Comment by ganzuul
3 years ago
Making plans for the future is incredibly hard. People are not naturally cooperative so actually affecting positive change is always met with illogical resistance. This creates an environment which punishes any attempt to rationally discuss plans which are actually going ahead. The Saudi line city makes the dynamic obvious to anyone, without taking a stand on the merits of the project.
It's the strawman and steelman argument on a societal scale.
We also have a lot of skeletons in the closet. In some cases the tech is just exposing an underlying problem and not introducing anything new. Good tech also enables society do something about its foundation of sand.
> people are not naturally cooperative
Not perfectly cooperative, sure, but shockingly cooperative. Just recently I was sat in a commercial airline for 9 hours and struck by how much harder it would be to transport several hundred consciousness chimpanzees.
People are naturally cooperative. Just observe any disaster to see it. People come out of the woodworks to help each other.
They myth that when things break down, people revert to some ultra-survivalist hyper-individual bloodline protecting supersoldier has to die.
What happens is that society reverts to pre modern relationship templates where who you know and interpersonal skills reign supreme. Our modern society enables this myth and makes us more like it in our everyday lives than our natural cooperative base state.
I understand the concern. I meant that in the context of making plans people tend to diverge.
You are right in that in solving present problems people do converge.
It would be nice if people could follow plans to avoid having problems in the first place.