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Hello, I don't usually read or post in D&D so please pardon my naïveté. Also I'm not a native english speaker so please forgive if I make it hard to understand some sentences, I try my best. I'm a mixed race european in my early 30s. Not rich yet grew up in average comfort, studied with jesuits and I guess I'm agnostic thanks to them, 99% white acquaintances growing up. I've also been depressed all my life as far as I can remember (no meds), mostly because of my super racist, dysfunctional, hosed up family. At least we had tons of books, so I grew up reading a lot more than my peers (is that a douchey word?). This resulted in me growing up as an insufferable know-it-all with lovely opinions, sort of like an imitation Lovecraft: I spent the better part of the last 10 years of my life trying to claw my way out of a warped adolescent mindset, with the help of a wonderfully normal girlfriend. Around the time I turned 30 I tried going to a therapist who focuses on relationships (family, couples) and he gave me his latest book, which greatly helped me and allowed me to pinpoint many of the issues in what has been my development as a human being. In addition to that, I'd also turned vegetarian a couple of years before turning 30, after a life time of lovely excuses. Around the same time, I think I can identify among others a chain of specific books that, together with the political climate and my own self-development, managed to turn constant self-loathing and misanthropy into a feeling that I can only describe as at times wanting to love individuals while despising humanity as a whole, or the exact opposite. These are the books, in reading order as best as I can recall: Gombrich - A little history of the world Dick - The man in the high castle Sartre - Nausea Spiegelman - Maus Miller - Tropic of Cancer+Capricorn Jung - Man and his symbols; Memories, dreams, reflections; various essays on dream analysis, unconscious archetypes and synchronicity More recently, having always heard about him but never having actually read anything of his, I bought Chomsky's How the world works and On anarchism, but I still have to read them. I was intrigued by his quote: “You have two choices, you can say, "I'm a pessimist, nothing's going to work, I'm giving up, I'll help ensure the worst can happen". Or, you can grasp onto the opportunities that do exist, the rays of hope that exist and say, "Well, maybe we can make it a better world". It's not much of a choice.” This whole preamble was to say that what all these books have shown and taught me in one way or another is that technically there is always hope, even for the shittiest human being, to disassemble and to reconstruct his own self in a way that benefits him and everyone else, through humility, education and self-reflection. Why then does human history seem to contradict this possibility at every step with an endless stream of terrifying inhumanity at all levels, from individual to the collective? The first and easiest answer that comes to mind personally is that organized religions have wormed their way so deeply in the history of man that what is theoretically the core of human experience (childhood, adolescence, individuation and actualization of the self, maturity) is lost in a web of rules, requirements, dogmas, prohibitions, excuses and deflections that prevent mankind's growth out of its infancy. Is it realistic to desire and expect a positive social and cultural evolution in the next few centuries? Is it stupid to think that a complete overhaul of all our educational systems is the best way to set it in motion? Is it possible to light the spark of basic decency in every human being just by teaching the right things? I think I've reached a point where I can't actually hate another human being, no matter how vile or ignorant his or her views, because I am aware that all that is needed to change those views is humility, education and self-reflection. And yet it sounds so loving stupid because how are you actually going to consistently and reliably lead as many people as possible to the point of choosing that over being willfully ignorant, selfish pricks? It took me 30 years of depression to get to that point, sometimes it seems so far-fetched to think that it might be possible to skip all that. Sorry if this reads like an inarticulate rant, these are all thoughts that have been bugging me for a while and I felt like I needed to share them in order to get external feedback. Thanks for taking the time to read. e: I forgot, if you'd like to suggest some books to read please do so necroid fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 11:23
