Comment by rglover
5 days ago
I came to comments first. Thank you for sharing this quote. Gave me a solid chuckle.
I think people are going nuts because we've drifted from the dock of a stable civilization. Institutions are a mess. Economy is a mess. Combine all of that together with the advent of social media making the creation of echo chambers (and the inevitable narcissism of "leaders" in those echo chambers) effortless and ~15 years later, we have this.
People have been going nuts all throughout recorded history, that's really nothing new.
The only scary thing is that they have ever more power to change the world and influence others without being forced to grapple with that responsibility...
> I think people are going nuts because we've drifted from the dock of a stable civilization.
When was stable period, exactly? I'm 40; the only semi-stable bit I can think of in my lifetime was a few years in the 90s (referred to, sometimes unironically, as "the end of history" at the time, before history decided to come out of retirement).
Everything's always been unstable, people sometimes just take a slightly rose-tinted view of the past.
> Everything's always been unstable, people sometimes just take a slightly rose-tinted view of the past.
No. For the most of history people could look decades into the past and be quite confident that things would be the same decades in the future. The only aspects that mostly changed were local leaders and maybe some fashions. A farmer was a farmer and a carpenter was a carpenter and their sons and grandsons likely too.
Ever changing times with regards to technology and professions is a rather modern thing.