Philosophy 101
- Thread starter TheSameIdiot
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JakeEkiss
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Permanently stopped? No. Of course not. There is no end of history. Good or bad. It never just stops. Stories end. Time keeps plugging along. That's one of the hardest delusions we labor under. That today is all it can ever be.
You could just as easily say peace breaks out all the time. We just don't think of it that way because peace breaking out doesn't involve explosions. Like, it's easy to see humanity as this oozing black plague, but that simply doesn't account for the global drop in violence over the past few decades. It doesn't account for the way renewable energy is becoming the default, whether the oil barons want it or not. Things are still bad, but big trends like that are largely invisible because they don't stimulate the amygdala.
New people are made every day and we don't get the benefit of genetic memory telling us all the faults of previous generations. We rely on what we learn, and some folks will be taught badly. Peace and progress will never be achieved in a permanent way in the same way death will never be conquered. But there's also never been a permanent war. It's always an ebb and flow.
It doesn't mean you can't raise the global longevity by decades or eliminate some diseases outright. And we've done those things. Truly miraculous things happen all the time through sheer sweat and bloody-mindedness.
My thought isn't that the world is mostly good or bad. It's a casserole. A deeply intertwined mess of stuff. It doesn't feel that way. But then one of the things those architects of ruin are invested in is making us feel hopeless. They don't actually want people to feel calm and comfortable, or they wouldn't couch all their initiatives in fear. Calm people can think, calm people would never let them into power int he first place. Trump had to convince people the country was under attack and only he could save it before they let him take the wheel. And that's still the game plan. Scare some people so bad they bow, and the rest so bad they give up.
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Sorry, guys - I wanted to treat these topics with respect and not rush through a response, so I had to wait until I had time to really think it over and digest the responses, and my own opinions/reactions.
Obviously, you can be all like "rebellion!" But that's not going to happen. Are the small things ever going to be enough to matter? Probably not.
But if the question is; what do we do in the absence of being able to create actual lasting change? Just be better. That's all you CAN do. Be better than the people that want to tear us all down and destroy our planet, and be better than you were yesterday. If you can't make the world different, you can make your neighborhood different and let that be enough.
If I try to do much of anything, it's to encourage people toward honesty. That's kind of been my mission over the last several years; pushing the idea that we need to be honest even when it's uncomfortable or unkind. Once you allow yourself to be dishonest, you excuse dishonesty itself. And look where we are as a planet when dishonesty is trivial.
A drop in violence only occurs when you allow the people in power to define violence. Renewables are certainly on the rise, but not fast enough and only with massive pushback, and STILL only when the oil companies figured out how they could still make money on it. These aren't trends in upward direction, they're a stalemate we've been watching since the Industrial Revolution (and before) where technology is allowed to flourish when it benefits the wealthy and powerful, and stifled when it doesn't. It's not proof that things are changing - it's proof that nothing has changed.
We will still stand here, chatting away together, waiting for our overlords to decide that it's okay for us to use renewable energy. And tell us how we can use it. And when we can use it. And from whom we have to purchase it. When we KNOW that not doing it sooner, and with more vigor, is literally destroying the planet we're on. And we're still just going to keep waiting for permission. That's not progress. It's stagnation masked as progress to keep us pacified.
Yeah - sounds like a pretty shit species to me. Again, it feels like you're making my point for me and simply feel differently about it. We are utterly unable to conquer the evil inherent in us. Even the most hopeful and optimistic among us see these things as intrinsic to our existence. How incredibly fucking depressing is that.
Life expectancy has always been different between the rich and poor, and it's getting worse. That is a failure, not a success.
300,000 years as a species.
10,000 years arranged in complex societies.
200 years with modern technology.
And we've not only gotten it wrong - we've gotten it incredibly wrong and failed to fix even our most basic weaknesses. We haven't solved a SINGLE problem as a species. Maybe the difference between your position and mine is really just in the fact that I do not accept a final social state where we just accept intentional suffering inflicted on other people, en masse, as part of who we are and not consider that an utter failure deserving of extinction. And that's fine. We just differ in our worldviews.
I don't know.
Obviously, you can be all like "rebellion!" But that's not going to happen. Are the small things ever going to be enough to matter? Probably not.