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Yes. Human civilization is generally a trek towards progress. We have up's and downs, we fail and produce societies that are worse than those that came before, but over time those societies give way to new and better ones. In my lifetime we have made great strides towards openness, equality and justice. When I was born, being an 'out' gay man was just barely acceptable in that you wouldn't get lynched. Probably. When my father was born, you very well could be lynched for being in the wrong town or the wrong club. Earlier this year I walked alongside an openly gay friend and his husband in a pride parade. We've also back slid recently, and have serious issues with things like income inequality. But we trend towards progress. Things should, in the long run at least, get better rather than worse. Yes, it is possible we have hosed ourselves ecologically. Yes it is possible one day some lunatic will end all life with a button press. I hope neither comes to pass, and I'll do my part to see that they don't. But absent that I do believe that things will get better, just as they have been century after century. Caros fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 11:55
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You yourself admit to suffering from depression. This makes is deeply unlikely if not impossible to sustain a long-term optimistic worldview. We, as a species, have some really nasty challenges coming up. Mostly due to our own hubris. However one thing that the ever-accelerating pace of human technological development has shown is that we are an adaptable and resourceful species. I honestly do not believe that there is any circumstance short of a full-scale global extinction of anything larger than a cockroach that would end the human race. Take a deep breath, and remind yourself of one solid truth: you can't save the world. What you can do is live the best life you can, by whatever values you honor, and do what you're able to make the lives of those around you better in whatever small way you're capable of. If we all give the tiniest of shits about doing that, it'll be a net positive for the world. To use the US as an example, consider that we as a country haven't existed for 250 years yet. That's a blink of an eye in terms of human history, but look at all the social progress that has been made in that time, and then again in the last 100, or 50 years. poo poo sucks in a lot of ways, and is trying to regress right now, but overall the tide has been coming in and this is the last gasp of a dying breed.
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Jul 6, 2018 12:31
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Yeah, the world sucks and it's a fight to keep progress happening instead of it being an automatic thing but it's mostly getting better over time, not worse.    yes, some of these are dumb, but a bunch aren't, now is the best time in history to be alive
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Jul 6, 2018 15:16
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Optimism may be largely unfounded but that's not really the point of it, the point of it is to provide a filter through which you can screen your experiences to make things seem less bad than they are and allow you to keep trying as if you expect to make progress. It is what allows you to keep going even if a more objective view of reality would really suggest that you shouldn't bother. In that respect, optimism is useful even if it isn't rational, because if everyone was realistic then they would probably give up, and then things definitely would get worse.
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Jul 6, 2018 16:19
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Caros posted:We've also back slid recently, and have serious issues with things like income inequality. But we trend towards progress. Things should, in the long run at least, get better rather than worse. I dunno, it isn't really clear that we're going to see a trend towards progress in the future. If you're talking about the US specifically, it's not clear that the net result of positive strides on certain social issues and negative ones materially is positive, and we've reached a turning point of sorts where future generations can't expect to be materially better off than earlier ones. If you're talking about the world, then the social progress you mention is far from universal and certainly isn't guaranteed to continue (especially with the rising of far right movements throughout a lot of the developed world). edit: It also depends whether by "optimism" you mean "expectation of a good future" or "expectation of a better-but-still-bad future." The latter is reasonable to expect, since the global poor have become somewhat better off, largely due to improvements in technology, etc. But there's no clear path to them actually not being poor, at least as things stand now. The figures OwlOfCreamCheese posted largely represent picking the low-hanging fruit of technological/scientific progress and the resulting increased productivity, but we can't expect that trend to continue, since our current economic "paradigm" is already starting to tear at the seams. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 16:59
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Ytlaya posted:. But there's no clear path to them actually not being poor, at least as things stand now.  seems like there is and has been for a bunch of countries and a majority of the world.
