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Pessimism
Rufus_Shinra
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm currently a sophomore in college, and on the last day of my French class the teacher sort of went out on a limb and we started talking about what direction we felt the world was moving. Now the entire class is usually very upbeat, but when everyone really stopped to think about it, no one had any great hopes for the future.
In the last 5 years, I have seen no progess in Iraq, Energy, Social Security, Immigration, Poverty, AIDS, Health Care, Terrorism. I hope I'm not alone, but I'm seriously burned out when thinking about the future. I really have nothing to compare this to, and no statistical evidence to speak of, but I feel Generation Y is being raised in an environment that breeds pessimism.
Hell, I don't even have any problem with Hillary Clinton, but if she got elected I would spend almost the first 28 years of my life under two families, I'm fucking sick of this stagnation. It's like everythings just being passed along and nothing improves.
Are you hopeful about the future, why or why not?
In the last 5 years, I have seen no progess in Iraq, Energy, Social Security, Immigration, Poverty, AIDS, Health Care, Terrorism. I hope I'm not alone, but I'm seriously burned out when thinking about the future. I really have nothing to compare this to, and no statistical evidence to speak of, but I feel Generation Y is being raised in an environment that breeds pessimism.
Hell, I don't even have any problem with Hillary Clinton, but if she got elected I would spend almost the first 28 years of my life under two families, I'm fucking sick of this stagnation. It's like everythings just being passed along and nothing improves.
Are you hopeful about the future, why or why not?
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Things are progressing nicely in my country
Humanity is slowly trying to progress. It fails, constantly, and it will never get nearly as far as it's physically capable of being, but in some parts of the world, things have been getting better.
Every generation has its improvements. There's still a whole lot they fuck up royally, but things are getting better.
It's just that better isn't nearly as good as it should be.
It's what happens when you have a species that has to be tricked or forced or threatened in to not being absolute assholes.
That sounds pretty... pessimistic to me. "We're making progress, but only because we're forced into not being as evil as we'd like." isn't too positive a thing to say.
We reversed the ozone hole, we can slow global warming down to a managable pace.
We conquered polio and controlled leprosy, we can conquer or control AIDS.
We ended the Cold War, we can end the fight on terrorism.
I recognize that each of the latter problems are more complicated than the former; yet part of that is hindsight being 20/20.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You should probably keep in mind that I have a hard time accepting myself as being of the same species as the people who explode themselves for Yahweh or verbally crap all over the place in the name of Jesus or kick the ass of their own potential in the name of Community or who otherwise expend insane amounts of effort to make the world suck, when the world could refrain from sucking if people were just lazier.
--
By tricked I mean being trained to follow objective moral systems; I do not believe the notion has jackall to do with reality, however useful it may be to convince certain people otherwise. I basically support humanism and similar ethical movements because I don't trust people to be decent on their own.
Are you sure you're not just saying that so's we don't bring you some Democracy?
PSN: Broichan
We know how to stop AIDS, we know how to stop global warming, but we aren't actually making sacrifices to fix the problems, just let them slowly eat away at us. I don't know, I just can't think of anything since the fall of the Berlin Wall that we can point to and say "Look, we really pushed to make something big happen and we made the world a much better place for it."
Just this week President Bush reversed his stand on global warming and released a statement saying that the United States is committed to working with the rest of the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Governor Schwarzeneggar has aggressively pursued limiting of greenhouse gas emissions in the state of California. It took way too long, granted, for the world (particularly right-wing America) to wake up and smell the damn coffee, but it's happening and change is afoot.
Regarding AIDS, every year new drugs are discovered. 20 years ago, HIV was a death sentence. Today, it's a manageable condition that you can live with for a lifetime. You can even get married and have an active sex life with your HIV-negative partner without fear of transmission. There are a lot of obstacles against getting HIV drugs to places like subsaharan Africa (and, further, cultural obstacles against getting subsaharan Africans to take HIV drugs once available), but, again, those obstacles are surmountable.
It's hard to be patient for these changes, as they are slow, and a lot of shit is getting fucked up in the meantime. Animals are dying, people are dying... but it's not always going to be this way. And, y'know, in 50 years there will be a new set of challenges. New diseases, new environmental threats, new wars - and we'll figure out a way around those, too. Despite acting like stupid spoiled brats a lot of the time, the human race is capable of some staggering feats of genius. But only if we don't let ourselves get overwhelmed by short-term calamities.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah, exactly.
The Cuban missile crisis is a good example. That was probably the closest we've ever come to extinction in recorded history.
Or look at the last war in Afghanistan. Not the one after 9/11, but the prior one, in the 80s. The world's two superpowers with enough nuclear warheads pointed at one another to destroy the earth several times over got into an armed conflict that started to look pretty ugly. That was a pretty scary scenario.