But if the question is; what do we do in the absence of being able to create actual lasting change? Just be better. That's all you CAN do. Be better than the people that want to tear us all down and destroy our planet, and be better than you were yesterday. If you can't make the world different, you can make your neighborhood different and let that be enough.
If I try to do much of anything, it's to encourage people toward honesty. That's kind of been my mission over the last several years; pushing the idea that we need to be honest even when it's uncomfortable or unkind. Once you allow yourself to be dishonest, you excuse dishonesty itself. And look where we are as a planet when dishonesty is trivial.
I think you made my point for me. Because history isn't a thing that happens to us. It's a thing we do. WE are an endless cycle of premeditated murder, by your own logic. It's just a point of philosophical contention whether or not that means we have failed. I think that's exactly what it means. That after hundreds of thousands of years, we still can't even CONCEIVE of a world where we aren't exactly what we are.
Not really. Peace exists without us. War does not.
A drop in violence only occurs when you allow the people in power to define violence. Renewables are certainly on the rise, but not fast enough and only with massive pushback, and STILL only when the oil companies figured out how they could still make money on it. These aren't trends in upward direction, they're a stalemate we've been watching since the Industrial Revolution (and before) where technology is allowed to flourish when it benefits the wealthy and powerful, and stifled when it doesn't. It's not proof that things are changing - it's proof that nothing has changed.
We will still stand here, chatting away together, waiting for our overlords to decide that it's okay for us to use renewable energy. And tell us how we can use it. And when we can use it. And from whom we have to purchase it. When we KNOW that not doing it sooner, and with more vigor, is literally destroying the planet we're on. And we're still just going to keep waiting for permission. That's not progress. It's stagnation masked as progress to keep us pacified.
Yeah - sounds like a pretty shit species to me. Again, it feels like you're making my point for me and simply feel differently about it. We are utterly unable to conquer the evil inherent in us. Even the most hopeful and optimistic among us see these things as intrinsic to our existence. How incredibly fucking depressing is that.
Don't you consider this somewhat... nationalistic? If we look at the broad view, and actually view all other human beings as our brothers and sisters - that we are ONE people; We have absolutely been in a permanent war, because there has never been a time when humans were not at war with other humans since we developed the tools by which to engage in war.
Did we? 'Cause my province has more cases of Measles right now than in the entire United States; because of bullshit misinformation perpetrated entirely on purpose, and repeated by absolute fucking idiots. And while global longevity has been increased -- one of the biggest factors for life expectancy is still WEALTH. If the rich 1% lived to be 600 years old, that would skew our life expectancy as a species way up even if regular people were dying at 40.
Life expectancy has always been different between the rich and poor, and it's getting worse. That is a failure, not a success.
I understand how they work. The problem is that they already won at it. And they didn't even need to try very hard. The systems are ALL rigged against us to an extent that no one seems to be able to conceive of an actual way out of it. It's all just blind hope and shitty fucking platitudes. Useless except for making some people just feel a little better about the miserable world we've created for ourselves. Just gotta make yourself feel better for a couple of decades and then you'll be dead and it won't be your problem anymore. So no one feels obligated to think through the next 200 years.
300,000 years as a species.
10,000 years arranged in complex societies.
200 years with modern technology.
And we've not only gotten it wrong - we've gotten it incredibly wrong and failed to fix even our most basic weaknesses. We haven't solved a SINGLE problem as a species. Maybe the difference between your position and mine is really just in the fact that I do not accept a final social state where we just accept intentional suffering inflicted on other people, en masse, as part of who we are and not consider that an utter failure deserving of extinction. And that's fine. We just differ in our worldviews.
If you have free time, volunteer at your local mutual aid organization. If you have disposable income, donate to your local food bank, homeless shelter, arts organization, whatever. The only thing you can control is you.
I feel helpless and small sometimes, but even $5 to your local food bank or an hour volunteering makes a difference. That's a meal for someone in need or an hour helping out, building community. All we've got is each other.
This is true to an extent, but we don't all have the power to start or stop wars. I can vote for Al Gore all I want, but ultimately George Bush was at the sticks when 9/11 happened. Bush, who won a minority of the vote. That's injustice, baby. I don't want to totally derail this with politics, but the fact that we all know that's injustice and can speak truth to power feels like it matters. Yes, the oligarchs are trying to consolidate power behind a fascist government, but I have to hope we'll eventually overcome that obstacle. Should history repeat itself, I know we will.
