea of personal growth (in places, even spirituality itself).

But this was all so that they could utilise wage labour as atomic parts of their industrial mechanism whenever they chose to.

Agree with everything you said, and I don’t have much more to add except to say that I was thinking of perfect knowledge as in if only the workings of institutions were known to all, not how they occur on a daily basis (let’s say because of an efficient education system, or media giving all the relavent info). Compare this to current day knowledge of people, where they have to depend on a lawyer or agent or someone in the know. In either case, capitalism would succeed in obstructing any legitimate public good because it is capital and financial interests that dictates these institutions workings on a daily basis. So this is an argument against “institutions” we “trust” being for our good.

The median person has no trust in any system because they cannot begin to understand their workings.

This is what I was getting at as well. That maybe the bigger question is should we be considering the inner workings of any political system easily representable to the median person by even the most transparency imaginable. And as a thought experiment, even in a society where everyone has perfect knowledge of the system, can we trust this system to work as it says it will?

Because, even if we consider all requirements of political trust, transparency, accountability, institutional strength et al as worked out, the system still remains oppressive.

Since there are tons of academic papers and political theorisations in the liberal world about these concepts, I am looking for leftist critiques that engage with these ideals that are a facade if anything.

There are two broad ways I can think of this and firstly it is the trust we place in our financial system. Right from the value of our currency to monetary policy, we trust the government to make fiscal decisions on our behalf. We trust the government to transparently allocate public funds. Not like PM Cares, which we have no relief to now, despite the duplicitous effort by our head of state. Heck, even in a regular transaction, we assume that we will get infrastructure that works rather than fails. All of this is a basic assumption that fails with events like demonetisation when they are conducted unilaterally.

The other way I spoke of trust is the liberal ideal of trust in institutions. Like if the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare says that COVID numbers are of a certain amount, people would report on that. But in states like Gujarat that basic premise was lost and courts had to bring up authorities to correct the numbers. So one institution helped another cover the trust deficit in this case (but we all know the caste class character of these institutions and who they really end up representing in neoliberalism).

I don’t think individual action can amount to much. Hence now I am seriously considering working with an organisation that works on ground in the environmental sector.

Organic farms, communitarian organisations, animal rescue centres, citizens’ fora all seem to be places where you can make a genuine organised effort, while feeling more connected to nature. Bonus points if they are socialist. In fact, I’d only go if they were at least socialistic about their praxis.

During COVID, I learnt by observation that such on ground organisations are the ones that determine a neighbourhood’s resilience to a natural disaster. Hence volunteering to socialistic organisations made me feel less like I am sitting by watching the climate crisis unfold.