No, we absolutely haven’t.
Thinking everything should be simple is exactly how we got into our current global socioeconomic situation.
We should collectively set the rules so that everyone benefits and nobody suffers. Complex problems and complex solutions.
65% of life forms on the planet engage in parasitic survival strategies. This was a risk we took when we started using agriculture, allowing for specializations other than chieftain and shaman. (Everyone else was a generalist.)
Our instincts are still the same hunter-gatherer stuff from 25,000 years ago. Which includes behaviors antithetical to large, complex civilization.
One of those is a bias towards obedience to authority, and to loyalty to clan, over principle (creeds, laws, codes of ethics). We tend to want to obey the chieftain who commands us rather than challenge them when they demand the unconscionable.
Demagogues, who exploit these biases, were known in classic Athens, hence we have a Greek name for such people, and Athenians tried to recognize and shun them.
The bible has a lot of proscriptions against manipulative tyrants and priests. It also has many decrees to uplift the widow, the stranger, the immigrant, the destitute. This tells us the problem of dudes seeking to consolidate social power (money and authority) and then abuse that power has been a problem throughout known human history.
Obviously we haven’t fixed it yet and still want high tech water, sewage, power and information infrastructure.
We need a movement that is willing to assert its collective power not just for a few concessions but until we have an ironclad social contract that distributes political power widely, and does not tolerate surplus when there is scarcity and need.
Whenever I hear the phrase “life isn’t fair” in response to someone being treated unfairly by humans, I feel compelled to point out that humans could very well make life fair if most of us weren’t absolute garbage.
It can always be better but I think pure nature is even less fair and can be absolutely cruel. We are very spoiled of our cultural progresses living in a huge bubble where everything is pink and fluffy compared to “real life out there in wild nature”.
Yeah but I don’t live in nature so what do I give a fuck? I just want people to stop being assholes to each other
I just wanted to point out that we humans already made life more fair. Of course it could be better and it sucks when people are mean, but at least we mostly don’t just beat each other to death suddenly or dueling on the streets any more.
Mean this with respect but it’s not that simple. Bonobos have matriarchs and when there’s a violent abuse like a rape, the female bonobos rip the others genitals off as a show punishment against their actions. Or how elephants care for and mourn their dead. If we were in the wild, our life wouldn’t be that of a deer, rabbit or bear, we are a pretty unique species where most of our closely related within our genus are wiped so all we have left is to look at monkeys for simulatry. Be it today or 100,000 years ago, homo sapien was just as smart then as now.
In a sense, we are integrated with the previous hominids. They didn’t go extinct so much they bred with early humans and their DNA is preserved in our own.
You list other animals as positive examples and then say yourself that our life wouldn’t be like other animals.
When we were still small hunter gatherer groups, individuals who made problems or simply weren’t strong enough or a bit sick would cold heartedly be left behind alone which was a death sentence for early humans sooner or later.
it feels like a line from the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
