Part of the problem is plague, as in infectious disease. This factor drove us to evolve into preferring small separate tribes over big ones. Once your brain can’t keep track of all the neighborhood, it starts wanting to categorize folks into groups, and separate us from them.
In fact, all of civilization is in defiance of some base instincts, in which we presume people of different color, who speak different languages, who have different cultures or worship different gods, all are indicators that they are dangerous.
In the time before livestock (from which we caught bunches of infectious diseases, died a lot and developed immunities), a mutant influenza was deadly and strangers were dangerous. And this is seen as empires explored new worlds, exposed indigenous peoples to their array of diseases and wiped them out.
As a note, since germ theory, we replaced segregation with robust communal disease control. And even then, movements rise up to distrust vaccines, masking, social distancing and even washing hands. The same shit that happened during the COVID-19 epidemic also happened during the Spanish Flu epidemic.
So we never really had time to evolve to meet the expanding size of civilization, and had to fake it. In small groups there’s just not much political power to consolidate, but by the time we’re making villages and cities, we start seeing classes beyond tribesman and chieftain.
What is curious is that we’ve proven that political power and advantage saps away empathy and respect for your fellow human, so any time there is a significant power differential, the working class feels expendable according to the working class. (They aren’t, and some elites will preserve awareness of this, but it’s difficult to be a billionaire and still respect wits and education when vibes are so easy.)
It doesn’t help that the ownership class conspires among its own to preserve power within its group (all the while, individually contriving to seize the power of their peer for themselves – avarice is brutal), so anytime we see in history an attempt to create a socialist democracy, capitalist interests act to sabotage the effort, including killing the organizers and sending in military force to seize power and install a puppet junta.
So yes, we really are bad at this, and are not merely going to drive ourselves to near extinction, but are also killing off most of the species across earth.
Pretty sure most of the medicine were done by us in the last 100/150 years
True…but…
A lot of medicines are fully natural things that we’ve learned how to cultivate or synthesize with remarkable accuracy. Look at Aspirin/Salicylic acid (sourced from certain bark, iirc). Or Penicillin.
Insulin is another great example, something we’ve learned how to extract from pigs.
And now tons of medicines are biologic. We are finding all sorts of stuff in nature that we can borrow and make it grow inside of domesticated plants or animals.
When you get right down to it, everything we make came from the earth. Hell the phone I’m typing this on is really just a chunk of smart sand.
Maybe we can find a way to have both? Science, research, health care and technical innovation don’t need to go hand in hand with capitalism.
Well that’s not how you get endless record quarterly profit margins, silly
True if we’re mainly focusing on pharmaceuticals and devices but theres more to medicine than that.
Pretty sure medicine always existed and it’s only gotten a lot better in the last 100/150 years
Yes, losing half your children before they became teens used to be normal.
In addition, there were a lot of trees, fruit and water. But, the majority of the fruit wasn’t something humans could eat. It was simply there so that the plant could reproduce.
It took millennia of cultivation to get nice, juicy fruit like we have today. Even just a hundred years ago, a sweet orange was a rare treat.
For most of history, just getting enough calories every day was a challenge. The whole reason why debt, feudalism, war, etc. exist is that life was hard and sometimes people were willing to kill or die for the chance at something better.
A vast chasam exists between those that destroy and those that create. Unfortunately, the destroyers, having no limits (moral limits etc) become the “natural” rulers of this world. Ours is an upside down world. The more malevolent and destructive the more powerful these entities become.
They see us as sheep, hence the “Flock” surveillance system. The United States of America has always been an experiment, “The Great Experiment”. Hollywood casts it’s spells of unwarranted pride upon the masses, shepherding us into an all encompassing belief system built upon lies and deceptions. Through the Videodrome, depictions of violence unlocked the viewers mind for the Master Control Program’s invasive programming.
We weren’t gifted anything. And any species will expand to consume all the available resources. We’re just better at it than all the previous ones. The challenge now is to find an equilibrium, which is a totally new concept in the history of evolution on earth. The jury is very much out on this one.
Yeah its a mystery
Humans didn’t invent war.
War and murder surrounds us, everywhere, from micro to macro, as we feed on each other to live.
It’s a Murder Planet
Apathetic bloody planet. I’ve no sympathy at all.
The only other animals on the planet that go to war are ants. Most animals do not fight to the death, outside of predators going for prey to eat. And absolutely none of them have atomic bombs besides our stupid asses.
umm, have you never seen a pack of baboons or chimps fight?
