It is kinda a central mental conflict right now for me - while I deeply sympathise with individuals, I dispise Humanity as a whole for what it is right now - what its doing and what its failing to do.
You need to take a longer-term perspective. Look at what our species has accomplished in a mere twelve millennia. We started out as a pack-social species of nomadic hunter-gatherers, who regarded all other packs as hated and feared competitors for scarce resources. Reexamination of ancient remains using modern instruments has disclosed the fact that
more than 50% of Paleolithic adults died as a result of violence. More people were killed by other people than by all other causes combined!
Since the invention of the technology of agriculture we no longer need to fight over food--as a species anyway, of course there are still a few benighted communities. Violence has been steadily abating. Genghis Khan was the high water mark, killing ten percent of the people his armies could reach with the transportation technology of his era. Compared to the Stone Age, it's fair to rephrase that as
only ten percent! The high water mark since then was WWII, whose military leaders succeeded in killing
only three percent of the people they could reach--which in the 1940s was
everybody--60 million people. Since then there have only been one or two conflicts with body counts over a
mere one million, and today we weep over a battle that kills one hundred people--that would have been a slow news day in 1944.
And yet, I have a rose tinted optimism about our future as a species - no doubt because of my Humanist ideology. So I am stuck between accepted my [somewhat justified] misanthropy at the risk of nihilism or having a somewhat unrealistic optimism to allow for existential humanism to give my life meaning.
Your optimism is reasonable. As we evolved out of the Stone Age, we have consistently used our uniquely enormous forebrains to
override the instincts passed down in our DNA. The obvious example is BASE jumping: no other non-flying mammal would step off a cliff. But more importantly, we're overriding our pack-social instinct and becoming steadily more
herd-social. In our cities we live in harmony and cooperation with complete strangers. But better than that, we now consider ourselves as kin to people on the other side of the planet who are nothing more than anonymous abstractions. The internet and cellular technology have even improved on that: we can send those people e-mails anytime we want, or even talk to them if we care to! One graphic artist in Israel has started a movement which so far has enlisted thousands of people in Israel and Iran, promising that they do not want to bomb each other, regardless of the propaganda their shit-for-brains theocratic governments keep spewing out.
Yes, there are still forces that conspire to reinforce our Stone Age instincts and divide the world into Us and Them. But the forces pulling us closer together become stronger with every new technology: agriculture-->city-building-->wheeled vehicles with domesticated animals to pull them-->writing-->sailing ships-->railroads-->electronic communication-->digital communication.
SciForums is a place of science, it says so in our name. So let's celebrate the achievements of science, engineering and technology in overcoming our Inner Caveman.
. . . . I think its asking too much of a 10,000 yr old civilisation to be perfect.
Actually the first cities in Mesopotamia were built 11KYA, a mere one thousand years after the Agricultural Revolution both permitted and
required our ancestors to stop chasing their food across the landscape and settle down in permanent villages. The technology of city-building spread rather quickly to Egypt, India and China. The folks on this side of the planet had to invent it for themselves so the Olmecs didn't figure it out until around 5KYA--hampered by the need to build their cities with
no draft animals! We've only recently managed to domesticate the bison, and AFAIK nobody has even bothered trying with the moose and the mountain goat. Oddly enough we have reindeer on this continent (we call them "caribou") but our Arctic people didn't try to domesticate them. Pigs domesticate rather easily but I don't think anyone anywhere has tried hitching one to a cart.
And then I think of all the good that humans do - of W.H.O. and Hawkins and Mozart and of my own ancestors who worked their asses of to gradually give me, in collaboration with countless other forgotten and unappreciated people, smartphones and GMOs and the internet. Perhaps we are not so bad after all. If this is it [it most likely is] and all we have is each other, its a fine idea to find meaning in improving life for all and purpose in doing whatever one can for our civilisation.
You are wise beyond your years.
And yet as I think this, I see the news, I see religious fanatics slinging shit [or bombs] and selfish leaders seizing power, I see the pope discourage condom use in the most Aids afflicted area in the world and third world children starving.
