The one encompasses the whole

[cmdr_zoom]

I often find myself hating the rest of my nation/gender/race/etc. (Actually, "hate" is probably too strong; "depressed/greatly disappointed by" is more accurate.) In fairness, most of the time I do include myself.

It's really for the same reasons, too. Sure, we could, in theory, stop killing, raping, lying, stealing, etc and be decent to each other, treat each other like true equals and all that. Just like I could, in theory, eat healthier and lose some weight and keep better hours and finish the projects I should be working on. Am I going to? No. Are we going to? Probably not. Because it's easier to keep going on this way, being selfish and unfair and satisfying short-term wants at the expense of the long-term. Because we're human. Some days that word is an excuse; others, a curse.

My natural urge is to escape, to get away from all that and put it out of my mind, but oddly, most places I go have other people. And even when I really am alone, there's one still there to ruin everything.

Friends tell me I'm a good person. Some express similar optimism about humanity in general. Some times it's hard to believe either.

Comments

[seawasp]

The problem is that people want *no* war, *no* rape, *no* bad stuff. They're not satisfied with "orders of magnitude less than in prior times in Earth's history".

That's well and good, the old "reach should exceed one's grasp" bit, but it's a denial-based aspiration. We do irrational things not "because we are human" but "because humans are animals like any other, only smarter". We still have -- and unless we want to engineer us into something utterly different, will ALWAYS have -- the basic instincts and reactions of the animals to which we are related. This will result in actions which are reprehensible from the point of view of an idealized civilization that doesn't want to admit that human beings will always end up with some percentage of them doing Bad Things -- that there is, short of universal constant monitoring by passionless controlling machines or something like that, no possible way to eliminate crime, hatred, prejudice, etc. Eliminate one form of prejudice, there'll be another, unless you make everyone identical. And KEEP them that way. We've got instincts to promote our close group, our herd or clan identity, and to exclude the others.

I don't find it depressing to recognize that People Will Screw Up and some of them will just plain be BAD people. Or even that sometimes perfectly GOOD people will have a moment -- or a week -- in which stresses and events conspire to make them into monsters they'd never even have imagined before.

I'd find it more depressing to imagine that we'd be willing to go to ANY lengths to prevent it. In order to do good, you need the actual, as well as potential, option to do bad.

As Marcus put it on Babylon 5, "You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair? And all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?"

Humanity's heroic moments, good choices, grand achievements, are only shown in greater relief because they ARE the achievements of humanity, not of perfect beings who AREN'T really subject, like us, to temptation, weakness, impulses of the subconscious that we would rather weren't there.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

The problem is that people want *no* ... bad stuff.

Sure, I'll cop to that. I tend to be rather absolutist, as most long-time readers know - another personal flaw. What's the medium, though? How much human misery should we simply shrug and accept?

They're not satisfied with "orders of magnitude less than in prior times in Earth's history".

Do we really have that, though? Really? Are we likely to at any time in the near future? 'Cause to me, it looks like pretty much how it's always been. (I imagine this might get into issues of how much one might be expected to be aware of, personal experience vs. mass media, etc.)

Your point that there's probably no way out other than large-scale, probably non-consensual social engineering is taken. So I guess we're just fucked for all time, huh? Either by More of the Same (aka the Human Condition, Meet the New Boss), or by "solutions" that are just as bad or even worse violations of the self.

[seawasp]

They're not satisfied with "orders of magnitude less than in prior times in Earth's history".

Do we really have that, though? Really? Are we likely to at any time in the near future? 'Cause to me, it looks like pretty much how it's always been. (I imagine this might get into issues of how much one might be expected to be aware of, personal experience vs. mass media, etc.)

Yes, we do, so inarguably that it's almost incomprehensible. Orders of magnitude less interpersonal violence, rape, etc., in any of the civilized countries. VASTLY less abuse of children, of the crippled or infirm, of any who are Different. Compared to centuries past, we practically have NO WAR, and the effect of wars is much less.

It's the media effect, magnified by the news reporting effect. "Man Bites Dog" versus "Dog Bites Man". The first is news, the second isn't. "Countries have minor dispute, settle by talking" is not news. "Countries send armies marching, blow up neighbors", that's news. "College boy treats girls he meets with respect" isn't news. "Nice college boy kills three, rapes four" is news. "Boy does homework, minimal argument with parents" isn't news.

