Ironically, we do have a common enemy: The billionaires. Problem is the enemy has managed to brainwash almost half the populace into fighting for them.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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As an ex-biologist, I think this is just down to a choice of words: as a society, you could see Nature as an enemy.
Man, even as an individual, or even a monocellular organism, you could argue that entropy is your enemy.
If an enemy is a useful concept for maximizing potential within your scope of choice, then be it.
Not necessarily a common enemy, but a common cause.
I've never seen people come together and work harder than when we were trying to end the Y2K problem. I guess you could call the bug "the enemy", but it was a little more abstract than that.
Were you in an industry affected or are you just reminiscing on being in society
Because being in society for y2k was utterly meaningless. We did nothing. We did not come together, we did not work hard. A small handful of dweebs noticed the issue and fixed it.
The USA, with its burgeoning 24 hour news cycle and coming off such hits as oj, princess di, and columbine, recognized they could blow that shit up. So then America wasted 40 billion dollars and a shitload of fear mongering when basically every other country spent almost nothing for essentially the same outcome. Because the outcome was contingent on patches to windows and the Linux kernel, which were obviously going to happen long before 1/1/2000 and regardless of the government because it was a glaring bug that was found
I do ultimately agree with your sentiment though. A common enemy is not necessary and we absolutely can be unified around a cause. The space race obviously had Russia as a villain. The new deal is something that on paper could unify but in practice saw conservative opposition and liberal criticism that it didn’t go far enough. I still think it’s possible though, even if an example is a challenge to think up
I was a front line worker during Y2K with 60 software updates across 600 systems from Texas to Guam.
I had to run a color coded Excel sheet to keep it all straight, it was CRAZY.
In my case, because it was the automotive industry, it also all had to be done early because of the '00 model year cars. Like I say, I've never seen people work harder.
Even then, there were still problems outside our control:
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/1999/10/13/y2k-brings-back-horseless-carriages/51026660007/
I quit after y2k. I worked nights for months and after it was over, my baby threw up on me one morning, I was 10 minutes late because I had to change, and my boss literally screamed at me.
So you were administering systems or something similar? Then sure, I am sure for you and your team it brought you together (and maybe some tension at times). Glad it went well. But society as a whole? Eh
That’s the challenge though. On a micro level it’s easy. I work in mental health and I have similar stories from my days working in hospitals (I do outpatient work now) where our unit staff have banded together for challenges. Covid was like that at the beginning. Then it fell apart because everything became politicized thanks to our dogshit leadership at the time
But finding something that can (for the most part) unite all of society? Even limiting it to just the US that’s a talllllll order. Especially if you also don’t want it to fall apart after a month like the Covid thing
I was administering a small part of a system, probably 1/3rd of the entire server environment. There was another team doing the financial software and another team doing the hardware side.
But, yeah, society as a whole I think did notice. There was an up-tick in "prepperdom" or whatever you want to call it, especially when this story broke:
I had a lot of non-technical people asking me what it was all about and I explained it like this:
Let's say, on 1/1, the government has decided to issue everbody new quarters and all your old quarters are going to go away.
1:1 - you won't lose any money, but the new quarters they're handing out won't work in ANY vending machine. Everything with a coin slot needs to be updated.
Now, if you have the proper tools, and knowledge, updating one machine is not a big deal.
But now you have to update every machine on your block, in your neighborhood, in your city, in your county, in your state, in the entire country, in the whole world...
Suddenly the scale is far, far bigger.
To this day, I'm stunned we pulled it off without more problems. There was the "horseless carriage" bit noted above, there was another problem with a taxi system in, I wanna say Thailand?
Singapore! I wasn't that far off!
The only system that has sustained common cause in human societies long-term is religion. It's outlasted nationalism and political ideologies, noble families and dynasties, and even the collapse of civilizations.
Which is terrifying, when you consider how much violence has been done in the name of religion throughout human history. Why do none of our more productive ideas and organizing principles have such longevity?
And now people are saying climate change is like the Y2K bug and "it will fix itself" 🙄
Truth.
Though, America got by for a long time with that being Russia, and Nazis...
What happened to that
Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
A more applicable version would be Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that they still have something to do in case they succeed.
Yeah, don't want to end up unemployed... better create some more monsters...
Having the local dictator as the unifying enemy seems to be popular. Just ask anyone from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Yemen.
Well except for all the innocent people swept up in the red scare.
Or the minorities living during those times.
This is the underlying plot of plenty of movies. The prevailing solution is to find something other than each other to be our unifying enemy.
Conclusion: Hopefully we get attacked by aliens or something.
We had a global pandemic and that didn't work. Maybe an alien invasion would work but I think it might just be a plot device.
The global pandemic of COVID-19 was not a visible menace, and only endangered the poor, the old and the weak.
We have built within us a need to fight for survival. Natural selection has bred us to constantly be fighting for the top. When we get there we have no idea what to do with it.
We need something to fight against, that's why we all love under dog stories.
We need something in common for people to get along. Enemies are just very easy things to share between groups, but common creeds, ideals, projects are all unifiers of equal power (though they're not nearly as convenient to find...)
You'd think being people would be common enough... life has enough difficulty without us creating more for each other.
Unfortunately I've found that unless they're given a very definitive common focus, humans are exceedingly prone to spending their free time carefully cataloging their differences.
No, it means that your society is not homogenous and most of the time people do not feel themselves as part of it.
Feeling a part of something has nothing to do with homogeneity, it has to do with empowerment.
What you’re describing frankly sounds like ethnonationalism.
Feeling part of something has a lot to do with homogenity. Most nations are built on ethnonationalism.