Don't get me started on religion. It's a relic of the Stone Age that we just haven't been able to shake off. Belief in the supernatural is what Jung calls an
archetype, an instinct programmed into the DNA in our synapses by evolution. Perhaps it was a survival trait in an ancient era whose dangers we can't imagine, or it might just be an unfortunate mutation passed down through one of our species's genetic bottlenecks. Fortunately some of us have mutated away from it: there has been no religion in my family for three generations.
And then I see other people do what they do - eat themselves to obesity because they have some or the other issue, gossip about neighbors, follow celeb relationships and watch "reality shows" while they grind out a job just for the money.
Sounds like a lengthy way of saying, "People aren't perfect." In aggregate each generation leaves the world slightly better than they found it, and that's what matters. Of course that isn't a monotonic phenomenon and there have been some astounding backslides, but averaged over 12,000 years we're doing very nicely, thank you. Let us have our weaknesses, especially if we enjoy them. Only a few hundred generations separate us from our Paleolithic ancestors, and that simply isn't enough time for our biology to evolve to fit this new reality we've built for ourselves. There is still an Inner Caveman inside each of us. We placate him with beer and TV and motorcycles and football and pizza and a domesticated wolf at his feet who thinks he's God, and most of the time that works. But every now and then he goes Paleolithic on us and does something that breaks the rules of civilization. Most of the time no serious harm is done and he sneaks back into his Barcalounger hoping nobody noticed. It's only when an entire community is exorted into going Paleolithic at the same time, that we have wars. And as many of us have noted, that exortation comes from our religious leaders as often as not. Sure, they blame the civil leaders. But it's a little facile to blame
only Hitler for the Holocaust, which was nothing more than the culmination of two millennia of violent antisemitism that was one of the
defining characterstics of European Christendom, and which was happily endorsed, or at least studiously ignored, by the vast majority of the European Christian population. The proof of this is that when the war was over and the Europeans were wallowing in contrition, they offered to do anything they could to make it up to their Jewish refugees
except let them come back and live among them again. The Brits actually pulled off the coup of getting rid of them permanently by
sending them to Palestine and renaming it "Israel"!
And then I think - Am I ever going to make a difference? Is anything worth doing?
Of course you are. As one of the
very many lucky people who have intelligence, a good education, and good mentoring from your elders, you will certainly be a productive member of society. But like most of us you may have to settle for accomplishing things that are merely bits and pieces of the grand scheme, none of which are obviously noteworthy individually. Make your company slightly more efficient and environmentally conscious; teach your children to be good adults; vote for the candidates who will lead civilization forward; perhaps write a poem or a song or a story that brightens someone's day and lifts him to a higher level of consciousness and productivity. You won't notice these things as you do them, and quite probably no one else will either. But in a "village" that now has seven billion inhabitants, you can hardly expect everyone's minute contributions to be noted, much less celebrated.
You will have to learn that there is honor in modesty: that just because you're not given credit for something doesn't mean that it wasn't the right thing to do. That usually happens in our 30s and 40s.
And then I go a full circle as I think - are these people really at fault here? Are they not doing just what they have been conditioned to do? I was lucky to have a good childhood, an early interest in science and a good, functional, supportive family. Is it not my duty, as some what has a better lot than others, to improve theirs?
Seeing that written by such a young person almost makes me weep. Thank you so much!
But as the circle completes again, I cant just find the motivation to do anything. And so I feel guilty and undeserving of what I have as the meaning in my life and my purpose for the future seep away like a handful of water.
We all go through these cycles. Don't worry about it. All you're telling us is that you're a fairly normal human, which is a
good thing. You're still young enough that your endocrine system is A) not quite in balance and B) powerful enough to override the rational part of your brain from time to time. Go jump up and down at a rock concert; play a sport; camp out amid some beautiful scenery; play with your dog. (If you don't have a dog, go out right now and get one. During the past 12,000 years they've gone through more than
ten thousand generations, so their instincts have evolved a lot faster and further than ours. They are much better adapted to civilization than we are, so they have a lot to teach us. Deep down inside, each of us is still his "ancestral wolf.")