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Jul 6, 2018 17:21
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, the world sucks and it's a fight to keep progress happening instead of it being an automatic thing but it's mostly getting better over time, not worse. Eh. Some of these are subject to definitional quibbling, at the very least. Like the slavery one; I suppose I'll accept that forced labor as punishment for a crime (aside from political offenses) doesn't count, but does the treatment of foreign workers in Qatar qualify as slavery? Does ISIS qualify as a country? Reasonable definitions could yield a number higher than 3 there, I think. New HIV infections are down, but that doesn't tell us the numbers of deaths attributable to AIDS or the number of people living with HIV. And of course as the graph itself shows, HIV/AIDS is a new problem that arose just a few decades ago, whereas many of the other charts use much larger timescales. The number of nuclear warheads doesn't mean much; what really matters is the number of countries that have them, which has increased. Women have the theoretical right to vote almost everywhere, but many of the 194 countries don't have elections in any meaningful sense. Which brings us to the most definitionally tricky one: democracy. I think most people here will agree that democracy, or at least liberal democracy, has been on the decline pretty much everywhere except Tunisia over the past few years. This is obscured by the binary measurement of democracy/non-democracy and by ending the graph in 2015. And of course, scholarly articles published is a poor measure of scientific progress. I'm not going to be all doom-and-gloom here; most of the non-HIV public health metrics show genuine progress, and the world is still probably more democratic now than it was in 1988 or so. But there's plenty of reasons for pessimism as well as optimism.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:22
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Silver2195 posted:Eh. Some of these are subject to definitional quibbling, at the very least. Like the slavery one; I suppose I'll accept that forced labor as punishment for a crime (aside from political offenses) doesn't count, but does the treatment of foreign workers in Qatar qualify as slavery? Does ISIS qualify as a country? Reasonable definitions could yield a number higher than 3 there, I think. I think the graphs are very intentionally a range from very frivolous (number of movies/cell phones) to very serious (child death, war death). To show a range from "big issues like war and disaster and starvation are getting better" but also to address the followup of "what about ME?" like if they only had the big issue ones people would say "yeah, so their lives are getting closer to mine, so what!" and if they just had the first world problem ones people would say "so I got a cell phone, people in africa are still starving, so what?" and by showing both it's "less people are starving and you got a cell phone" to show improvement across a range of life situations. If everything was already perfect in your life 20 years ago then even you have a lot more movies to watch.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:30
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think the graphs are very intentionally a range from very frivolous (number of movies/cell phones) to very serious (child death, war death). To show a range from "big issues like war and disaster and starvation are getting better" but also to address the followup of "what about ME?" My point is that it's questionable whether some of these even measure actual progress, in part because a lot of them are using one straightforward statistic to measure something more complex. The issue with number of movies isn't even that it's frivolous, but that it's a imperfect metric of things people actually care about, like the quality of movies.
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Jul 6, 2018 18:38
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Silver2195 posted:My point is that it's questionable whether some of these even measure actual progress Then ignore them, it seems like the measures of "real" problems like war and famine and death and disease and crime are getting better and it's just the fluff that you are arguing with. Like it'd be silly to be like "well yes, the number of babies that die is dropping but I don't like this new ghostbusters movie as much as the old one so it's a wash"
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Jul 6, 2018 19:19
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War is a bit of a weird one given that until fairly recently we fought some of the most destructive wars ever and the world was under constant threat of total nuclear annihilation. Feels a bit like "well we've been building the tower progressively higher and balancing even more weight on top of it but it hasn't fallen over yet so we're safer than we've ever been!" The graph is that way too, "if you start counting from just before world war 1 and ignore the two really loving big spikes, we're more peaceful than we've ever been!" A bunch of those, to be honest, start basically at the peak and only show the downward trend, like leaded petrol, you know when use of leaded petrol was really loving low? Before the invention of the loving car. You know when nobody had HIV? Before it became a worldwide loving epidemic. You know when nuclear weapons were least prolific? Before they were loving invented. It takes some major myopia to look at the emergence of really serious recent problems and say "yes but we're getting better at them so they're not killing as many people as when we first caused them." Even the ostensible good ones like lowered fatality rates come with serious caveats about the ability to provide sustainably for the increased population with things like the massive fossil fuel use leading to likely ecological disaster in the future. Sure they might not be dying now but there is little to suggest that a shitload of people won't die fairly soon due to a massive uptick in famines and disasters. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 20:03
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OwlFancier posted:War is a bit of a weird one given that until fairly recently we fought some of the most destructive wars ever and the world was under constant threat of total nuclear annihilation. How could it be otherwise? All problems forever will hit a peak before declining. Would you only count problems that never grew and then declined from there? I am sure there is also thousands of examples of diseases that mutated and killed one person then died out without spreading so their peak and resolution came simultaneously. Any other sort of problem had to grow before it shrank so it seems unfair to count things that peaked as not counting. Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 20:35
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My point, is that looking at existing problems as if they just happened out of thin air, and then were solved, ignores the possibility towards a trend of increasing number and and scale of problems as a result of human activity. War, for example, yes if you ignore everything before and after the 20th century, we have solved war. If you look at it rather more accurately however, we have steadily escalated our capacity to destroy each other to the point that we now have the ability to end all human civilization as we know it but nobody has used that capability within the past 60 years. It's end of history nonsense.
