Because we outnumber them. It's really that simple. We can chop off their heads whenever we want. It's why JD Vance is terrified of just driving past old people holding up signs about him. He knows what he's doing is wrong, and he knows making people hate him has consequences.

Many people fought and died for those things

How is it that we managed to abolish slavery? Years of bloody battle and political challenges preceded by many years of the worst atrocities humans are capable of.

How do we have an age of consent? Because people work hard for keeping children safe, but the system isn't perfect, and people still find loopholes or dark and hidden places to do trafficking and similar things. Most women I know have been assaulted at a young age and/or as an adult. We can keep making it all better.

How do we have minimum wage? Years of political challenges, and it is still far from the minimum it should be. There is a lot of complexity that goes into this. It's great that progressives work for these things, and I support them in working more to make it better for you and me.

Everyone in power is evil and hates us, but why are women still allowed to vote? Because it is hard to take rights away, but I certainly still see people trying to find ways and convince others that they don't need the right to vote, and that concerns me.

How come minimum wage hasn't lowered or been removed entirely? Same as previous statements.

And more importantly, how do we get good things to happen again? We keep going. Listen for the helpers, and be one.

Because it seems like no matter where someone is on the political spectrum, THEY'RE ALL EVIL and they hate us. (And even if they didn't, they're still controlled by evil billionares.)

• I don't think all are evil. Most honest people that look at it can probably some examples lf good people trying to be honest public servants. In my opinion, it is a complexity problem, and we need better, federated technology to distribute power better. We need equality and equity. We need education and communication and collaboration. I'm not against left or right but I think extremes on both sides gravitate toward selfishness and authoritarianism. I think it isn't because of billionaire status that billionaires are evil, but I think there is no ethical way to become or remain a billionaire in these times on this planet.

Power corrupts. Every time. The only way to work around that is accountability. The people we give power to get it for a limited amount of time and with clear rules on what they're allowed to do with it. If you break the rules, you're held accountable. That's how a modern democracy works. Once accountability breaks down we get *gestures vaguely at everything*

people protested, shit got violent.

slavery is not abolished, it is legalized and codified with amendment 13's criminality clause. the south won. they got exactly what they wanted: federal enforcement of slavery.

Least disingenuous No Stupid Questions post

slavery being ended was a combination of morality, law, and war. Other places managed to get rid of it in a more progressive law kind of way while the us had people fighting it for a long time and had a massive majority who wanted to see its end before the civil war eroupted and mostly put it to bed (it being allowed for prisoners show the good guys did not completely win). The great depression is what spurred minimum wage. Voting rights for both blacks and women were a long and drawn out fight. Minimum wage has been lowered like with sub minimum wages. There is a party in the us and I think some in europe and such that toass around the idea to not have women vote. Everyone is not evil and hate us and its a pedantic thing to say they are all the same and not recognize some are better than others. So voting and resisting is what we can do. We know a lot of this has corporate influence and even ones not explicity going for it roll over easily. So don't consume any more than you have to. Take that free time from not going to movies or out places and go to protests. Use your libraries and other local community things and support them. The reason you feel powerless is because group power comes from acting in concert. No single grain of sand in a sandstorm is that harmful but when many are raging in the storm it is a terror.

"Rules for thee, not for me."

Slavery is a tool of the state. Age of consent is violated constantly by those with strings to pull. Minimum wage is a joke that started as "one full-time job should provide for a suburban nuclear family" and is now "starting wage/part-time highschool job". Conservative women vote how their husbands tell them to.

Everything's a joke.

There's an early-60s stage play I was in once called Marat Sade, set in a mental asylum in 1808. The central theme is essentially that authority only exists because we let it. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. I think that show is ripe for a revival.

I see your post is being hammered deep into the ground, because at a superficial glance it appears to maybe challenge the local gospel that the system is evil - even though it doesn't really do that. This sort of thing isn't tolerated by people who react to the first word they see that raises their shields.

But to try to answer your actual question, I think the reason good things happen even in a bad system is the same as how brilliant ideas can emerge from a sea of ignorance. In the "rise of civilization" it hasn't really been civilization that's been rising - as in people generally getting smarter and doing things better. It's more a process where a DaVinci shows up now and then and contributes brilliant ideas that get adopted by the group. Remarkable individuals show the way, and as long as adopting their idea doesn't take much effort, the generally clueless public goes along with it.

You ever hear the saying that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys and infinite number of typewriters at least one of them would likely produce the stage play of Hamlet by pure chance from slamming the keys? That's not exactly how this works but it's close. The reality is co-operative power always exceeds what any individual can do, but co-operative power requires co-ordination. Usually these systems start out with well meaning people coordinating groups of people to build a house, raise a barn, build a wall, found a city, organize a farming district, found a nation, start a multinational corporation. Unfortunately the guy co-coordinating the team, tends to get a little full of himself over time, starts taking bigger shares for himself than is truly justifiable, and then their kids do the same thing and the system starts to decay.

Public, private, capitalist, socialist, doesn't matter what the goal or structure of the organization looks like, it always rots from the top. And then it falls apart, we rinse the blood off, and repeat with a slightly different version. This is not new, Plato had a very good description of it in 375 BCE (approximately). And every new attempt we try to build it a little bit better to prevent someone (or their great, great grandson) from eventually deciding they're a demigod and entitled to do whatever horrendous idea pops into their head. We even built systems that kick you out of the top seat every once in a while to see if people still trust you to be in charge. Unfortunately we forgot corporate governance is also governance, creating a wealth class which became modern aristocracy, and yada yada here we are. Turns out our current system is also vulnerable to corruption. So are all the rest we've tried too though, and we have at least 10,000 years of attempts at it. It's a hard problem.

We get better, we still fail, we try again, repeat infinitely. How do we do good things like abolishing slavery, age of consent and minimum wage? We got better. Why are there still evil, greedy, pedos in charge? Well, they didn't start that way, but they did end up a blood sucking fiend, sometimes after generations of rot, sometimes in one lifetime. You can't really turn a vampire back to human though, so we do what we have to do. We'll hopefully find a better solution on the next go around, trying to figure out how to work together to achieve a good life for everyone without the people facilitating the project turning into monsters.