Is the world getting better or worse?

Wow, Kevin Spacey? Never pictured him as such. Then again, as you say, probably just a move to get less disapproval from his actions.

On the thread of the topic, yes, it's good that more people are getting prosecuted for crimes, because it means the victims who were previously afraid to say anything are gaining the courage to tell their story now and that the justice system is getting more transparent overall.

edited 30th Oct '17 5:45:05 PM by Grafite

The Kevin Spacey thing on the other hand is incredibly shitty. Only coming out as gay after being charged with sexually assaulting a minor? Do we really need the All Gays Are Pedophiles stereotype to be reinforced? It's bad enough that Weinstein and other predatory assholes and their supporters have been spouting the old I'm a Man; I Can't Help It bullshit excuse (sex addiction my ass).

My answer to the thread's question is two-fold: 1. Yes, the world is getting worse in that we have a much greater technological capacity for destroying ourselves than we used to, and 2. No, humanity in terms of character is about as messed up as it has always been, with some improvement over the centuries in human rights depending on where one lives.

In the 19th century, large disasters were often followed by people calling for high celebration and prosperity. WWI was followed by the "Roaring Twenties" and WWII by the "Golden Age 50s". The belief was that the worst was over and humanity had shed off its past evil to advance eternally upward. But this was a myth allowed by the fact that the celebrators survived by living in prosperous places and knew little about the outside world. So other places continued to bear the scars of the devastating wars but were rarely heard of.

Media technology started changing that. With the increasing availability and cheapness of film stock, television news became more widespread in first world homes, and people started hearing more about the world outside of them. With more knowledge that there were problems all across the globe, problems with no easy solutions and continuous bloodshed, people began to grow more cynical and dismiss the idea that the world was improving. As a result, a period of relative peace and prosperity like the 90s, which might've in the past sparked a decade's celebration from the fall of the USSR, was instead characterized by feelings of alienation and boredom.

Today the Internet has tripled what television started, allowing for faster spreading of news and reaction to events than in all of humanity's existence. With such rapid information and increased learning, humans know more about the world at elementary ages than even recent ancestors did as adults. And all that information has complexified our view of the world, and the world's response time. This is why today it feels like a year's worth of news happens within a single week, because the web lets us all move so fast now.

Can the world improve what it is now? Perhaps. This mass information stream is both a curse and a blessing. This generation could become the most informed generation in all of history, knowing more about government and racial politics and sexual politics and the environment than any other voters before. But there remain archaic laws, unfair systems, and fake news sabotagers that prevent that progression. If enough of them are shed, this world's societies really can improve. It will not be viewed as the "Golden Ages" our ancestors spoke of in the past, but it can be viewed as definitively fairer than before.

Making a follow-up to why I believe things are getting better:

I do not consider individual bad events in my judgement since every decade has had it's good and bad.

In broader trends, as mentioned in my first post, metrics of quality of life, human development, equality between race/gender/sexuality/etc, and human rights are trending upwards in most countries, and with the trends it's very hard for me to see that things are getting worse and not better.

It's easy to pin-point Trump as proof that the world is getting worse, but America isn't really the whole world. It makes up 4% of the world's population. In other words, 7.3 billion people don't live in the US.

Unless he causes damage to human rights and quality of living across the globe, or if those metrics that I mentioned in the opening post stop improving and start worsening, I will continue to find it impossible to believe things are getting worse worldwide.

edited 3rd Nov '17 10:10:51 AM by WhatArtThee

Trump is more a reaction to progresiveness than a conclution to shittiness, he is more reaction to Obama than anything else.

100 years ago we experienced on a global scale WWI, the Spanish Flu and most of the world lived under the heel of imperialist powers.

30 years ago, half of Europe was under the dominion of the Soviet Union.

Even outside of the Western world, there are a lot of people who have a better life than the generation before them. There is a growing middle class in countries like India and China, and also more and more people in Africa who escape poverty (unfortunately due to the high birth rate, the absolute number of poor people has not been affected).

