We are currently living in the safest, most well-off period in history. Our evolved instincts, still calibrated by evolution to a riskier time, have not properly caught up. What’s worse, parts of modern society exaggerate our perception of risks, and incentivize people to manufacture polarizing new conflicts. It can be seen all the time on social media, with communities united by their hate and mistrust of a common enemy, or people sharing articles ridiculing or highlighting the worst sides of their common enemies. As people stop viewing the people disagreeing with them as human beings inherently worthy of respect, and rather start to treat them as enemies, those others will lash out in return, their brains correctly interpreting the situation as a threatening one and engaging protective systems.
I would like to find ways to put a stop to this cycle.
* Creating a sense of purpose for people. Modern Western society has a distinct lack of clear vision and sense of purpose. Young people are told that they can do what they want with their lives, but are rarely given much in the way of suggestions of what could be a valuable, interesting thing to do with one’s life. Many drift aimlessly, never quite finding anything that would motivate them, or that would encourage them to really work hard for some deeply fulfilling aim.
In a theoretical sense, I don't think that the solution is all that difficult. Northern Ireland has now had close to 20 years of peace after (depending upon who you ask) 30 years, a century, or several centuries of bloodshed and oppression, and while getting those first couple of years of peace was hard, keeping it just required companies to move in and provide jobs and a hope for a better life for all the teens and early 20s people who were previously lost in rage, fear, and violence.
It seems very clear to me that this is merely a specific case of a much larger solution. Much of the Middle East is a mess, and in much of Western Europe people of color are a permanent non-citizen underclass, while almost all of Western Europe is suffering under utterly disastrous economic policies, and the US is doing only marginally better.
These conditions breed the sort of hopelessness that leads to violence, especially since almost the entire Western middle class is watching their prospects dim, and nothing sparks hopelessness and violence like loss. From a developed world perspective conditions utterly suck for working class people in China, but they aren't making bombs, they're working, because they see real economic hope for themselves and their children.
Solving the problem of the Middle East is difficult, but the fact that an increasing number of Israelis are sick of electing jingoistic war-mongers is definitely hopeful. For the EU & the US, solving the various sorts of violence and upset is ultimately easy - tax the heck out of the plutocratic leech-lords who have taken all the money, and use these funds to create good jobs, which given increasing automation might involve a larger number of high paying part time jobs. I'm fairly certain that most of the tea-party crazies, the radical Muslim crazies, and even the EU's the would-be fascist crazies would stop their nonsense if they had the option of a well paying job in an economy that wasn't (for them and everyone they know) at best stagnant.
From my PoV, purpose & value are useful, but only once people have legitimate hope for at least a modest amount of prosperity and (especially) improvement (even if its slow and gradual improvement). Without those, from my PoV all talk of giving people feeling of purpose and value are either misguided efforts by progressives or well-decorated lies promoted by the plutocratic leech-lords (I utterly love that phrase, which I just came up with) in an effort to offer fake solutions that will keep people sufficiently busy so as not to attempt to extract money from them or to look at who is actually to blame.
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Date: 2015-01-21 05:00 am (UTC)I would like to find ways to put a stop to this cycle.
* Creating a sense of purpose for people. Modern Western society has a distinct lack of clear vision and sense of purpose. Young people are told that they can do what they want with their lives, but are rarely given much in the way of suggestions of what could be a valuable, interesting thing to do with one’s life. Many drift aimlessly, never quite finding anything that would motivate them, or that would encourage them to really work hard for some deeply fulfilling aim.
In a theoretical sense, I don't think that the solution is all that difficult. Northern Ireland has now had close to 20 years of peace after (depending upon who you ask) 30 years, a century, or several centuries of bloodshed and oppression, and while getting those first couple of years of peace was hard, keeping it just required companies to move in and provide jobs and a hope for a better life for all the teens and early 20s people who were previously lost in rage, fear, and violence.
It seems very clear to me that this is merely a specific case of a much larger solution. Much of the Middle East is a mess, and in much of Western Europe people of color are a permanent non-citizen underclass, while almost all of Western Europe is suffering under utterly disastrous economic policies, and the US is doing only marginally better.
These conditions breed the sort of hopelessness that leads to violence, especially since almost the entire Western middle class is watching their prospects dim, and nothing sparks hopelessness and violence like loss. From a developed world perspective conditions utterly suck for working class people in China, but they aren't making bombs, they're working, because they see real economic hope for themselves and their children.
Solving the problem of the Middle East is difficult, but the fact that an increasing number of Israelis are sick of electing jingoistic war-mongers is definitely hopeful. For the EU & the US, solving the various sorts of violence and upset is ultimately easy - tax the heck out of the plutocratic leech-lords who have taken all the money, and use these funds to create good jobs, which given increasing automation might involve a larger number of high paying part time jobs. I'm fairly certain that most of the tea-party crazies, the radical Muslim crazies, and even the EU's the would-be fascist crazies would stop their nonsense if they had the option of a well paying job in an economy that wasn't (for them and everyone they know) at best stagnant.
From my PoV, purpose & value are useful, but only once people have legitimate hope for at least a modest amount of prosperity and (especially) improvement (even if its slow and gradual improvement). Without those, from my PoV all talk of giving people feeling of purpose and value are either misguided efforts by progressives or well-decorated lies promoted by the plutocratic leech-lords (I utterly love that phrase, which I just came up with) in an effort to offer fake solutions that will keep people sufficiently busy so as not to attempt to extract money from them or to look at who is actually to blame.