What to Do

Political problems can be solved with technical solutions. Take the problem of food insecurity in third-world countries as an example. It's a hard problem to solve because transporting food overland via unpaved roads through politically unstable areas is expensive and dangerous. Long-term, using highly-productive first-world agribusiness to feed the third-world will fail, because no matter how cheaply agribusiness can produce food the transportation costs will make the whole enterprise cost prohibitive. This is a political problem: we can easily produce enough food to feed the entire world, but we can't get that food to the places where it is most needed due to political instability. But it's a political problem with an engineering solution. If the tools and techniques needed to efficiently grow food are cheap and widely available, farmers in politically unstable areas can simply grow their own food without a dependence on far away agribusiness. GMO crops crafted for nutritional value and hardiness, easily accessible guides on farming best practices, weather forecasting, irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, financial markets to hedge against risk, cheap tools and machinery; these are all unsolved or partially solved problems. Whenever someone comes up with a "good new thing" that improves the SOTA in terms of value per dollar in one of these areas, we get closer to solving the political problem of global food security.

If political realities prevent us from solving problems, then we can either change the political realities or create new solutions. Individuals generally can't change political realities, but they can create good new things that work around them. So it is good advice.

> This is a political problem: we can easily produce enough food to feed the entire world, but we can't get that food to the places where it is most needed due to political instability. But it's a political problem with an engineering solution.

There isn't really a technical solution to the problem of political instability.

> If the tools and techniques needed to efficiently grow food are cheap and widely available, farmers in politically unstable areas can simply grow their own food without a dependence on far away agribusiness.

You posit political instability as a problem but your solution doesn't address it. Thinking that, in a politically unstable environment, it would be simple to grow food if only you had better tools and techniques is naive. If the political environment was stable people would be able to feed themselves even without newest tools and techniques.