Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

This all comes down to humane treatment of your fellow human beings. I grew up in an era where that was a core expectation of our culture.

But I see that tenet degrading in various ways - how we broadcast our views on social media (reduced empathy), how we interact in the real world (less patience and understanding), the polarization of our politics (less compromise and thus less effectiveness), and how organizations treat their customers (even basics like Terms of Service and Privacy Policies that have trended much more user-hostile over the last decade).

Cooperation is the fundamental basis on which civilization is built. I'm not sure what the start of a dark age looks like, but part of me feels like over the course of my lifetime I may be witnessing us entering one.

I fervently believe it's not too late to correct course, and I'm interested in ways individuals can have an impact. Set a personal example. Push back against dark patterns proposed by your corporate colleagues. Instill a deep sense of responsibility and healthy skepticism in your children. This is just a start, and I'm open to more suggestions.

Every little fight is what got us here, but that's also how we get out. Do good for the sake of good. Don't let others push you beyond your ethical bounds.

The good thing is we don't need everybody to do this. Even a small percentage can build momentum. So speak up and back up those who do. It makes it easier for others and causes people to be more nervous to float unethical ideas.

You must be very old, for one the murder rate is at the lowest point since 1900. I can agree that US political theater is getting more clownish but there were similar times throughout history (including brawls breaking out in the House over slavery. Slavery by the way was very much not humane treatment. Same for up to the 60s and beyond)

Western civilization has been built on exploitation not not cooperation, it's stil an open question if we can build a cooperative society, my guess is no.

I don’t think a high trust society is compatible with modernity. In my opinion, a high trust society comes from a relative naivety in most of the population that just sort of did what their grandparents did without thinking too much about it. In an “information” inundated populace, it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society. Maintaining a common culture isn’t easy either, it takes generations of shibboleth building, universal thought termination phrases and a brutal society-wide suppression of the “other”.

A datapoint that points to the contrary:

- Singapore pre-1965 was a low trust, racist society. The tensions were so bad that in 1964 there were racial riots.

- Today, after a lot of immigration, within 1-2 generations, Singapore became a high-trust society.

Similar stories in South Korea and Taiwan. In all 3 cases, the trust came recently, within 1-2 generations, and from different approaches of the state. They combine high institutional trust and the economic prosperity with medium-low interpersonal trust.

Singapore isn't high trust. It's brutal authoritarianism that squashes anything that looks remotely disharmonious between groups. High trust doesn't need a government boot stomping in the face of anyone who steps out of line.

singapore is an authoritarian state (ie. trust is forced) that presents a homogenous population, where after 2 generations of immigration, over three quarters of singapores populace are still ethnic chinese. let us now examine london's population and how it changed within 1 generation. london consisted of 90% ethnic english in the 1990s, nowadays this figure sits around 50%. concurrently, london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves. perhaps this occurred because england was not authoritarian enough?

"Ethnic Chinese" is a term covering 1.45 billion people. I don't even know where one would find a definition for "ethnic English", but if you take the NHS' "ethnic British" which ridiculously excludes even Irish heritage, I can see how you'd come to 50%.

A reasonable comparison would be to look at "Ethnic European", covering roughly 1.2 billion people.

> london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves

As someone who traveled the world a bit and lived for a decade in London, I'd beg to differ without further elaboration.

> it becomes very hard to have a common culture

Counter point: culture has been compressed, not widened, in the last 60 years.

Accents have gone away, we listen to the same music, food has homogenized. By almost any measure, culture across the US has become a monoculture compared to any time in its history.

I don't think your point is necessarily wrong, but how do you square the above?

Accents have gone away?

The University of Georgia did a study and came to the conclusion that the Southern accent is fading. Less formally, a word game website did a survey that found the standard New York accent is fadingas well.

The Georgia study largely attributed it to migration and people moving more than they used to, with a focus on growing metro areas in the south. Though apparently some younger generations are trying to shed their accents to sound more professional, and the internet is creating a sort of average American accent.

Though nobody is worried they'll disappear entirely at the moment that I can find.

> https://news.uga.edu/classic-georgia-accent-fading-fast/

Fascinating! Thanks!

> it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society.

I think a large set of problems have come from this statement. We have, over time, become more intolerant of other cultures which is directly related to trust. Excluding the other isn't the path we need to take. We need to get back on the path where we can include other cultures.

There has been a concerted push by the far right to delegitimize the idea of "human decency." It started to trickle into our mainstream culture by way of aspects of toxic masculinity, and "cringe culture"—can't be seen to be enjoying things unironically! Emotions (other than rage or contempt) aren't "manly"!

But with the rise of Trump through the mid-to-late 2010s, it became much more widespread and broad in scope: Dignity, respect (in the sense of "treat other people like humans"), and politeness are all "woke", and all that matters is me, me, me. Being a bully is the highest form of social capital.

And now with enshittification spreading to all our commercial services, the same basic ideas are expanded to the corporate realm. Customers are just numbers; "customer service" is for bots to provide; lock them in so they can't leave and it doesn't matter how terrible the service is.

It's not just cooperation that's needed—though you're absolutely right that it is the basis for our entire civilization; it's respect and dignity. Treating everyone you meet as if they're someone whose daily experience you care about, at least inasmuch as your interactions with them affect it.

It's never too late to shift a culture, and individuals can make an individual difference—very much in the sense of the old story about the girl throwing starfish back into the sea. But what's really needed is a cultural movement to restore dignity to our interactions, and I'm afraid I'm clueless as to how one starts one of those.

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