Social Problems are Here to Stay

by S4B0T4G3FIRE | May 21, 2021, 8:00 AM EDT

Abstract

Sometimes, it takes a fresh pair of eyes to notice that something is not quite right about how the world is operating. With the arrival of each new generation, social problems enter the spotlight anew to be reexamined by future politicians, engineers, scientists, and citizens alike. What these people come up with are old solutions that have already been tested (with no success) or new ones that sound good on paper but have no chance of solving social problems within the next foreseeable number of generations. The purpose of this article is to highlight some potential solutions and why the world’s worst social problems are impervious to all of them.

Disclaimer: “Pessimistic” is the intentional mood of this article. The goal is to frustrate readers enough to motivate them to prove the hypotheses wrong and arrive at a happier future sooner.

Meet the Social Problems

A social problem is any problem that negatively impacts the citizens of a particular society. You are probably familiar with at least a dozen of them, but here are a few to get you thinking:

• Climate change
• Gun violence
• Sexism
• Racism
• Gender inequality
• Immigration and border security
• Car accidents
• Alcoholism
• Lack of Healthcare
• Poor Quality of Life

You should already be aware of the fact that none of them are anywhere close to being solved, so eliminate all optimism and look at these problems from an objective point of view. Now, which one would you like to work on first?

Your Assignment

For the sake of this assignment, let us pretend that a social problem can be solved if the entire world devotes itself to the cause for the next century. Which one do you believe is the most urgent? Is it…

• the one that takes the most lives?
• the one that lowers the quality of the most lives?

Do you start with…

• car accidents — a problem that kills well over 1 million people and leaves millions more severely injured every year?
• alcoholism — a problem that kills 3 million people each year and leaves hundreds of millions more with crippling addictions and disorders?
• racism — a problem that currently affects the quality of life of all racial minorities?
• sexism against women — a problem that currently affects the quality of life of all women (who account for almost exactly 50% of the world’s population)?
• climate change — a problem that currently affects the quality of life of every living person and future person (and many animals and other organisms) on Earth?

Do you selfishly select a problem that affects you and your family the most, or do you unselfishly select a problem that affects the most people worldwide?

“Solving” Social Problems

To avoid all bias, it might be best just to write them all down on slips of paper, throw the slips into a hat, and pull one out at random. In fact, let us do just that to spare you the difficult decision.

Gender Inequality

The chosen slip of paper reads, “Gender Inequality.”

Okay. Make it your life’s work to research everything there is to know about gender equality, and then share with the world a foolproof 10-step procedure to fix it. After 50 years of devoting yourself to this social problem, you get as far as “equal pay,” “religious freedom,” and “equal political participation.” Wow! These are remarkable achievements in themselves. You are satisfied with the progress, but you soon realize that gender inequality is still at large. How could this be?

You covered politics, religion, economics, biology… Wait. You forgot about biology! Discrepancies (on average) in physical strength, height, life expectancy, risk-taking, aggression, sex hormones, reproductive organs, empathy, caretaking, and so on were all overlooked, and gender inequality continues to plague society. If only there were a way to destroy biology, you could successfully destroy gender inequality forever… but you would destroy humanity forever as well. To be fair, the extinction of the human race would end gender inequality. Problem solved! You are ready to pick a new slip out of the hat.

Alcoholism

The chosen slip reads, “Alcoholism.”

Well, this should be simple enough. Just ban the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcohol… Wait. Déjà vu. Prohibition has been attempted once before, and it failed miserably. People were upset, crime and murder rates soared, and then prohibition was repealed. Nowadays, over three million (known) people still die every year from alcohol-related health incidents anyway… Oh well! Alcohol and the risks that come with it have become happily accepted as a necessity to human culture. Pick another slip.

Car Accidents

The chosen slip reads, “Car Accidents.”

