I think I mentioned a discussion I had with a college friend in Argentina who welcomed Javier Milei because he felt the apple cart needed to be overturned and a chaos agent was required. Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend who lamented the state of the world in so many ways. The thread that connected them was this sense of doom and futility. This is the first step towards abandoning democracy.
This Twitter thread lays out so many ways that the world is improving. The basic thesis is "Yes, the world isn't perfect and 'X' is bad, but we are making remarkable progress towards solution 'Y'." Take climate change. In the thread there are numerous examples of breakthroughs in energy storage, access to lithium and hydrogen and geothermal energy. However, even if we brought all of that online tomorrow, the world would still continue to get hotter for another decade or so, until existing carbon was removed from the atmosphere. The news on climate is promising, but not to the degree that the crisis has passed.
It seems we are wired to need the instant gratification of immediate results. The internet has its plusses and minuses, but few can argue that it has not completely reshaped the world. It was basically invented in 1983, yet it really didn't start to enter our lives until the late 1990s. It feels like we are in a similar pattern with technology now.
Additionally, we are so much richer today than we were 40 years ago. Global inequality has shrunk dramatically, even if we have the troubling concentration of wealth in a super-class of billionaires. My friend yesterday said that we managed to grow up, sitting in the back of a station wagon with no seatbelts while our parents chain smoked in the front and we didn't die. True, but plenty of people did. Today, the stench of cigarette smoke is a jarring exception rather than the miasma through which we move. We have cars that can seat 6 and get 35MPG with crazy amounts of user friendly tech. Go back and drive that 1986 Honda Civic; your preference for it is nostalgia, not fact.
Of course there are problems. Big problems, but we tend to blow them up into catastrophes. Take Gaza. That is a wrenching humanitarian crisis brought about by two awful entities - Netanyahu's right wing government and Hamas' theocratic terrorism - but calling it "genocide" is intended to elevate it to the levels of the Holocaust or Cambodia. It simply...isn't. It's awful, and we should be doing everything we can to end it and bring lasting peace through a two state solution. But it simply isn't genocide, and calling it that is designed to create this sense of catastrophe that extremists need to justify eroding democracy.
Joe Biden ran on getting things back to normal. Sadly, that proved beyond his reach. Not because he didn't try, but because we have become addicted to the doom spiral.
We have met the cognitive enemy and he is us.
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