C'mon. The average lifespan in 1925 was 58. We eradicated smallpox. We stopped polio. Thanks to inventions like the washing machine, humans went from doing 60 hours of household chores a week in 1900 to less than 10 in 2020.
You can "yeah, but" me with idiots who aren't vaccinating their kids, but this is a particularly stupid point in history. We're enough generations removed from polio and fascism that people forgot what real suffering looks like.
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100%.
I'll admit that charity is something I really struggle with. It's that constant fight with myself that if I just allow myself less, I can give people more. Half of my toy budget every year could literally change someone's life. And yet.
I'm also severely ADHD, unmedicated. I self-regulate my dopamine levels by spending money and eating junk. I counter the latter by working out a lot (still could lose a few pounds - I'm probably 8-10 pounds over my peak fighting weight at any given time). But there's only so much money and I'm constantly aware that spending more on me means less I have to give to anyone else. Clearly, that's something we all struggle with as none of us are here because we stopped all of our hobbies and gave all of our spending cash to charity.
10,000 years of complex societies has proven that we will not overcome that obstacle. It's wildly (and beautifully, I want to add) idealistic to think THIS decade, or NEXT decade will change what has been true for that long, for no other reason than because we'd like it to change and yet have no real power to change it.
Vanishingly small accomplishments. We eradicated smallpox, but have done very little to actually curtail the spread of disease because it's not actually profitable to do so. Polio still exists and at the rate humans have stopped vaccinating, it could actually return in force. Arizona just had a fucking confirmed case of BLACK PLAGUE death.
Humans may have massively reduced how long it takes to do household chores, but that came with also creating a system where there's no one at home to do chores because most families need at least two incomes to not die in a gutter. Our progress is tempered by only progressing when it serves our betters, or our betters using the progress to serve themselves. We remain slaves.
And the lifespan thing is kind of bollocks. It would take days to put together a truly coherent argument here, but the reality is that (as I said earlier, or in a different thread?) rich people live longer and better than poor people. That's fact. The lifespans of rich people informs human averages. Take out the wealthiest 10 percent of the population and how much has our lifespan actually increased? And what qualify of life do we have in our gains?
Also, there are points in our history where average life expectancy fluctuates due to a host of inter-related factors. Infant mortality also plays a HUGE part in average life expectancy. It's also region dependent. The short answer is; if you factor out infant mortality (still wildly different across the world, and increasing in the US thanks to Republican policies), life expectancy hasn't changed that much over a 1000 year curve. We've gained a few years, but we've also gained more years of infirmity due to poor nutrition, chemicals in everything, being worked to death, and other stress factors.
But let's be clear in all of our achievements; they are largely achievements in dealing with issues that affect the wealthy. If only poor people could get polio, we'd all have polio. If only poor people could get smallpox, it would still be around. One of the easiest problems humanity could have solved over 10,000 years is unnecessary starvation. But that doesn't affect the wealthy. So, 10,000 years into human civilization, 3 million -children- still starve to death every year.
So you will have to excuse me if I can't muster up the ability to be impressed that rich people keep living longer, healthier lives every few decades.
We could sell all of our worldly possessions and donate every cent we make to charity, but that's not realistic. In that case, we'd probably join a monastery and stop participating in the capitalist system.
My toy budget is decidedly bigger than my charitable donations. That's okay. Whatever you can do is better than nothing.
I was making a pretty clear reference to revolutionary France. The French government that formed in the aftermath was an improvement of our own flawed system. France doesn't have the best democracy in the world, but it's a hell of a lot better than ours. A better world is possible.
Countries like Denmark and Finland have excellent democracies. I'm sure the people there would tell you it's imperfect, but we're human. Imperfect is the best we've got.
Ask someone who died of smallpox if eradicating smallpox is a vanishingly small accomplishment.
I won't argue this. You're right. As someone born and raised on WWII video games, I cannot believe the fucking Nazis are coming back. It hasn't even been 80 years since World War II ended.
Wellness girlies and manosphere boys are as human as you and I.
What can you do?I think this is where you and I fundamentally disagree. Democracy, like marriage, requires constant upkeep. The same can be said for class war. Right now, we're losing.
Sometimes, the pendulum swings in your direction, sometimes it swings back and hits you on the ass. The cycle is inevitable, but that doesn't mean humans have failed.
This is true.