This was not an issue at first and I know it's my problem to solve, but it's affecting everything now - my sleep, my studies, my healthcare; hell, I am even worsening at sports. Promises made months ago and deadlines set weeks ago are not being met & the days are blending together, day after day, week after week.
There is such a thing as "sub-clinical depression." On the one hand, this too shall pass, so you simply have to survive it without causing any serious problems for yourself or others. On the other hand, it would be worth talking to a professional, to learn from the experiences of the sixty bazillion teenagers who came before you and went through
exactly the same thing.
My parents have their own issues and as I am about to turn 19, I am feeling the squeeze of responsibility.
Bingo! A new force from the world of adulthood is making its way into your life. This is absolutely
not a problem you should expect to solve on your own. Props to you for bringing it here, but geeze the average SciForums member isn't much older than you, and even some of the grownups here might not be your best role models. Please do yourself (and the people in your life) a favor and find someone a little better qualifed to give you the advice you need! I may seem like a nice stable trustworthy adult, and at 69 perhaps I am, but
I never raised any children so I can only see your problem from your perspective, not from the perspective of an experienced elder of the tribe.
Btw, guess religious people do not have this issue to deal with, huh?
I see that you haven't lost your sense of humor!
Humans are violent, we just have to deal with that biological fact. If we weren't violent, we could not have come this far. Take comfort in the fact that modern societies are less violent than ancient ones.
Indeed. I gave the statistics above. Even in times not so ancient, we were more violent. The murder rate in European cities in the Middle Ages was about 100 times as great as in the most violent American cities like New York and Washington.
What's wrong with reality shows? I love the fishing and gold mining ones. These are real stories about real people.
We need stories, we need dreams. They are full of metaphors, which bridge the gap between reality and fiction. The give a simplified view of the universe that helps us make sense out of it. I am alarmed by the fact that the younger generation of Americans would rather watch ordinary people do ordinary things than be taught to dream.
I mean the shit ones, like music shows and the like.
What's wrong with the talent contests? We've had talent contests for centuries before television. "American Idol" has produced quite a few stars, and even the losers turn in astounding performances. "So You Think You Can Dance" is utterly amazing. Some of the routines these young kids develop on their own are incredible. And they too have gone on to become highly-regarded professionals.
Since the invention of television, entertainment has become a much larger industry than it used to be. There's always room for one more star. I've gone to see both Kelly Clarkson and Chris Daughtry in concert.
My advice to you if you want to keep your sanity is humor, sometimes at the end of the day you've just got to say "fuck the world...fuck the world and smile!"
It's been well established that laughter is good for our health. It releases beneficial endorphins. And one of the many great things about it is that it is contagious! When a person sees someone else smiling, the probability is that he will start smiling too.
One of the little things I try to do to make the world a tiny bit better is to just walk around smiling.
You need to be careful with stereotypes because it can create irrational illusions that can detach you from reality. I know more people who don't war, than who do war, yet humans are stereotyped as violent. That stereotype creates the illusion even peaceful people are violent? I need to forget what I see, and I play along with the illusion?
You need to recognize the fact that our modern, peaceful, cooperative life is built almost entirely on ideas that came into our heads via reasoning and learning. But deep down in the nether regions of our brain, there is still a caveman lurking.
One of the things we have done forever, to accommodate the needs of our caveman, is to play sports. Sports are quite violent, and they are genuine battles between you and an adversary. They activate many of the same areas in the brain as real combat. But the difference is that when the game is over, (usually!) no one is dead or even seriously injured. We're even able to get many of the same salutary effects from simply
watching other people play sports. I've never been a sports fan--like religion, it seems to be absent from my DNA. But I envy the people who can sit engrossed in a baseball/football/basketball/soccer/tennis game or some other kind of athletics. It must be so cathartic! I envy the people who paste a sticker on their car with the name and logo of their favorite sports team, who talk passionately about the last game on their lunch break, who know the names of every member of that team and their win/loss numbers back to 1928.
The blacks in America suffered slavery at the hands of white slave owners, yet I can't find one slave or one slave owner. Yet, the illusion created by the stereotypes makes it appear both are everywhere and I belong to one of the categories even without cause and effect. In the land of make believe the gullible rule.