This is incorrect, our close relatives go to war as noted already (and other animals besides, see lions vs. hyenas for example). And, animals fight to the death with frequency, also, even herbivores.
Atomic bombs are irrelevant to the topic, far more have been killed by other means for many thousands of years.
There is also a chimpanzee civil war that’s been going on for a while.
It’s pretty common amongst primates. I recalled some monkey tribes in South America warring over territory but I couldn’t find them.
Most animals do not fight to the death, outside of predators going for prey to eat.
The only reason this is true is because every moment of combat is dangerous - which means it is far safer to chase your opponent off, whether by intimidating them or wounding them. Humans are unique in that our tool use allows us to kill our enemies with a single blow. Animals besides ants that operate in large social groups can absolutely come into conflict with other groups, and engage in what can easily be considered warfare.
If you somehow managed to hand a rabbit a pistol and teach it how to use it, I guarantee there would be dead animals near its burrow.
It also makes sense because, in a fight, you of course would use your most intimidating weapon first.
Humans invented war? Tell that to ants, birds, bees, wasps, wolves, and millions of other animals. We just happen to be very good at it. If there’s one thing to be said about humans, it’s that we are ridiculously good at killing things.
I remember this was a thing in Larry Niven’s “Known Space” sci-fi universe. Humans had become super peaceful because we were too good at war. The way it was achieved however was to have everyone medically pacified, except for a handful of selected people for their insight…
Oh c’mon that’s like saying the cave painters of Lascaux invented cubism.
Yes, they both involve creating visual artifacts but one of them is orders of magnitude higher as a discipline. War as she is practiced today is a library’s worth of theory, history, practices, and knowledge.
Not to minimize the cave paintings. In their own way greater than any style, respectively.
That’s a silly analogy, if natural murder is analogous to cave paintings, modern war would be more suitably analogous to AI creations, not cubism. One cannot exist without the other either way. (we never get to AI slop without the cave painters before us)
Anyway, our planet is fundamentally violent, so of course we are violent. We know nothing else.
“Peace” is an ideal, and temporary, not the norm. Even as you look upon a quiet meadow, war is there should you pay attention. Maybe not for you at that point in time, but it’s there. Those cute bunnies feed those adorable foxes, and so on.
Peace is when the oppressed can’t fight back.
I get what and agree that is the peace some are aiming for but oppression is an act of violence. Allowing people to die from treatable conditions due to medical insurance issues is an act of violence. Allowing people to die of starvation while “surplus” crops are destroyed to keep prices higher is an act of violence. Peace occurs when resources are plentiful enough for all, and distributed fairly to all.
Cost of livin’ gets so high, Rich and poor they start to cry: Now the weak must get strong; They say, “Oh, what a tribulation!” Them belly full, but we hungry; A hungry mob is a angry mob. A rain a-fall, but the dutty tough; A pot a-yook, but d’ yood* no 'nough.
- Robert Nesta Marley
That’s a silly analogy, if natural murder is analogous to cave paintings, modern war would be more suitably analogous to AI creations, not cubism.
Er, sure. Fine.
Anyway, our planet is fundamentally violent, so of course we are violent. We know nothing else.
Mmmmnot sure where you grew up but over here we knew a lot more than just violence. Good food, for example.
Glad there’s no violence involved in the obtaining/creation of good food.
It is almost like society is complex
Only when the last tree has died and the last river poisoned and the last fish caught will we realize we cannot eat money.
Cree Native American proverb
First of all, we are a product of it. We also demand nutrition, like any other animal. We work by the same principles like any other animal. We just have a large neocortex, which allows us to solve complex problems, which other animals cannot. We use this to our advantage like any other animal would do. I am not saying that it is the right thing we are doing but we grew out of primitivism and have much more complex problems at hand now, which mainly need us to reject our tribal behaviour and move past it. Many of these large problems are due to our tribalism. Why should we care about the world? We care about our loved ones only. Why should I give money to people I do not know? I would rather give it to my close ones. Everything else is a potential threat. Our tribalism doesn’t function properly at this scale and we have to move past it somehow, while it is deeply natural for us to behave like this and it’s at small scale also beneficial and not harmful to others.
We work by the same principles like any other animal.
No we don’t. No other animal has the ability to use language the way we do. Or to conceive situations as we can. At least so far as 20,000 years of recent history has revealed. It’s not even close. We’re unbelievably, fantastically strange compared to all other animals.
Almost like, humans are some kind of outside species in a world full of organisms that otherwise work on the same principles.
