Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
100 years ago there were more things that just happened to us that we couldn't do anything about. It's hard to eradicate a virus when you don't even know what a virus is.
Nowadays we are plagued with completely solvable problems. We could eliminate measles, but dumbasses are afraid of vaccines. We could feed everyone, but we got billionaires to maintain. We could stop destroying the earth, but then who will burn all this oil? We could cooperate on a global scale, but then we might have to talk to brown people, ew. We could stop bombing each other, but then how would we prove to our gods that we're good people?
So yeah "things" are shittier, because nowadays we have the ability to live in a nearly post-scarcity society but we just don't wanna.
Humankind could have been living in blissful peace for centuries. We've always had the ability to not kill each other or fight for resources. But many people, then and now, don't want that.
The way civilizations/empires/countries have operated has largely been competitive. It's naive to think we'll all just come together and solve these very complicated problems.
Saying that people are stupid or racist... I don't think that barely has anything to do with what prevents all major countries of the world to work together to combat things like disease, climate change, inequality, etc.
Nah. This is a unique moment in history - access to objective truth has never been so widespread. In theory, it's a lot easier to lead people to war if you can convince them that their neighbors' customs and culture are causing your crops to fail or some shit.
But it turns out that people simply prefer to reject objective truth. So they'll blame gays for hurricanes and tell people that homelessness is punishment for sin.
Everything is definitely shittier now.
seems like it's really just that people are shittier