timberwraith
"I believe that most people have goodness in their hearts."
I believed this at one time. Or, I really tried to believe this. Probably from my teens to my 30th birthday or so. It lasted for a little while in my adult years.
It just didn't stand the test of time and experience.
I do not believe this anymore. I've seen too many humans behaving in too many cruel ways and espousing too many cruel things.
We're disturbingly cruel for a social species. We aren't good at being a social species.
Rich Felker
@LJ @timberwraith We're too small to be that. Space is too huge. If there are alien civilizations, we'll never see each other. This is the boring but serious answer to the Fermi paradox.
timberwraith
@LJ "There is no them. Not on a rock with a thin shell of air hurtling through space."
THIS
I am positively face-palming myself across the decades because the nearness of the consequences of our collective cruelty grow thinner with each passing year.
A clock is ticking down...
LJ
@timberwraith If there are alien civilizations in the cosmos, it's no wonder they haven't come here. We are probably the universe's warning sign.
timberwraith
Because years and generations establish distance too.
Distance resets the cruelty counter.
Murder becomes viable again.
Always.
We don't have goodness in our hearts.
We only have goodness in our hearts for people in close proximity who are like us or a false goodness when the consequences of cruelty are too high.
Until time has passed and we feel safe enough to be fuckers again.
And then we do what we have always done.
To those who we see as alien.
LJ
@timberwraith I'm thinking hard about this thread. I wanted you to know that. No answers. Only a wish that more people would open their definition of 'us'. There is no them. Not on a rock with a thin shell of air hurtling through space.
timberwraith
I have seen this happen twice. I was just a child at the end of the Vietnam War. People had cruelty brought home to them and they reconsidered being fuckers to other countries of people who are different from them.
But that didn't last too long. Cruelty became a viable measure by the time I was an adult. Murdering people in the Middle East for oil was a good thing in the 90s. We continued in the next decade after people from the same part of the world punched us back hard.
timberwraith
And then torture, slaughter, and wholesale burning entire countries down were acceptable things.
Because a small group of people from a group of people different from us had the temerity to punch us in the face for being assholes to them across the decades.
How dare they. OK, let's just murder everyone else from that part of the world.
Easy and good!
Especially when you can have a group of *other* people do your cruelty for you.
Thank you for your service.
timberwraith
Oh fuck, this has gone on for over over a decade. We actually know some of those people from our own group who were maimed or killed. That's painful.
Maybe murdering people different from us in other countries, far far away, is a bad thing.
OK.
We'll reconsider for the next round.
2026, more murdering of people different from us in places far, far away...
This is bad we can't do this.
I give it ten years or less before we forget what we learned.
timberwraith
I have seen this demonstrated again and again in my life.
Oh, how easy it is to lead humans into thinking that it's good to murder and destroy whole countries full of people if they're different enough from them. Bombing, burning, raping, torturing, and so on... All popular and easy things to convince one country full of people to do to another country full of people if you can convince them of how DIFFERENT the other is, of how DANGEROUS that makes the other.
timberwraith
Emotional distance and physical distance are the lubrication for evil in the hearts of humans. It is so much easier to feel justified in murdering other humans if those things are present.
Especially if you can outsource your evil to a standing military. Someone else can do the evil for you.
That's comforting.
Thank you for your service.
timberwraith
Well, until too many of one's own group of similar people are hurt. Too many conscripted soldiers coming home in bags and caskets. Or too many relatives and neighbors and friends who were professional soldiers in a standing military come home as corpses.
That's painful.
A whole country reconsiders after the cruelty comes home to THEM.
Then they remember that cruelty comes with a price.
For about a generation.
And then they go back to being fuckers.
timberwraith
"I believe that most people have goodness in their hearts."
Goodness toward WHOM?
If you limit your awareness to just those people in your own particular corner of the world, your own particular demographic, class, race, sex/gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc., then yes, I imagine that people look like they have kindness in their hearts.
Humans are more likely to be kind toward other humans who are like them.
But NOT if they are outside those similarities.
timberwraith
Humans are actually petty *terrible* at extending kindness to others who are different from their own group of shared qualities.
Difference creates distance, on an emotional scale, and it is surprisingly easy for humans to not care about people who are different.
It is surprisingly easy for humans to be *cruel* to people who are different from them.
The more difference, the greater the emotional distance, and the easier it is to hurt the other person--easier to exploit and destroy the other.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.