What about birds, dolphins and wales then? They arguably also communicate in complex ways as we do through another type of “language”. Also on another note, animals also do use propositions, while this is still discussed in behavioural sciences, scientists are pretty sure that dogs for example do understand propositions too without having a language.
Also what makes us strage? Our species has lived through a lot of different states in history, which made us evolve more often than other species did, which makes us seem quite fifferent to other animals, while we are in construction still very close to other animals.
And compare us to chimps and bonobos. They are very similar to us in many ways except for the capabilities we excert through our neocortex, which is far more developed then theirs aside from some morphological differences.
And where do dolphines work on the same principles like ants? They are also extremely different, like we are to lets say pigeons.
I would call your argument invalid.
What about birds, dolphins and wales then? They arguably also communicate in complex ways as we do through another type of “language”.
Typo on the Cymru, but point taken. Human language is more expressive, possibly more conceptually far-reaching although we’ll never know. And if that doesn’t do it: opposable thumbs. Check and mate, cetaceans!
Koalas have even two oposable thumbs but are not able to use them intellectually. They are smooth brained, because their digestive system is highly specialized for breaking down eucalyptus and this needs a lot of energy, so development of higher intellect is impaired in these animals. Else the potential would be extremely high for these to evolve similarly to us intellectually. Having two opposable thumbs is even more advantageous than just one. You can see that in a few cases of polydactyly, where these cases have a second pointing finger. They use it like a second thumb and are far more capable in manipulating objects with one hand than non-polydactylic humans are. Koalas could do that too, if they would have evolutionary more energy left for their brain.
Understanding other languages that never developed from each other are extremely hard to analyze from one of the two perspectives and it even seems more primitive on first glance. I wouldn’t assume that dolphines are that intelligent to develop such a sophisticated language as we did with verbs, adjectives and what not but wales language has been tried to analize by correlating it with fitting propositions by creating a knowledgebase and it was found to be pretty sophisticated already.
Also as a cognitive scientist I have to say that our language might only seem from our perspective very sophisticated. If wales were more intelligent they would lough similarly about our weird noises we do with our mouths, because they are not built to understand our language, the same way as we are not built to understand their language.
Where meme
Didn’t you hear?
Screenshots of body temperature takes from Twitter technically count as Memes according to some definitions, these are what we’ll have to consume for the foreseeable futureWhere politics?
Capatilism was mentioned
It’s in here:
I hate takes that condemn the whole of humanity for the evil of a powerful handful. That’s basically conservative ideology.
If history teaches us one thing, it’s that there’s no shortage of horrible people.
I’ve always felt the primary takeaway from a broad history education is the nature of power and how it’s misallocation corrupts people. If your main takeaway from history is that “There were a lot of bad people” then I think you’re missing out on a lot of critical nuance.
If we were inherently good, that wouldn’t happen
First, nobody claimed that we’re inherently good either. Second, you definitely don’t know that for sure and wouldn’t be able to prove it if you had to. Third, the apparent need of some to reduce our conception of humanity to either good or evil is a loaded premise that is damaging and derailing to a more meaningful and useful understanding of humanity and should probably be unpacked on it’s own elsewhere.
Well, I’ll believe humanity isn’t evil when we turn around and start treating each other well and look after the planet and it’s inhabitants
It starts with you and me!
It’s religious nonsense, we’re all sinners.
if we’re all sinners, then religion can’t be nonsense.
Sin is a creation of religion.
Also its kinda true.
If you consider normal human behavior sin, sure.
Or just aberrant to living peacefully on a rich planet.
I can believe it.
Our species has repeatedly and reliably demonstrated its innate awfulness for the entirety of our history. If there is a way to exploit and be shitty to one another, we’ll not only commit it, but we’ll legalize it, normalize it, and pretend that not doing it is the weird thing.
Indigenous peoples worldwide learned how to exist sustainably and some have done so for thousands of years. Not a universal human issue although some societies do be that way.
To an extent, yes, but they also did all of the awful things the other societies did too, including slavery, killing people over religion, and war among others.
Humans just happen to be at the top of the food chain at this point in time. littereraly millions of other creatures have held the title before us, and millions more will after us. Circle of life an all that.
I don’t really see how this is important. Earth will heal once humans destroy themselves/their environment. Theoretically we should be trying to save earth for the next generation, but leaders think short term…. The next 3 months.
Earth will heal once humans destroy themselves/their environment
Depends on how ambitious we get with our fuckery. We could potentially create cascading environmental collapses that are bad enough to where we lose a huge chunk of biodiversity. Life will most likely continue on in some form, but it may never recover to be as complex and diverse as it is now.
It’s because of the mosquitoes
