Comment by yterdy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yterdy | Hacker News Reader

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We seem to be quite advanced wrt edge cases that the wealthy and influential are concerned with. In the interests of a good humbling, however, a short list of issues that we haven't eradicated:

>Homelessness

>Hunger

>Slavery

>Genocide

As to our level of sophistication, also, a short list of scams that we've fallen for in living memory that have lead to civilization-level crisis:

>A bunch of guys learn how to fly planes so that they can crash them into buildings in order to draw us into a war.

>The aforementioned war.

>Banks sell people loans designed to default, sell insurance on those loans, get bailed out when the loans default and insurance is due on the failing loans.

>Governments promise that sort of shutting down in-person economic activity for 2 weeks will stop a disease with an infectiousness period of ~3 weeks that relies on person-to-person contact, while helping businesses that will benefit from an extended pandemic set up related operations

>Something something Eurozone austerity

And not in living memory, but rhyming nicely:

>A bunch of guys shoot a small-time royal in order to draw us into a war.

>The aforementioned war.

>Homelessness

>Hunger

>Slavery

>Genocide

All are greatly reduced in the last 100-150 years. Globally. In large part thanks to "Western" contributions to science.

The rest are some very developed and sophisticated atrocities. Being developed and sophisticated doesn't make people good, it just makes their evil deeds more sophisticated and developed.

Just to qualify: I'm not trying to promote the noble savage myth here either. I'm trying to say that the simplicity/sophistication scale is orthogonal to the good/evil scale.

We basically licked the problem for food production but the issue is distribution.

We now have specific terms for genocide, and varying amount of labor rights, such as non-free versus free labor, characterizing levels of deception, coercion, and force.

Homelessness is a political problem that has no business of existing, because affordable housing will have huge benefit for everyone.

We reduced poverty. This has:

>reduced hunger, but not eliminated it

>potentially exacerbated homelessness, as the income/wealth floor for maintaining a household is now higher, globally

Additionally:

>there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in history

>some of the worst genocides in history are within living memory

All of the above is the result of Western cultural and logistical immaturity in the face of its industrial over-development. E.g., notice how a major global shipping lane is currently inaccessible due to war (a war ultimately cause by Western meddling in the region). It should also be noted that we're in the middle of a mass extinction driven by this same dynamic.

Any positive assessment of the West's sophistication and development has to be tempered or even nullified by the reality that its efforts have served to worsen, let alone ameliorate, basic measures of civilizational quality. An extreme analogy, using fiction: I refuse to call the civs in universes like WH40K, Dune, etc. "sophisticated and developed", because they've simply transposed and magnified age-old failings and atrocities onto a cosmic scale. True sophistication and development may eschew technological complexity, if complexity is instead in the systems and processes that support self-actualization in the population.

To go back to the original point: if the introduction of indoor plumbing and the extension of civil rights in America had been switched chronologically, we'd be much better off as a society. If landing on the moon and the acceptance and election of a female president had been switched, ditto. So, yes, it's shameful.

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