Certainly, this problem is easy to solve. After 50 years of fighting it, you make vehicles safer, illuminate roadways more effectively at night, and convince every single human being on Earth to wear their seatbelt. First of all, you must be a magician because what you were able to accomplish in just a few decades is incredible. Secondly, you probably think that you just solved this entire social problem. Unfortunately, you came nowhere close. Roads are still hazardous during storms, and people are still driving under the influence of drugs (another way that alcoholism kills people), falling asleep behind the steering wheel, and driving speedily and recklessly to “make good time” at the expense of others. As a result, we face the loss of over a million lives and injuries of tens of millions more people worldwide every single year.

You can make vehicles as safe as you want while keeping them affordable, but physics is physics, momentum is momentum, and a collision is a collision. Also, people are people. Unless you can change biology (which we determined earlier is impossible) to make everybody less tired, less selfish, less aggressive, less injury-prone, and less careless, you may as well give up. Technically, you could give everybody a self-driving vehicle, but those have already been proven to make terrible mistakes and get involved in accidents (causing death) as well, so just move on to the next social problem.

Gun Violence (in the United States)

Okay. No more slips or hats. Let us go ahead and select an easy social problem to solve: gun violence. Just take everybody’s firearms away! Surely, everyone will cooperate, and there will not be any backlash whatsoever. Surely, no one will keep their firearms and express in a violent show of force their discontent with the new laws. Right? Wrong.

In that case, maybe you could make people turn in only their automatic and semi-automatic weapons instead, and then stop manufacturing and selling automatic weapons altogether. Certainly, that will solve gun violence. Right? Not even close. A large majority of gun-related deaths do not even involve automatic weapons. When people hear about “gun violence,” they immediately think of the occasional “mass shootings” that take the lives of maybe a couple hundred people each year. If your solution is to reduce the size of a magazine from 100 rounds to 40 rounds to 20 rounds to 6 rounds, you would be lucky to reduce yearly gun-related deaths by less than half of a percent. Technically this is progress, but it is nowhere near a solution. The only way to eliminate gun violence is to reduce magazine size to 0 rounds. You already know that will never happen, so you can stop pointing fingers at guns themselves.

If you wish to realistically “solve” gun violence, then the only statistic to consider right now is the number of suicides each year. Nearly two-thirds of all gun-related incidents are suicides. You can talk all you want about mass shootings, but until you fix the quality-of-life issues forcing 800,000 people to turn to suicide each year, you have yet to make a dent in human loss to guns.

Poor Quality of Life

It would be logical to discuss living quality now, but that would be a waste of time considering just how many factors impact quality of life. Besides, if poor quality of life leads to suicidal thoughts, and suicidal thoughts lead to gun violence, then where does the cycle even begin?

The Truth

Social problems are linked to one another, hindering our ability to solve them at will. If you were aware of this, then you are already one step closer to realizing how silly it is to expect drastic amounts of progress at the snap of a finger. A protest here and a social media post there are not going to fix a problem.

Problems like racism, gender inequality, and lack of healthcare all contribute to poor quality of life. Poor quality of life can lead to alcoholism, which can lead to car accidents and gun violence. Car accidents and gun violence result in millions of injured (or dead) people who require healthcare that they cannot afford. These once-average citizens turn to alcoholism as well, and maybe they eventually become addicted, lose their home, are subject to harassment in the streets, and then commit suicide (suicide rates are nine times higher among the homeless population than the general population). This is just one unfortunate, though very plausible, series of events that happens more often than you realize.

The Interconnectedness of Social Problems

Without deep research studies, you would never even realize these interactions and correlations exist. Reading this, you might think, “If they are linked to each other, then you can break one link so the whole chain fails.” They may be linked to each other, but these chains do not vanish at the breaking of one link. You cannot just fix healthcare and unemployment with the expectation that homelessness will decline.

