PP: People Suck - fordsfords/fordsfords.github.io GitHub Wiki

This is nothing new. Most ancient religious texts concern themselves greatly with the bad things that people do.

I used to be convinced that humanity was getting better. Certainly life in general is better than it used to be. Technological advances in medicine, transportation, energy production and distribution, food production and distribution have made the lives of the vast majority of people on the earth better than 100 years ago. (And life 100 years ago was much better than 200 years ago. And so on.)

So sure, the lives of people are better, but people themselves are not, at least not by much.

For example, people finally abolished slavery. And in the US, the thing that replaced it was sharecropping, Jim Crow, red-lining, and any number of other forms of then-legal discrimination, which weren't much better than slavery. Jim Crow was finally abolished, as have been most forms of legal discrimination, but there are still millions of people who are legally in forms of wage slavery, which is flourishing in the digital gig economy. This is an improvement over old-fashioned slavery in that there is some generational upwards mobility (although social ills may limit that), but tell that to an immigrant who works 16 hours a day for barely enough to keep his family alive.

But the thing that probably bothers me the most is the post-truth notion that expertise in general, and science in particular, are untrustworthy. In Western society (the only society I have any hope of commenting on), belief in a flat earth had died to trivial numbers ... until the rise of social media empowered people to discovered geographically-diverse like-minded groups. This gave people permission to hold unpopular opinions, which is its own form of attraction, resulting in huge numbers of anti-VAXers, flat-earthers, climate change deniers, and so on. It's cool to be an outcast so long as you have a crowd of fellow outcasts telling you how cool you are.

So we took a step forward with slavery, and a step backward with truth. A step forward with religious tolerance, and a step backward with civil tolerance. On balance, I think humanity has improved its morals a little in the past thousand years, but not much. And while I used to think this progress was growth, I now see it as a leaf blowing here and there in the wind. Our lives are a million times better than 500 years ago, but people are still morally in the Stone Age.

And by the way, I suck too. I tell myself that I suck less than average, but I'm not sure that's true.

(Bertrand Russell once said, "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." He might praise me for my self-examination, but he also understood that intelligence won't necessarily save the world. Then again, you don't need to be a genius to know that.)

The thing is, we can't help it. Several million years of evolution selected for the characteristics of being mistrustful, paranoid, aggressive, fearful, and clannish. Humans evolved a tendency to form hierarchies. Leaders want followers, followers want a leader. Humans also evolved social cohesion, which means people want to belong to groups. Safety in numbers. Believing the truth is only a survival advantage if it directly benefits you. Tigers are dangerous. This kind of berry is good; that kind bad. A lever can help you move something that your muscles alone can't budge. If all else fails, use brute strength to get your way.

The characteristics of people that disturb me are the very characteristics that led to our survival as a species in a world that wasn't rooting for us.