Political Memes

Pretty sure most of the medicine were done by us in the last 100/150 years

We weren't gifted anything. And any species will expand to consume all the available resources. We're just better at it than all the previous ones. The challenge now is to find an equilibrium, which is a totally new concept in the history of evolution on earth. The jury is very much out on this one.

Well, we also invented Buddhism, communism and veganism.

Humans didn't invent war.

War and murder surrounds us, everywhere, from micro to macro, as we feed on each other to live.

It's a Murder Planet

First of all, we are a product of it. We also demand nutrition, like any other animal. We work by the same principles like any other animal. We just have a large neocortex, which allows us to solve complex problems, which other animals cannot. We use this to our advantage like any other animal would do. I am not saying that it is the right thing we are doing but we grew out of primitivism and have much more complex problems at hand now, which mainly need us to reject our tribal behaviour and move past it. Many of these large problems are due to our tribalism. Why should we care about the world? We care about our loved ones only. Why should I give money to people I do not know? I would rather give it to my close ones. Everything else is a potential threat. Our tribalism doesn't function properly at this scale and we have to move past it somehow, while it is deeply natural for us to behave like this and at small scale also beneficial and not harmful to others.

Part of the problem is plague, as in infectious disease. This factor drove us to evolve into preferring small separate tribes over big ones. Once your brain can't keep track of all the neighborhood, it starts wanting to categorize folks into groups, and separate us from them.

In fact, all of civilization is in defiance of some base instincts, in which we presume people of different color, who speak different languages, who have different cultures or worship different gods, all are indicators that they are dangerous.

In the time before livestock (from which we caught bunches of infectious diseases, died a lot and developed immunities), a mutant influenza was deadly and strangers were dangerous. And this is seen as empires explored new worlds, exposed indigenous peoples to their array of diseases and wiped them out.

As a note, since germ theory, we replaced segregation with robust communal disease control. And even then, movements rise up to distrust vaccines, masking, social distancing and even washing hands. The same shit that happened during the COVID-19 epidemic also happened during the Spanish Flu epidemic.

So we never really had time to evolve to meet the expanding size of civilization, and had to fake it. In small groups there's just not much political power to consolidate, but by the time we're making villages and cities, we start seeing classes beyond tribesman and chieftain.

What is curious is that we've proven that political power and advantage saps away empathy and respect for your fellow human, so any time there is a significant power differential, the working class feels expendable according to the working class. (They aren't, and some elites will preserve awareness of this, but it's difficult to be a billionaire and still respect wits and education when vibes are so easy.)

It doesn't help that the ownership class conspires among its own to preserve power within its group (all the while, individually contriving to seize the power of their peer for themselves -- avarice is brutal), so anytime we see in history an attempt to create a socialist democracy, capitalist interests act to sabotage the effort, including killing the organizers and sending in military force to seize power and install a puppet junta.

So yes, we really are bad at this, and are not merely going to drive ourselves to near extinction, but are also killing off most of the species across earth.

Where meme

Humans invented war? Tell that to ants, birds, bees, wasps, wolves, and millions of other animals. We just happen to be very good at it. If there's one thing to be said about humans, it's that we are ridiculously good at killing things.

Only when the last tree has died and the last river poisoned and the last fish caught will we realize we cannot eat money.

Cree Native American proverb

I hate takes that condemn the whole of humanity for the evil of a powerful handful. That's basically conservative ideology.

It is almost like society is complex

I don’t really see how this is important. Earth will heal once humans destroy themselves/their environment. Theoretically we should be trying to save earth for the next generation, but leaders think short term…. The next 3 months.

It’s because of the mosquitoes

Humans just happen to be at the top of the food chain at this point in time. littereraly millions of other creatures have held the title before us, and millions more will after us. Circle of life an all that.

I can believe it.

Our species has repeatedly and reliably demonstrated its innate awfulness for the entirety of our history. If there is a way to exploit and be shitty to one another, we'll not only commit it, but we'll legalize it, normalize it, and pretend that not doing it is the weird thing.