And it's not just about the advance of technology, either. Technological advances are going to give us significant tools in fighting disease and managing energy and pollution, but it's also about simple human nature. Humans don't want to die. So when US and Soviet nuke subs were playing chicken off the coast of Florida, Kennedy and Khrushchev each said, "Shit, I don't want to nuke myself into a fine green glowing mist, maybe we should figure out a diplomatic compromise."
That doesn't mean that shit doesn't get bad, it just means that there's always a way out. Thank your lucky stars that you were born somewhere where you can afford a computer and Internet access and not in, say, Darfur or the Congo. I think worrying yourself sick about the future of humanity is a luxury that's afforded by the rich - and by 'rich' I mean how every middle-class first worlder is 'rich' compared to somebody who's scraping just above the starvation line. There isn't a whole lot of time to worry about AIDS when your neighbor is dying of ebola.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I read the article, but I can't quite recall what exactly Ebola is, It says they die from internal bleeding, but I was thinking Ebola was the flesh eating virus. Are they the same, or am I horribly mistaken? (Sorry, I'm scared to look it up incase its the flesh eating virus, I don't want to see images of that.)
None the less, its awesome that there might be a vaccine for it.
Man, what? You mean I've got to flush out my ebola stocks now and find something else. Fuck it, I'm just going to stick with the genetically enginered croco-monkeys.
But will our species survive long enough (2035?) to get there? I don't think so myself, but I'm hoping Obama will get in 2008 and really shake up the White House.
Oh and:
It doesn't matter what we achieve as a species, as we are inescapably destined to be forgotten...
The 1900s had rampant poverty and a near constant state of global war, and the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation in the latter half. The 1800s had rampant slavery. The 1700s had rampant political and civil unrest. The 1600s had Galileo threatening the religious establishment with his suggestion that we were not in fact the center of the universe.
And what do we have in the 2000s? Computers are getting cheap enough to hand them out to poverty stricken parts of the world, so they can learn new things, and improve their situation. We're slowly but surely figuring out how to power our lives without wrecking the planet. We're quickly unlocking the secrets of the universe (scientifically, not some metaphysical BS).
The common theme here seems to be that we screw up a lot, but we get better at fixing it as time progresses.
As rough as things are right now, I think things are getting better overall.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~ryden/ast162_10/notes41.html
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/990210c.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0310/10expansion/
I've got hope in tiny solutions to problems we don't even think about. Everybody I know seems to have a project these days, some little contribution that only a handful of individuals ever actually get the benefits of. Maybe one day we'll all be politicians and doctors and business leaders and hang out with the big picture guys, but while I'm young I'm loving the tiny solutions and wondering what the run on effects are going to be.
Oh god, I've been hanging out with all these hippies, someone help me please
Usually being hopeful leads to disappointment.
So, no, I'm not hopeful.
Sadly, one day these people will control the world.
Maybe you will luck out and the fundamentalists will take over instead.
Personally, I'd take someone who enjoyed West Wing over someone who thinks there is an invisible man in the sky.
This is a thread for pessimism J. Take your sky-larking optimism elsewhere.
I'm sorry.
Fundamentalists will never take over and the country will always be run by lawyers and scientists.
Better?
But for the whole human race, not so much. Like people pointed out, we've gone through some pretty bad times: World Wars, Cold War, polio, leprosy, the Black Plague, slavery, oppression, which burnings, the ozone hole, the Great Depression... and we always pulled through bigger and better. Today we have more knowledge, more wealth, more ressources, more manpower, than ever before. We'll find a way to beat AIDS, and cancer, and global warming, and religious fundamentalists.
People are pretty much assholes, but we're still advancing despite it.
The true miracle of humanity is how a bunch of goddamn evil idiots can somehow keep making life better and better while they try to ruin it.
Don't you find that horribly depressing?
Personally I'm incredibly optimistic for the future, especially in the technologies that are going to be pioneered within my life time. We're seeing the birth of genetic engineering, cybernetics, nanotechnology etc. In the last ten years or so we've been privy to the creation of the internet and how it's changed day to day life for innumerable people. I think of what my parents have been privy to during their life time and I can't help but think, the future is going to be simply awesome.
The thing is, humans as individuals are smart. In groups they tend to act stupid. There is a quote about it, I forget...
Anyway, the reason I generally don't put much faith in humanity is that humans tend to take drastic measures only when the problems become drastic. We have trouble foreseeing what might become problematic, and what little foresight we have is usually stomped or ignored by the majority.
:shock:
Why haven't I heard about this? The article's dated 2003!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.