You know, as a follow-up to “democratic populations making sacrifices at scale” - have you _looked_ at the US lately? Our lifestyle is atrocious - we work shitty jobs too many hours, drive everywhere, live in isolating suburbs in crappily-built and ugly houses surrounded by bland box stores hawking shitty wares that break by design, restaurants hawking garbage food by the truckload, and grocery stores that are a bare minimum box-checking exercise with crappy produce and shitty meat, and that’s before you get to the meat factory we call a healthcare system. One trip to a proper first world country ought to be enough to disabuse us of the notion that our choices are value-neutral. It seems like we’ve already collectively sacrificed a ton for the sake of enriching the same people telling us collective sacrifice is impossible.