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What do you not understand about humanity?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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At the end of the day, we’re all just dumb, stupid animals. Natural selection may have given us brains with more folds, but the process of selection cares not for things that don’t impact immediate survival. Anxiety, depression, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer… the list goes on. Those things don’t matter for selection because they don’t really have an impact on our ability to continue our gene line.
It’s evident in the way our society works. Everyone, at the end of the day, just wants to get by. Some feel that in order to do so, they have to be better off than everyone else. They have to have the big stick. Meanwhile most of us would be happy if we didn’t have to struggle to pay rent or buy food.
We’re no better than viruses at the end of the day. We’re just unique (or maybe not so?) that we can comprehend the thought.
So true. That's the point of the novel "Animal Farm." We want a human society where justice and peace prevails. But, inevitably, there are some pigs who feel they deserve a bigger slice of pie and don't care how they get it. It's not pretty, it's not some mythic ideal of paradise, but it's the reality we live in. Yeah it's true we have the ability to comprehend yet we still lack the ability to feel and to care. In a way, that's even worse than being a dumb animal.
Not all of us. And that’s probably the only reason injustice actually matters.
No not all, but people who study violence (such as the council on criminal justice) have found that more and more humans lack the (previously thought to be innate) traits of empathy and kindness. We live in a world where shooting people in video games is perfectly OK and causing death is entertainment.
I play God of War (and House of the Dead) so I can't say that I'm above any of that. Only that I see how it dissuades people from being able to care very much and even enables some people to murder others for fun. For every mass shooter who plays violent video games, there's 10 million more playing those same games that aren't mass murderers.
But, and this is the big BUT, violent media (even if it is big business) does inure people to feelings of empathy and compassion, it accustoms people to seeing acts of violence, and it even makes it seem like nothing but a game. These are just my thoughts - not moral judgments about what others do with their free time.