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Comment by iliketosleep | Hacker News Reader

Under the thin veneer of civilized society it's still the law of the jungle; while our civilization may have become advanced, our DNA hasn't caught up. We are programmed to blindly accumulate as much as possible, because for most of our evolutionary history scarcity and disaster was always just around the corner. In modern times, it translates into those who already hold positions of wealth and power going for even more, at the expensive of everyone else. This has in turn been amplified by technology and globalization.

Having said that, historically we're still at a "high point". It's a cold comfort, but still..

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Seeing how wages adjusted for inflation have stagnated while productivity has nearly doubled in the past 40 years and the impending climate catastrophies, I don't see how we're at a high point. Although, I guess if some kind of climate catastrophe occurs, we could consider ourselves in one of the luckier generations https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc....

Actually I think we peaked 10-20 years ago. My father experience most of the peak 50-odd years - thankfully he didn't live to see what the world has become.

The sobering reality once you understand things is that we are never more than 1 generation away from living in caves and losing all civilization. The delusion of durability of The Cloud (compared to physical books) is one of the saddest things.

I used to be a vendor for both Seagate and WD - and they'd regale us about how NO HDD can store data forever even if it's not running. Everything fails as long as it at 300K rather than 0K. And the lifespan of most electronics and computer is FAR shorter than most people imagine.

>while our civilization may have become advanced, our DNA hasn't caught up. We are programmed to blindly accumulate as much as possible, because for most of our evolutionary history scarcity and disaster was always just around the corner.

Yes, we'd be much better off if we'd just stop progressing at some arbitrary point, and just accepted:

- 35 years of life expectancy

- no running water

- famines every decade

- zero modern technology, like electricity or even healthcare

35 years of life expectancy was not reality. If you lived past childhood you usually lived until your 50s or 70s. There are tribal villages in africa today that barely have modern anything and have many people in their 90s. Human life expectancy decreased with the transition from hunter/gatherer/herder tribes into agriculture with a few crops, due to relative malnutrition. It's only recently in modern times that we have started matching hunter gatherer life expectancy with our knowledge of nutrition and 120 year old medical knowledge.

>35 years of life expectancy was not reality

So? That's still the definition of life expectancy. Moreover, being able to live to 90 if everything went right doesn't mean much when you die at 20 because of a treatable illness/injury, or seeing your wife/kid die in childbirth.

> Under the thin veneer of civilized society it's still the law of the jungle

that "law of the jungle" thing is a myth. people believe it because it makes sense, but it isn't real for humans or almost any animal species.

what really exists is that people feel very good when they view themselves as superior to others, and they come up with an insane amount of mental gymnastics to justify what they do to attain that feeling.

one of the great myths of nature is that predators have some sort of instinct to screw over their social group at every opportunity. even most animals know that there is strength in numbers and in fairness. we humans have taught ourselves that fairness and consideration of others are weaknesses and that feeling like a badass at the expense of others is very positive.

humans are literally an irredeemable species at this point, because all of the evidence of what I say is available to anyone with an internet connection, but it's easier and more fun to feel like a badass occasionally than it is to change your view of society, so the facts get ignored and humanity continues to destroy itself over smaller and smaller things.

> One of the great myths of nature is that predators have some sort of instinct to screw over their social group at every opportunity.

Speaking of humans: Their social group, no. Other social groups, absolutely.

We know this as "ingroup bias".

Pre-internet, your ingroups and outgroups were largely restricted by geography. Moreover, you got this sort of "ingroup boosting" effect by being part of a town, county, state, and country, so you had a lot of overlaps with other people.

Interestingly enough, each of those geographic entities actually occupies a "slot" in your social graph -- unconsciously, you think of them as people.

Without a forcing function providing behavioral moderation through discordant groupings, ingroups and outgroups become increasingly monocultural, tribalistic, and behaviorally extreme.

>one of the great myths of nature is that predators have some sort of instinct to screw over their social group at every opportunity. even most animals know that there is strength in numbers and in fairness.

Citation on this? Your claims are contradicted by wikipedia articles like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)

The big ideological thing that both these comments miss is the they don't question the presupposition that we need to be 'natural'

Oh, but what is "natural" is not "coercive," at least according to capitalists.

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