Comment by Retric
10 months ago
That negative view doesn’t match the underlying reality of the world today. We’re simply getting a closer look at just what most people are like on social media/reality TV/streaming etc. Meanwhile the past sucked.
Consider what are the major issues right now that aren’t being addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low, climate change has been met with vast investments in solar/wind/batteries/EV’s etc, there’s suddenly effective drugs for obesity, poverty’s down, medicine keeps advancing and antibiotic resistance is being slowed down by better methodologies, etc
The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.
Perhaps… but for a couple decades after the Berlin wall fell, it had sorta seemed like we (collectively) were figuring it out. Granted, 9/11 damaged that narrative, but that was "barbarians" attacking "civilization." The assumption was that winning the war on terror could end history the same way the fall of the Soviet bloc was supposed to.
Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe, and US allies are engaged in ethnic cleansing in the Middle East. The current American government is overtly fascistic, and now that they've admitted they're seeking to extra-judicially imprison citizens in El Salvador, I don't think that's even up for debate anymore.
I think people are increasingly coming to believe that we'll never figure it out. Technology will advance, but humans are liable to stay the same forever. In light of this, utopian science fiction begins to feel naive. The most optimistic story we can stand is about humanity temporarily prevailing against its own worst impulses, rather than featuring the kind of… solved society that something like Star Trek envisioned.
> Perhaps… but for a couple decades after the Berlin wall fell, it had sorta seemed like we (collectively) were figuring it out.
> Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe
Maybe you simply weren’t paying attention? There’s been several expansionist land wars in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union, it took 3 years ignoring civil wars.
“The First Chechen War, also referred to as the First Russo-Chechen War, was a struggle for independence waged by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the invading Russian Federation from 1994 to 1996. After a mutually agreed on treaty and terms, the Russians withdrew until they invaded again three years later, in the Second Chechen War of 1999–2000” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War
Then there’s the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia.
It’s arguable if this is even a separate war after the initial Annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.
So no there hasn’t been several decades of peace after the 1991 fall of the USSR. It’s been the same crap for centuries with different governments playing shockingly similar roles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_betwee...
I think that we are approaching a "solved" state of society, but that solution involves some level inequality. It is "solved" in the sense that a game of Monopoly is "solved" and approaches steady-state as one player wins. Hypernormalization is a good movie that presents this thesis.
> Consider what are the major issues right now that aren’t being addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low, climate change has been met with vast investments in solar/wind/batteries/EV’s etc, there’s suddenly effective drugs for obesity, poverty’s down, medicine keeps advancing and antibiotic resistance is being slowed down by better methodologies, etc
> The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
> Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.
Whether a lot of these changes are good/optimistic or bad/pessimistic depends a lot on your political stance.
Yes, society is very divided.
Are you including anything blind how accepting mainstream society is in the US in that assessment? Because there’s other examples like abortion, lower crime, etc are definitely seen as positives by the other side of the political spectrum.
Really I’m not sure what specific political ideology would measure the world as going downhill by their stated goals.