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Jul 6, 2018 20:46
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OwlFancier posted:My point, is that looking at existing problems as if they just happened out of thin air, and then were solved, ignores the possibility towards a trend of increasing number and and scale of problems as a result of human activity. I mean, this seems like a worldview where there is not possibly a thing that could happen that would be interpretable as the world declining. If not just real but theoretical issues need to be counted.
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Jul 6, 2018 20:57
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If the world is in decline is it possible to determine what year was the best year?
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Jul 6, 2018 21:08
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Probably the one before the nuclear war or climate change induced worldwide crop failure or both.
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Jul 6, 2018 21:29
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Thanks for all the insightful replies, much appreciated. I will take some time tomorrow to contribute, right now I gotta sleep because Im mashed.
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Jul 7, 2018 00:09
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, the world sucks and it's a fight to keep progress happening instead of it being an automatic thing but it's mostly getting better over time, not worse. Stretch the line back 10k years and these are all tiny blips in the data. It would be reasonable to assume that everything will return to the long term mean.
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Jul 7, 2018 00:36
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:Stretch the line back 10k years and these are all tiny blips in the data. It would be reasonable to assume that everything will return to the long term mean. There has never been that sort massive global regression at any time period in the last 10k years so it’s a weird thing to count on happening soon. Like, not that regression is never possible but claiming it’s inevitable seems based on whiney depression and wishing for gods vengeance instead of any sort of observed historical pattern.
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Jul 7, 2018 01:02
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:Stretch the line back 10k years and these are all tiny blips in the data. It would be reasonable to assume that everything will return to the long term mean. This is a silly line of argument. Everyone isn't going to suddenly forget how to read. (You may have noticed that I've been arguing both sides here. That's because different parts of my mind are on each side of the optimism/pessimism line.) Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jul 7, 2018 |
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Jul 7, 2018 01:03
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Some things that may appear to be good are actually harmful. I believe the lifestyle popularized in the West is not sustainable long-term especially not with an ever growing population. You also need to take into account moral relativism. Your idea of good is somebody else's idea of bad. Let's assume the root of all evil is that which induces suffering. Our justice system in the West tends to punish those that do "harm" (cause others to suffer). The ultimate good would be the annihilation of suffering itself. There are several ways to go about this: instantaneously kill everything without notice, alter everyone's brain without their consent
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Jul 7, 2018 01:28
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Japex posted:Some things that may appear to be good are actually harmful. I believe the lifestyle popularized in the West is not sustainable long-term especially not with an ever growing population. You also need to take into account moral relativism. Your idea of good is somebody else's idea of bad. wait what
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Jul 7, 2018 01:41
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Japex posted:Some things that may appear to be good are actually harmful. I believe the lifestyle popularized in the West is not sustainable long-term especially not with an ever growing population. You also need to take into account moral relativism. Your idea of good is somebody else's idea of bad. Whoa, a galaxy-brain Thanos/JRPG villain take.
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Jul 7, 2018 01:52
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Japex posted:Some things that may appear to be good are actually harmful. I believe the lifestyle popularized in the West is not sustainable long-term especially not with an ever growing population. You also need to take into account moral relativism. Your idea of good is somebody else's idea of bad. Your 2edgy4me plan is that to avoid the sins of the western lifestyle killing people that we need to just kill everyone?
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Jul 7, 2018 01:57
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Japex posted:Let's assume the root of all evil is that which induces suffering No.
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Jul 7, 2018 07:21
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I think evolution caused humans to have a natural instinct to kill other humans who are not part of their tribe. So whenever one tribe felt that they were strong enough to destroy another tribe they would wage war. War has been a constant throughout human history, and the only time there wasn't much war was during times like Pax Romana where the Roman Empire basically defeated all its enemies, so there was no one to wage war against. I think we are in a very special time now where nuclear weapons have made it so those that possess them are scared of waging war against other nuclear powers, so WW2 might end up being the last major war for a long time. As for humans naturally just being dicks to each other, that can be fixed either through education or natural selection. It was only within the last century that human economies have progressed to the point where everyone can get a good education. The healthy economies also allow natural selection to thin the population from anti-social humans. So I'd say there is much optimism for the future.
