Why is the world like this?
Add this to my "weird reasons for hope" tag:
You know, the more I learn about people - about myself, society, psychology, language - the more I begin to think that a truly shocking number of conflicts - interpersonal and large scale - can be explained by some combination of:
Cognitive biases x, x
The fact that we're generally accidentally insulting each other all the time without realizing it, actually x, x, x, x
The fact that there have been a lot of different explanations for How Things Are and How Things Came to Be, believed in very strongly by different groups and people throughout history, and a hell of a lot of those explanations have now been empirically disproven (e.g., the earth is four billion years old, not six thousand) x, x, x
Trauma/intergenerational trauma and epigenetics x, x, x
50% child mortality rate for all of human history until the past 150 years, and much higher rates and younger ages of adult mortality, too x, x
All that constant heavy metal poisoning in Europe and North America from the late 1700s to like the 1970s-1990s (highly correlated with increased aggression and lower IQ*) x, x, x, x *ETA: IQ is a fundamentally flawed concept. It has a lot of issues and has been used to perpetuate a lot of bullshit and justify even more horrible bullshit. However, as the second source argues, it does look like it's a useful measure of cognitive damage and certain neuropsychological processes
Scarcity (x) and especially:
Europeans were historically pretty bad at agriculture and medicine, actually, but they decided they knew best and killed or persecuted everyone who disagreed with them and forced their shitty methods on the whole world via colonialism x, x, x, x, x, x
(Yes, and also capitalism, but everything on that list is older than capitalism, which coalesced in the mid-/late-1700s and early 1800s x, x; the first known use of the word "capitalism" is 1833 x)
Which ig sounds like a lot, but honestly? All those things are a lot more fucking fixable than "humans are innately and uniquely evil" or "humans are inherently stupid/too stupid to survive"
