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I think evil has always had the upper hand in history, in some way or another. We didn’t get to this point on the backs of our best people.
What makes this new era so weird is that the bad guys have won so hard that it’s begun to trickle down to the stupidest, least creative, most inept evils in our society. They used to be the fodder we chewed through as a society to distract from the worse stuff higher up the chain.
Evil used to be clever.
Been wandering if greed/power is actually the Great Filter of the Fermi paradox looking at the world we live in. The "evils" just keep getting worse...
looks at the 40k Universe
...I dunno.
I guess it kinda depends on how much greed was around in the dark age of technology
Life is a lot less brutal today than it was 200 years ago, though.
Wait for the environmental changes and the mass extinction event to break your knees because you're overdue on your vig
I'm not saying the "evils" won't get worse in the future, just saying that for a long time they've actually been lessened dramatically.
We can acknowledge that things have been getting better for a long time, and work to keep that going for the future, without diminishing or downplaying the serious issues we face today.
Things haven't been getting better, we've just gotten a lot better at deferring the negative consequences of our actions. In many cases entire generations can go by now without having to suffer the consequences of their actions, but those consequences are still coming.
As mentioned elsewhere, global child and infant mortality has gone from around 50% to around 5%. That counts as an example of something getting a lot better in my book.
But fair if that's not what you mean. What would better look like for you?
Massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and pollution in general, massive reduction in both poverty and homelessness (ideally homelessness would be eliminated, there's literally nothing stopping that from happening), access to healthcare as a fundamental human right, and massive reduction in wealth inequality would be a good start. On top of that we need better democracies (nothing has fundamentally improved on that front in hundreds of years), and equal protection of rights and access to justice for everyone, not just for the rich, those with the "right" color of skin and who happen to believe in the "right" delusion.
The EU has done a bit for a lot of these points in theory but the execution in many cases has been sloppy, haphazard, and generally ineffective. The rest of the world is looking a lot worse and in many cases is actively regressing. While individual countries at various points in time have seen improvements in individual areas in many cases those improvements were short lived as the various elements of humanity that oppose progress for selfish reasons chip away at and eventually destroy these small gains.
Our science, technology, and medical knowledge do constantly improve, but when all of that is then used for warfare and squeezing profit out of the suffering and misfortune of others the net effect is negative.
It seems like it's almost a law of nature that for every gain and improvement humanity makes in one area, we must have an equal negative impact in another.
You say that as someone rich enough to be posting on Lemmy and therefore probably part of the global 1%, or close to it. Remember that the worldwide median household income is still only around $3,000/year.
For sure, I'm not saying this based on my own privileged experience, I'm saying this based on the data. 200 years ago even the richest countries had around 50% child and infant mortality. Now the global average is 4.3%. We can acknowledge the tragedies of today while also celebrating the immense progress we've made at a global level.
But most of its "brutal-ness" of contemporary life is not about natural disasters, diseases or circumstances that go way beyond our reach.
It's because us humanity. We (stilñ) are brutal and cruel and unforgiving and relentless.
And we have the courage of calling ourselves "civilization".
And yet it is through compassion and the progress of civilization that we have defeated the brutality of the past.
Even today, most deaths globally are due to diseases that we are working hard to cure, with only around 1% dying due to violence.
Uhhh pretty sure we haven't defeated brutality. At all. If you don't believe me just ask Palestinians, the Uyghurs, inmigrants.
Most of what you call "civilization" has been build thanks to wars.
Not all brutality is defeated, but if you consider children dying a brutal thing, we have significantly lessened the brutality, and at a scale much greater than the tragedies of the Palestinians and other persecuted peoples.
Some of civilization is built with compassion, understanding and collaboration. Possibly even most. We can celebrate and emulate those victories without belittling the suffering still happening.
I was thinking of this recently too. Even if there was life out there, maybe they're just watching to see if we can make it past the Great Filter or not and destroy ourselves.