And media extremism trumpets the "news" even more. Panic and paranoia are the rule of the day. Terrorism? It's down in the noise in most areas, and even less of a problem here.

Even natural disasters are simply less of a disaster these days.

We live in the most peaceful, healthy, powerful, wealthy world that has ever existed in our history, and most indications are that, overall, it's getting BETTER, not worse. Except for when you listen to news programs and focus on the negative, at which point it seems we're in hell. But that's a selection bias, a presentation bias, and an accessibility of media bias combined and accelerated exponentially by each other.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

civilized countries

Speaking of selection bias. :/ How about when you take the world as a whole, without cheating? As for abuse of the different, that's not what I hear from the many less privileged than I, all over the net.

Even natural disasters are simply less of a disaster these days.

Tell that to people in the American South, or the Japanese East. Or Spain, or...

We live in the most peaceful, healthy, powerful, wealthy world

Thank you, Doctor Pangloss. *smirk* You realize that saying does not necessarily make it so? Look at all of those who doggedly claim that the American health care system is the best in the world, with no apparent awareness that, uh, it really isn't.

Heck, let's say you're right, that it's getting better, and we keep cranking it down by orders of magnitude until there's just one sufferer balancing the utopia of the rest, one entropy sink for the rest of the world. That's the Omelas scenario. That's the best that we can hope to achieve.

[seawasp]

civilized countries

Speaking of selection bias. :/ How about when you take the world as a whole, without cheating? As for abuse of the different, that's not what I hear from the many less privileged than I, all over the net.

Of course it's better globally as well -- there WERE no "civilized" countries hundreds of years ago, so simple averages bring it up, even if there were no other effect.

As far as the oppressed -- if they seriously think that they are JUST AS BAD OFF AS THEY WERE 200 years ago? Sorry, there's no comparison, and they bloody well ought to know that. Is it PERFECT? Hell no, there's a long way to go, but minorities of every type -- disabled, people with various mental issues, black, gay, and the big non-minority, women, have ALL improved their ability to act, to participate, to do pretty much everything in this society since I was a child (late 1960s), and to say that they haven't is basically to say that there's only two states: complete slavery, or total equality.

Even natural disasters are simply less of a disaster these days.

Tell that to people in the American South, or the Japanese East. Or Spain, or...

I certainly will, and the Japanese would doubtless agree. The panic-mongering Americans these days, I'm not so sure.

The Japanese were hit with a *9.0* earthquake, one of the most powerful natural forces on Earth. They were HURT, but they aren't stopped. They're recovering, and will continue to recover, VASTLY faster than they could have from a comparable disaster in the past (and go back a hundred years or two, and they've got much less infrastructure that they'd have to rebuild)

James Nicoll often posts on the subject of how his Nightmarish Future of improved living conditions seems to loom ever closer. If you insist on details of just how much things are better now than they were in the past, and you can't find it yourself, you could ask him, or I could; I don't have the figures to hand, but I remember what they were LIKE, and the fact is that there is almost no measure on which the world today is NOT better than it was a hundred years ago, or that world was better than it was a hundred years before that, and so on for some distance in time.

I could go on, but if we jump to the end we hit the ACTUAL meat of the discussion:

Heck, let's say you're right, that it's getting better, and we keep cranking it down by orders of magnitude until there's just one sufferer balancing the utopia of the rest, one entropy sink for the rest of the world. That's the Omelas scenario. That's the best that we can hope to achieve.

No, in Omelas it's some magical requirement that you must sacrifice one.

In the real world, it's acceptance that we are not perfect beings living in a perfect world that will never hurt us, and that even if there WERE some magical way to MAKE us never have problems, we wouldn't want it, because it would cost us who we are.

The key is that you seem to find this depressing, while I find it uplifting.

It's very interesting that this discussion popped up today, because it very closely parallels the episode of Naruto I watched just last night. You are espousing Pain's position: the world is filled with flaws and pain, and this grows to seem all-encompassing, so that either depression or rebellion and destruction are the only alternatives.

I am Naruto: I believe that human beings are, by and large, good people. And I accept that I have done things to hurt people -- mostly not deliberately, but still have -- and that most people do, at some point. I see that as a necessity of being human and being free. I don't think I -- or anyone else -- has a right to be 100% safe, because 100% safe is either death or a cushioned prison. I don't think I -- or anyone else -- has a right never to be offended, bothered, or in other ways inconvenienced, because that's how we define our borders; by bumping into each other.

