I love your comment, very frank about it. Thank you!
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Humans being awful is most of our entire written history. Bill Wurst has the cliff notes:
The powerful made themselves divine deities directly or made up religions where the deity gave them power over others. Conquest, war, rape, tribalism, raids, corruption, oppression, suppression, slavery, spice trade, disease, volancoes causing crop failures and wiping out empires, or causing starving pirate raids who did the same, ice ages causing genetic bottle necks where we almost go extinct, whatever.
You could read David Mitchell’s recent book “Unruly” about the ~1600 years of violent dumb misery following the fall of Rome just in the land whuch became the U.K. if you like. Pretty dry material but he does his best as a comedian to get through it all. It’s a very long list of short lived Kings (and a couple Queens) murdering each other and peasants while the Northerners did the same and eventually settled and interbred and continued murdering each other and living short violent dumb lives. A lot of them aspired to be like a fictional King Arthur. There’s your yearning for past glories. A little like today. It’s not real, it’s fantasy.
Until the printing press and the renaissance, sort of. Temporarily destabilised the powerful. Kinda like the internet. Or radio broadcast I suppose. The old guard didn’t know how to exploit it at first. Printing press fucked up the massively corrupt Catholics at the time, fresh off their crusades and coming up with the idea of paying money to get into heaven. They really hated the idea of peasants learning how to read too. Martin Luther had a bunch of reasons they sucked. One was a complaint about how many little boys each priest kept. Nothing new under the Sun.
Relating any of it to the “right wing” becomes incoherent in a hurry when trying to compare things to modernity. Conservatives are what Royalists became after people kept cutting Royal heads off. Suffice to say though, it was shit fucking awful almost all the time humans have existed.
Looking to the future with climate change in a few hundred years and I expect way more extremism and a lot of death fighting and starving over the dwindling habitable land near the poles.
Eventually the Sun gets too hot even if we were perfect and peaceful and the oceans boil into space. Long before the Red Giant phase swallows the scorched Earth entirely. The end.
Anyways, I’ve deliberately sterilised myself.
Onyxonblack@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Appreciated, I’m glad I could write something at least somewhat impactful while being very brief.
icylobster@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is a big reason why I hated learning history. It is very depressing. I’m always amazed how people can’t seem to understand things they didn’t personally live through. It is a constant cycle of exploration then revenge on the exploiters and then a new way to exploit.
I’m trying to be hopeful, but it feels like we are in the phase where most need to suffer in order to get to a better place. Climate change is scary, but I try to remember progress can be explosive in ways you don’t expect.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Well this is just delving my own personal musings: I think we’ve evolved to do our best to not understand and bury our collective heads in the sand. Being born with natural critical thinking ability (being driven to seek out maddening truth, rejecting comforting lies) and empathy ability is a rare combination. I think you need both to, as you say, understand things you didn’t personally live through. I mean real understanding, not a cold rote memorisation of facts and trivia to pass a government / post secondary tests.