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How Bad of a World Are We Really Living In Right Now?
New submitter Y.A.A.P. writes: Slate has a surprisingly relevant article of the state of the world today. A reasonable number of graphs and statistical comparisons show that our world is more peaceful than it has been for a long time. The article tells us that, despite what most news outlets (and political candidates) tell us, The World Is Not Falling Apart. Well, not from violence, at least.
I just finished watching the movie Tomorrowland yesterday. It was a bit of a let-down ... good acting, but the story made the movie weaker than it should have been.
But, hidden within it was this very insightful gem:
"In every moment, there is the possibility of a better future. But you people won't believe it. And because you won't believe it, you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality. So you dwell on this all-terrible future and resign yourselves to it for one reason: Because that future doesn't ask anything of you today." -- David Nix / Hugh Laurie
We like being pessimists when it comes to our future. When we imagine a brighter future, then we are responsible for doing what is necessary to create it. But when we imagine a bleaker future, there's nothing we have to do to make it a reality. We can just live as hedonists until our passing.
I'm sure you mean "education" as the indoctrination of peoples with beliefs that you yourself support of course. The rest deserve a subjectively diminutive label. Guess what? You're part of the problem.
So Syrian refugees should stop complaining because "ignition of underwear, and other mundane accidents, kill more Americans than terrorist attacks"? So apparently by "we" they mean Americans only... but how can they write "the world" and mean the USA?
Clearly we are getting better at stuff, but for certain things, raw numbers are more important than percentages.
Suppose there was a just a single serial killer out there that killed one person every year for the past 25 years. Population doubles every 23 years or so. So it looks like he has cut his death rate in half, when it has actually stayed the same.
Ignore the politicians that talk about how bad things are. That is a straight out lie. But are things really getting better or are we simply adding more people that don't have the same problems that the oldsters had? That's a different story.
Personally, I think we are actually doing better. But it's not as cut and dried as the story seems to think it is.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Or are there other interpretations that explain why it *seems* bad?
Enduring and worsening (I don't know about the worsening part) income inequality, with automation and globalization likely to make income inequality even worse, and automation predicated by many to lead to widespread under/unemployment?
The environment getting much worse -- mass deforestation, global warming, declining fresh water supplies, much of it abetted by ever-spiraling population growth?
While it's true we don't actually worry about a US/Soviet nuclear exchange every day, the number of states with nuclear weapons has increased and the newer states that have them or are working on having them are less stable or have chaotic or messianic motivations.
The nature of some of our conflicts seems more intractable due to the lack of state actors involved and in some cases leaving states that are marginally viable or stateless altogether (Libya, parts of subsaharan Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria).
It seems too simple to just dismiss a sense of pessamism as human nature and media styles.
No, it just means that as education prevails, people are less prone to fall for insane cults.
The anti-vaccination craze? Fad ketosis dieting? Near-worship of media figures like the Kardashians? Climate change skepticism? I'd go on but that's already more than enough to refute your statement.
The people who disagree tend to be fundamentalists, communists, and Luddites.
Cheap name calling. If this is the best your education can muster, it has obviously failed you.
(Although, it did get you modded highly. Another refutation of your original thesis.)
The past is often misunderstood.
A major reason for this is selection bias. The perspectives that generally survive from the past, are the perspectives of the elites. Impoverished people could not afford to create stories, literature, artifacts which represented their points of view.
So, it is not surprising if one's intuitions about the past, when past on the surviving material, give a very biased view: It can create the impression that people lived relatively well, when really it was just the elites' lives that you're imagining.