[seawasp]

And to finish, since LJ insists on cutting me off at 4300 characters:


And we're basically good, decent creatures to each other, which is proven -- beyond any shadow of a doubt -- by the fact that we *HAVE* a civilization at all. Were human beings essentially savage, evil, or selfish to exclusion, we'd have stayed in the caves and plains-wanderer stage, and never gotten out of it.

Instead, we've build cities that hold -- and support -- more people at once than were in the entire world not all that many thousands of years ago. We've spanned the oceans and walked on the moon, we've conquered smallpox and set other diseases on the run or at least battled them backwards. We've made deserts bloom and found a way to stave off death itself when a heart stops. My own wife went into the hospital two weeks ago to have one of her organs -- a gall bladder -- removed; such an operation would have -- within my lifetime -- have been major surgery, laying her up for a couple of weeks and with a month or more of recovery. She was up and walking on the same DAY, and by a week she was basically fully recovered.

This world is filled with miracles, it is filled with people who would have been dead, or never born, in the past, it is a world of conflict and confusion but also of partnership and certainty.

People are too DIFFERENT to all agree, too DIVERSE to always live peaceably and without trouble. But that's also one of our strengths, that gives us the ability to do all the things that we do, to push at the boundaries of the world -- and of ourselves.

If you expect, or demand, perfection, then the world will always be dark. Me, I realize that a perfect world would have no place for me, my wife, or my children.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

We cooperate to a degree, yes - to take what we want from those who are weaker. Even in groups, any group, we find or invent reasons to make some inferior, and that's "Us"; it's nothing compared to what we do, or wish we could do, to the "Other." We judge and fight each other constantly, over territory or resources or differences of ideology and even more trivial things, or just because something in us is looking for a fight or to bleed off some of our "surplus population." Freed of our social inhibitions and expectations by intoxicants or anomynity or a uniform, we abandon even the pretext of "decent" moral behavior and inflict atrocities on those who "deserve" it, Because We Can.

We have improved our ability to take life hand in hand with, or even in excess of, our ability to preserve it; we have, in the last century, industrialized murder. Tribe against tribe, nation against nation, whole peoples wiped out or forced into hiding, to do the same against their former oppressors and killers when given the chance. One man can now kill hundreds, or thousands, with our new and improved tools. Which isn't to say many don't still use the old methods, the familiar and personal acts of brutality and abuse and cruelty, one (or a dozen) on one...

... and yet, how fortunate am I, how privileged, that to me the grim statistics of murder and rape, of sickness and starvation which could be relieved if only the food and medicine were actually given to those in need of it, are only numbers? I suppose you would hold that up as a good thing, that I can consider these daily tragedies with remote horror rather than having them right in my face.

[seawasp]

Basically we're completely on opposite sides, then. Your position, taken as it sits, implies that we could never have reached the point we're at. If our natural state was savagery, we wouldn't have risen above it. Plenty of people are in a position to do evil, and don't. Because they don't have to.

Yes, we've got more ABILITY to kill. Yet, equipped with new weapons that could be more devastating than any others, we HAVEN'T USED THEM. We have even started DISMANTLING them -- unprecedented. Countries do NOT disarm themselves. Ever. Yet we do, now. We realize we no longer need ten thousand nuclear warheads, and so we get rid of them.

Your glass isn't even half full, it's a quarter full and leaking. My glass is half full, and filling up one small raindrop at a time.

[meagenimage.livejournal.com]

Here, maybe this will help.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link.

[kowh.livejournal.com]

Pick a statistic, and find a chart that plots it over any timeframe over 10-20 years (up to the start of recorded history), and you'll notice a definite trend towards "we're better off". E.g. most these have a decided downward trend: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=kftp&tid=3

I find looking at how far we've come gives a much better perspective on how far we have yet to go.

[kowh.livejournal.com]

Can't believe I forgot gapminder: http://www.gapminder.org/

Play with that for awhile, it's great for seeing things like what people think of as the "third world" doesn't exist anymore (http://www.gapminder.org/videos/hans-rosling-ted-2006-debunking-myths-about-the-third-world/).