With Daylight Savings once again coming up, it never fails for it to spark discussions about its purpose in modern times. People hate it widely while few seem to be okay with it and depending where you live, others don’t even know what the deal is.
Politicians have actually put it on the docket to be voted on, but seems to have lost traction. Quite frankly, this is an issue that should be done and over with. Just end it, but please end it when we have the clocks dialed back than forward, because I wouldn’t like time going faster than it already is.
Authority, hierarchy, government, capitalism.
It really is amazing, all the insights, the discoveries, the knowledge, the artistry, the technology that the human race has acquired. Historically, every time we thought we knew the limits of our potential, we have gone far beyond those limits. Except that we still haven’t figured out how not to hand over control of everything to the absolute worst of us. Like literally put our most deluded narcissistic psychopathic pedophiles in charge of the entire fucking world.
Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?
To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?
But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.
Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:
folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)
folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.
folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.
This is the purpose of the American Experiment. To devise a society that won’t ever truly be occupied entirely by the worst of us.