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Jul 7, 2018 08:03
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Liquid Communism posted:Take a deep breath, and remind yourself of one solid truth: you can't save the world. What you can do is live the best life you can, by whatever values you honor, and do what you're able to make the lives of those around you better in whatever small way you're capable of. Yes I guess it all boils down to this in the end. It still is very frustrating to witness willful ignorance and pettiness and I wish there was an easy way to engage people, to get them to examine their thoughts and actions without sounding like a stupid hippie. Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah, the world sucks and it's a fight to keep progress happening instead of it being an automatic thing but it's mostly getting better over time, not worse. Numbers like these always put things back into perspective. Still, some of the things graphed can't be considered positives on their own, like the 48% growth in internet users. It's clearly a massive improvement compared to not having access to it, but I feel that it necessarily entails a huge cultural adjustment in order to handle something so unprecedented that's potentially very harmful and problematic. For me the issue with saying that things are now better than they were is that maybe the next step should be a collective push to upgrade our standards in order to actively build the foundations of a nicer future, instead of maintaining the status quo because these improved conditions of living make it more of a comfortable nest? Change is uncomfortable but now more than ever we have all the means to put in motion some pretty radical changes, like for example phasing out factory farming and drastically cutting down meat consumption. Or re-evaluate the role and importance of religion in all cultures, not only in the West. OwlFancier posted:It takes some major myopia to look at the emergence of really serious recent problems and say "yes but we're getting better at them so they're not killing as many people as when we first caused them." I agree Japex posted:Some things that may appear to be good are actually harmful. I believe the lifestyle popularized in the West is not sustainable long-term especially not with an ever growing population. You also need to take into account moral relativism. Your idea of good is somebody else's idea of bad. I know I sound stupid like a stupid nerd whenever I say this but I truly believe that a global cultural and societal homogenization is more than necessary for the future of mankind. What I mean is a positive homogenization rooted in and aware of national and cultural differences, but an homogenization nonetheless. It might be too much to ask of most people though, at least as long as blind pride in one's origins and culture will keep being nurtured and passed on as instinct.
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Jul 7, 2018 09:50
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qkkl posted:I think evolution caused humans to have a natural instinct to kill other humans who are not part of their tribe. So whenever one tribe felt that they were strong enough to destroy another tribe they would wage war. War has been a constant throughout human history, and the only time there wasn't much war was during times like Pax Romana where the Roman Empire basically defeated all its enemies, so there was no one to wage war against. I don’t really agree that humans are naturally violent. History is obviously violent, but humans themselves are not inherently violent, and I don’t believe we have any “instinct” to kill other humans. I think the opposite is more true. We have to be conditioned over long periods of time to kill other humans, and we have to jump through psychological hoops to dehumanize our enemies before we are comfortable with killing them. There have been and still are many pacifist human tribes and societies throughout the world, but they tend to be very small. Here is a page from the University of Alabama Anthropology Department about some of them: https://cas.uab.edu/peacefulsocieties/ Some of these groups do not even have words for murder or war in their language, and do not have any concept of “bravery”. If they are confronted with violence from another tribe, they immediately run away. If there is any kind of conflict between families or members of the group, they move out. They avoid confrontations at all costs. The problem though, is that these pacifist groups tend to be conquered or destroyed or exploited by those humans who aren’t pacifists. So the world ends up looking like everyone is violent. It can be hard to believe sometimes that humans are not inherently violent, especially living in America in the 21st century. I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but here we are constantly surrounded by violence or the glorification of violence. Outside of an Amish community, we are surrounded every day by violent media, movies and games. The news media reports on violence constantly, and Americans love to jerk themselves off over how cool guns and violence are, and how cool and powerful the US military is. This is just America though, and we tell ourselves these things because we are a nationalistic people and it makes us comfortable living in a globe-spanning empire founded on racism, slavery and genocide. This is not universal human behavior though, and it can be changed. We humans are very adaptable, we can be taught just about anything, and our cultures are extremely diverse. I’ve never been a very optimistic person, and for most of my life I’ve been a depressed misanthrope. Studying anthropology though has made me change my views a bit, and I’m more optimistic than I used to be about what humanity is capable of. We do seem to be progressing as a species, but it is a slow and awful struggle.