No no no no no. You're ignoring a century and a half of history. Just because slavery was outlawed, racism did NOT go away. Euro-Americans had been taught for hundreds of years that Afro-Americans are inferior and cannot ever be able to function as ordinary citizens. After the Civil War they continued to confine them to separate villages, limit them to menial jobs, prohibit them from dating or marrying "white" people, and persecuting them for (often imagined) crimes just to remind them that we were better than them. They were treated only slightly better in the North: they didn't actually practice lynching (very often) but there were "sunset towns" everywhere, where Afro-Americans were allowed to come and work during the daylight, but after dark they had to be out or they'd be thrown out roughly.
Humans are actually getting less violent... You might feel better after reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature.
Indeed. We see the violence around us and wish it were less. If you had a time machine and could bring back somebody from the Roman, Greek, Persian, Egyptian, etc. Empires, they would be astounded at how peaceful our lives are.
With each passing decade, the percentage of the world population killed by government-sponsored violence keeps dropping precipitously. And make no mistake: since the beginning of the Iron Age around 2000BCE, governments have
always been the primary source of violence. Even in the Middle Ages, when those European city-dwellers were murdering each other, their armies were slaughtering them by the hundreds.
Seemingly subtler forms of violence, such as blaming or misinterpreting, can hurt more than being beaten up with fists and kicks and the like.
But it is very unlikely to kill you. Unless it drives you to suicide of course. And suicide wouldn't be such a problem if we didn't have so goddamned many
guns in America. If you feel despondent it is so easy to open a drawer and pull a trigger. If you have to slit your wrists in a bathtub or hook up an exhaust pipe to your car window or find the right combination of pills or figure out how to tie a noose, the mood is much more likely to pass before you actually accomplish it--and you're much more likely to still be alive when somebody finds you.
I live in America, and religion has no power or means to wage war, due to the separation of church and state. The atheists have control within the state, and the US has been in at least three wars in the past 10 years, yet religion is the one held responsible for warring by atheists.
But religion actually is responsible for those wars. It's Islam vs. Christianity: restarting the Crusades. 9/11 was an attack on the "Great Satan." Yes I know that Backward Baby Bush tricked us into thinking that Iraq was responsible for 9/11 because the Saudis are his daddy's partners in the energy industry and he couldn't let us start demanding that he bomb Riyadh. So it was politics that put the war in the specific place where it was put, but it was still religion that caused the war in the first place.
The data would be true if one said members of the Muslim religion like to war, since the data does show terrorism connected to this religion all over the world. But since that is true data, this is not pitched. It would be called profiling and is not allowed, since too much truth might upset alternate reality. It would help people gauge what is real and they might compare other sales pitch.
Muslims are like everybody else. 99.99% of them just want to make a living, support their families, and enjoy life. It's only a tiny minority of fundamentalists who believe in a warped meaning of
jihad that requires them to kill infidels. Unfortunately that tiny minority know how to foment unrest among the majority, or at least how to get them to donate money to the cause. Even moderate Muslims in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nigeria are sending donations to Islamic charities that funnel it to the madrassas in the Middle East that train the next generation of anti-American terrorists.
A liberal sales pitch is blacks were slave and the whites were slave owners. This may be true historically, but what does it have to do with the present since there are neither slaves or slave owners in the USA. But in alternate reality these both still exist.
You have an appalling ignorance of U.S. history since the Civil War. I spoke to this earlier in this post. It was only in the 1950s that there was a growing feeling that Afro-Americans should be treated like all other citizens. Ironically, it was the
Religious Left (a phrase that was never coined at the time) who were in the vanguard of this movement. Then in the 1960s the Flower Children joined the movement. This is when the South broke away from the Democratic Party, which up until then had been traditionally segregationist. The party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, then began its long evolution toward its current status: 95% white with its power base in the South. At the same time Christianity took a sharp turn to the Right and is no longer in the forefront of the civil rights movement.
America elected its first President not of British ancestry in 1836 (Martin Van Buren). We elected our first Catholic President in 1960 (John Kennedy). But only in 2008 did we finally elect our first Afro-American President, and it's often pointed out that his mother was Euro-American.