Environmental racism is real. On average, someone from Cancer Alley will live a shorter life than someone from San Francisco.
This is not true. From a quick Google, I can see that Genesee County (Flint, MI) is the poorest area of the U.S. As of 2016, "the life expectancy for a 40-year-old resident in a household with an income below $28,000 in Genesee County was 76.8 years, below the national life expectancy of 78.8." 76.8 > 58.
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We don't disagree at all on that point.
Do France, Denmark, and Finland have democracies that can survive the complete collapse of the United States? Or the sharp rise of fascist sympathizing across the entire world right now? When I look at the countries that are 'doing okay' - I look at those pictures of what beaches in Iran looked like. Might as well have been the '70s in the US. Now look at Iran. Things definitely don't seem to be moving forward, globally. GERMANY is becoming progressively more right-wing again. The one country in the entire world that should absolutely know better and devotes tons of resources into educating its citizens and even outlaws a bunch of shit that should absolutely be outlawed except you can't do that in the US because 'muh free speek!'
You can see a better world on the horizon. That's fair. I don't. I see us on the precipice of another collapse. I see a world that never learns lessons. And again, this is just an ideological or philosophical difference of opinion at this point; is it a failure for us to exist in a cyclical world where we don't learn any permanent lessons?
Didn't help them very much, did it?
Ask all the parents of children killed by gun violence in the last ten years alone if curing smallpox saved their kids.
The point isn't "have we ever made progress on any issue ever in history?" It's "have we made enough progress." If it's evidence for our success that we cured ONE disease, then logically every disease we have not cured is evidence against our success.
Right? Remember when we just all casually agreed that Nazis were bad? And Neo-Nazis actively hid their beliefs for fear of being ostracized from society as is proper?
We definitely disagree here and there's probably no resolution to be had. And that's totally okay. But yeah, I absolutely view it as a complete and total failure that we have made so little progress, and what progress we make is so easily lost. If we can gain and then lose everything and have to start over - we're just constantly in a cycle of failure. And every time we fail, our fellow human beings are subjected to horrific suffering.
Again, though, life expectancy statistics are insanely complicated and intentionally misleading. For instance, there's a reason they base it on the age of a 40-year-old. Wouldn't want all those dead 30-year-olds to get in the way of your numbers. You know.. the people you made so sick that they couldn't survive. We literally set up the rules so that you only count if you're already grown and relatively healthy.
Remember in 2014 (15?) when Flint was found to have reported like 60-80 pneumonia deaths when there was no outbreak of pneumonia and it wasn't in season? Just like.. a few dozen random pneumonia deaths in the middle of the summer?
Most statistics nowadays intentionally remove infant mortality, for both good and bad reasons. The negative effect of this is insulating us from facing the reality that technology and access to care are still very spotty even in first world countries.
Also, as I said, there are a lot of elements that interact here, and life expectancy has -always- fluctuated. Life expectancy, not including infant mortality, was mid-70s in 1960 (meaning MASSIVE changes in technology, but also massive changes in wealth inequality, have counter-acted each other and kept us fairly steady here). There's lots of evidence it was also in the late 60s-early 70s in the 1890s-1910s. Go way further back and we have tons of accounts of people living into their 60s and 70s even in the medieval period (pre-1850s gets REALLY hard to identify actual life expectancy stats of any value, to be fair). Life expectancy is also a function of technology. There are incidental developments that help us live longer, but weren't done TO make us live longer. Refrigeration, for example.
We're getting into the weeds on this, though. I think the important question is; IF our lifespans are getting longer but not worse, is it because we are actively trying to do that for the good of humanity, or is this just an incidental side-effect of better technology? Because if it's the latter (I'd argue it usually is) then it's not proof we're doing better as a species. It's only proof that we're more technologically advanced. I never argued we're not.
In fact, maybe that's worse. Because we're sufficiently advanced now that we could effectively end world hunger. And we don't. We don't even really try. We don't really try to do -anything- that doesn't directly benefit the wealthy and powerful. And by 'we,' I don't mean like six ladies that hand out meals to homeless people, I mean 'we' as a species.
We certainly don't have to keep going around about it. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. To be fair, I wouldn't want to. I prefer people not agree with me on this because I don't think nihilism is particularly useful unless you just like being depressed all the time. But you'll never convince me that after 10,000 years THIS being the best we can do as a species is acceptable.