Numerous additional factors cause homelessness. For instance, stagnant wages, poor education, gambling, and even domestic violence can all eventually lead to homelessness. Likewise, you cannot just close the wage gap and expect gender inequality to subside. Every little bit helps, but you would have to attack each contributing factor at its very core to expose and destroy the root of the problem. Unfortunately, we already concluded that that would be nearly impossible, even under ideal conditions and a great deal of optimism. Incredibly, people still dare to believe that these problems can be fixed on a whim.

Also, in a few decades, maybe gender inequality is much less of a problem than it is now in the United States, but what does that say about the rest of the world? In some parts of the world, gender inequality is hardly even considered a problem as it still has deep ties to culture, tradition, and religion. Maybe first-world countries are one or two generations away from “solving” gender inequality, while third-world countries are still six or seven generations away from this social revolution. Science and research have already proven this with studies concluding that “global gender equality is at least 100 years away.” To be fair, 100 years is a lot sooner than the “never” that science and research have estimated for other social problems like racism, and the “too late” for social problems like climate change.

Why are Social Problems Unsolvable?

At the beginning of this article, social problems were defined as “problems negatively impacting the citizens of a particular society,” but a very crucial detail was omitted. The reality is that social problems not only impact people but are also created by people. They are the direct result of mankind’s failure to sustain a healthy balance of nature over time. Unless you remove people from the world, you will not solve a single social problem. If you are not convinced, then let us approach this using the Scientific Method.

Problem: The number of people dying of gun violence each year is on the rise.
Hypothesis: If the possession of semi-automatic and automatic weapons is made illegal, the number of deaths to gun violence will be reduced.
Independent Variable: The ban of semi-automatic and automatic weapons.
Dependent Variable: The number of deaths to gun violence.
Confounding Variable(s): Every single person on Earth (7,860,000,000)

Pause! If you know anything about experimentation, you already know that confounding variables need to be held to a minimum and controlled as much as possible to arrive at the desired outcome. When it comes to social problems, every individual human being is a variable. You cannot control who people are, what they become, or which crimes they commit. All it takes is one stray belief in one person (out of eight billion people) to keep gun violence, racism, and gender inequality alive. If you cannot control everyone, then you may as well be in control of absolutely no one. Progress is the only thing that can be made. Progress is slow. Change is slow. You can make all the progress you want over the next century, but you will never arrive at a solution. Humanity is its own obstacle, and no amount of progress can change that.

In fact, if you consider all of the problems mentioned so far, you could say that only one of them has come anywhere close to being resolved. Can you guess which one? Ironically, it is the one trying to remove humans from the equation: car accidents. Although humans would still be passengers, their flawed decision-making would be replaced by the decision-making of robots. Self-driving vehicles still have their flaws, but it is almost funny that the only potential solution to car accidents is to stop humans from driving altogether.

Conclusion

In the end, of course reducing deaths and increasing quality of life is progress, but we are talking about the possibility of solutions. “Fewer car accidents” is always a good thing, but do not fool yourself into believing that “zero car accidents” is even a possibility. Nothing has been solved until the result of the equation is either 0 deaths or 100% quality of life, and that will never happen. You cannot control every variable in the world.

Just getting a small group of people to successfully execute a near-impossible Space exploration mission is difficult enough for humanity. Imagine trying to get every human on Earth to cooperate that well. The presence of even a single deviant out of Earth’s 8 billion people would result in a failed mission. Someone would intentionally throw an extra decimal place or negative sign somewhere in the code, and the social problem would survive and cause mankind to fail as it is destined to do so. Homelessness will never go away. Sexism is here to stay. Gun violence is a permanent residue. Corrupt leaders are an issue. Life on Earth is a paid privilege, not a right. It costs money to be born, to live, and to die.

Thank you for reading this article! Its purpose is to be as pessimistic as possible to motivate people to prove it wrong. Ultimately, we all know that the end goal is not to find a solution to social problems but rather to make real progress toward reducing the negative effects of social problems every single day! 👍 If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for future articles, please feel free to comment below or on my social media at Twitch, Twitter, and Reddit.

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