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Jul 7, 2018 11:02
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Every thing is hosed, the environment is coming apart, more and more people believe the ridiculous poo poo we thought we dropped hundreds of years ago and the majority of people will actively resist painfully obvious good things if they are not thought up by "their" side in the political game. Also no one seems to be aware the current 3/400 years of (more or less) general democracy is a flash in the pan of a normally poo poo human life cycle.
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Jul 12, 2018 01:33
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504 posted:Every thing is hosed, the environment is coming apart, more and more people believe the ridiculous poo poo we thought we dropped hundreds of years ago and the majority of people will actively resist painfully obvious good things if they are not thought up by "their" side in the political game. Everything in this post is true, but it's also true that this is the time in history where the average person almost anywhere on the planet is by far the best off as far as living conditions and access to medicine and just general wealth goes. The environment getting hosed is a really legitimate concern, however. I'm not an optimist in general at all, but most of the indicators are still looking positive for our species as a whole.
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Jul 12, 2018 08:29
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If anything, looking at 10k years should make you pretty optimistic. The setbacks from the early 2000s have been difficult after the brief end of history period but by almost all measures things are getting better globally. From time to time we get into local minima with a recession or some wars but even those aren't as bad as it used to be. Climate change is definitely a relatively new problem but we're also in the best position ever to do something about it. Trump and his buddies like Putin, Orban and Duterte are definitely a worrying and something that should be fought but again, it's manageable. Just go look back at the insane poo poo going on in the world in the 60s, 70s or 80s. This is child's play.
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Jul 12, 2018 09:39
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Do you think we would be here today if the Dark Ages never happened and somehow we all got nukes a few hundred years ago, or if climate change started ramping up in the 1500s instead of now? I don't. We're only here now because we did not have the capability of killing ourselves off in the past. Do you seriously think we can go another 10,000 years without a nuclear war? 10,000 years is actually not a very long time in this regard either. Try 100,000 or 300,000 years. I don't. Just because we were lucky enough to make it through the last half-century without dying just shows that over time we will be unlucky.
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Jul 12, 2018 14:15
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Mozi posted:Do you think we would be here today if the Dark Ages never happened and somehow we all got nukes a few hundred years ago, or if climate change started ramping up in the 1500s instead of now? Climate change won't be able to destroy us, just reduce our living area a lot. Nuclear warfare is a real issue, but it won't be forever. All these things are real problems, but they are also not permanent. Either we last through them, or we won't. All will be as it should be either way.
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Jul 12, 2018 14:28
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Let's regroup in 10,000 years and I'll give you 20 bucks if I was wrong.
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Jul 12, 2018 14:36
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Mozi posted:Let's regroup in 10,000 years and I'll give you 20 bucks if I was wrong. It's a deal.
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Jul 12, 2018 14:38
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At $20 present value I'm in too.
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Jul 12, 2018 15:11
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Nurge posted:Climate change won't be able to destroy us, just reduce our living area a lot. Nuclear warfare is a real issue, but it won't be forever. I mean, this is technically true, climate change will destroy a lot of us, and nuclear war indeed cannot happen more than once in rapid succession. But I don't know if I would describe either of those positions as optimistic.
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Jul 12, 2018 16:42
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OwlFancier posted:I mean, this is technically true, climate change will destroy a lot of us, and nuclear war indeed cannot happen more than once in rapid succession. The first one is already a reality, there's nothing we can do to stop it at this point, just mitigate the damage. It's not an extinction level event however. Nuclear war could easily be, but there's no reason to believe that it would remain so for the next thousands of years.
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Jul 12, 2018 17:10
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I'm not sure that "may not kill literally everyone immediately" is cause for optimism about the future either...
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Jul 12, 2018 17:11
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