Whenever I hear the phrase “life isn’t fair” in response to someone being treated unfairly by humans, I feel compelled to point out that humans could very well make life fair if most of us weren’t absolute garbage.
It can always be better but I think pure nature is even less fair and can be absolutely cruel. We are very spoiled of our cultural progresses living in a huge bubble where everything is pink and fluffy compared to “real life out there in wild nature”.
Yeah but I don’t live in nature so what do I give a fuck? I just want people to stop being assholes to each other
I just wanted to point out that we humans already made life more fair. Of course it could be better and it sucks when people are mean, but at least we mostly don’t just beat each other to death suddenly or dueling on the streets any more.
While you’re not wrong, this also isn’t a counterpoint to what I said. I’m not sure if that was your intention.
Mean this with respect but it’s not that simple. Bonobos have matriarchs and when there’s a violent abuse like a rape, the female bonobos rip the others genitals off as a show punishment against their actions. Or how elephants care for and mourn their dead. If we were in the wild, our life wouldn’t be that of a deer, rabbit or bear, we are a pretty unique species where most of our closely related within our genus are wiped so all we have left is to look at monkeys for simulatry. Be it today or 100,000 years ago, homo sapien was just as smart then as now.
In a sense, we are integrated with the previous hominids. They didn’t go extinct so much they bred with early humans and their DNA is preserved in our own.
Well yes and no, we did somewhat integrate them, but it in reality it was either we out fucked them leading to them being a tiny part of our DNA, or we did a cheeky genocide. I’m going towards the first idea
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You list other animals as positive examples and then say yourself that our life wouldn’t be like other animals.
When we were still small hunter gatherer groups, individuals who made problems or simply weren’t strong enough or a bit sick would cold heartedly be left behind alone which was a death sentence for early humans sooner or later.
This is unequivocally false and we have many examples of deformed individual from 8000+ years ago being not only bruised but cared for until a long age and in many cases decorated. Have you ever considered the possibility that unless absolutely necessary or atleast in most societies, most would care for the weak, sick, deformed, mentally ill. Your mindset of history comes from an hobbsian notion of the rough and brutish hunter gathers which has absolutely no scientfiic base
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/science/ancient-bones-that-tell-a-story-of-compassion.html
Also read Dawn of everything and humankind for more sources and more then I could possibly give.
But simply put. You are incorrect
now picture that bubble popping and nature has broken.
The concept of justice and fairness on a grand scale is distinctly human. If anyone is gonna make life fair it’s gotta be humans.
I try and remember we’re all just dumb animals.
Who like to fuck more than be considerate parents
Ouff ouchie that hurts.
it feels like a line from the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
Maybe whales know something we don’t. They have land ancestry, so they started as something in the ocean came out for a bit and decided to go back
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
No, we absolutely haven’t.
Thinking everything should be simple is exactly how we got into our current global socioeconomic situation.
We should collectively set the rules so that everyone benefits and nobody suffers. Complex problems and complex solutions.
65% of life forms on the planet engage in parasitic survival strategies. This was a risk we took when we started using agriculture, allowing for specializations other than chieftain and shaman. (Everyone else was a generalist.)
Our instincts are still the same hunter-gatherer stuff from 25,000 years ago. Which includes behaviors antithetical to large, complex civilization.
One of those is a bias towards obedience to authority, and to loyalty to clan, over principle (creeds, laws, codes of ethics). We tend to want to obey the chieftain who commands us rather than challenge them when they demand the unconscionable.
Demagogues, who exploit these biases, were known in classic Athens, hence we have a Greek name for such people, and Athenians tried to recognize and shun them.
The bible has a lot of proscriptions against manipulative tyrants and priests. It also has many decrees to uplift the widow, the stranger, the immigrant, the destitute. This tells us the problem of dudes seeking to consolidate social power (money and authority) and then abuse that power has been a problem throughout known human history.
Obviously we haven’t fixed it yet and still want high tech water, sewage, power and information infrastructure.
We need a movement that is willing to assert its collective power not just for a few concessions but until we have an ironclad social contract that distributes political power widely, and does not tolerate surplus when there is scarcity and need.