Even the Middle East is arguably in a better situation than it used to be, in terms of victims a least (compared to e.g. the Armenian Genocide or the Iraq-Iran War, the current conflict are somewhalt smaller in scale).

So in short, I would argue that yes, things are getting better with time. It is not a progress without setbacks, but as long as we avoid any war between Great powers, it should be fine.

Bumping this thread because recently I was involved with a *terrible* argument about why things in the world are getting worse, and would like to know how much of these claims are true.

- "Having Trump in power in America makes things are getting worse worldwide."

- "The issues we have progressed on up until the 2000s, including social progress like LGBT rights and racial equality, as well as things like health, are now regressing worldwide and have been undone."

- "Racist and far-right views are now normal and acceptable, worldwide."

- "The collective treatment of humanity has never been worse, ever".

- "Good periods for America are good periods for the entire world, and vice versa."

- "We are worse off than the 1990s and 2000s, worldwide, in pretty much every metric.",

- "Fascism has taken over the West, and is at it's highest peak since before World War II."

Is any of this true, or is it just pessimissm/fear-mongering?

edited 27th Nov '17 8:36:11 AM by WhatArtThee

Let's see:

-True, but it can be changed, at the latest, in 2024.

-False, there was no Obamacare in the 2000s or gay marriage in most states.

-False, far-righters are more prominent but far from being accepted by society overall.

-So much false, remember slavery, the holocaust, feudalism? I member...

-True, the US has a lot of influence over the entire world now, specially now with globalisation.

-False, the 90's and 00's had that horrid Christian fundamentalism and extreme islamophobia, and the economy was worse than nowadays.

-False, it is at its highest since World War, but it hasn't in any way taken over the West (see the French election this year).

edited 27th Nov '17 8:52:14 AM by Grafite

1 is definitely true. Of course things are going to get worse when the most powerful nation on Earth is being run by a fascistic careless bigoted xenophobic manchild.

2 is bullshit. Case in point: Australia voting Yes on gay marriage in a referendum. Yes there's backlash and we still have to fight to avoid regressing, but things have improved in certain places. Let's not forget the Me Too thing that finally has people starting to take sexual harassment seriously.

3 is sadly true. Far right fascist movements are rising and being normalized, in large part due to social media and the general disillusionment people have felt in the wake of the problems of the last couple decades such as the mortgage crisis. But there is at least backlash against this.

4 is just bullshit.

5 would be a bad joke to quite a few nations. Maybe it's truer now, but in the past not so much.

6 is based on a rose-tinted nostalgic view of those decades. Also bullshit.

7 is a gross exaggeration. Yes, we have a fascist in the WH and we've got alt-right assholes running around, but America's institutions are old and still strong despite everything. The POTUS may be a wannabe fascist, but the USA is not fascist. Yet.

edited 27th Nov '17 8:59:12 AM by M84

4. No, it's true. Slavery? It's more common now than ever before. It's not publicized, but it's prevalent. https://www.freetheslaves.net/about-slavery/slavery-today/

There may be more slaves total, but it's not legal in any country anymore, nor is it viewed upon fondly by most people, and the reason for the bigger number is because the world population has substantially grown too in the last decades.

Also, collective treatment of humanity has never been worse? Have we forgotten what it was like to be a jew, a "witch", a heretic or a homosexual in the times of the Inquisition?

edited 27th Nov '17 11:34:50 AM by Grafite

Just ask them if they would be willing to switch places with a randomly chosen person on Earth from 1000 years ago. 500? 100? See how close you have to get to today before they take the offer. The closer, the less you have a long term trend, and the more it's just a short term fluctuation. Things have been improving for a very long time, but it always seems as if it's getting worse.

One way in which we are going backwards is in terms of wealth disparity, however. Growing only since the 1970's, but growing fast, and becoming institutionalized.

Maybe never been worse is an overstatement, but when slavery gets brought up as a dead institution I have to raise a red flag and tell you, "nope, it isn't." I'm pretty sure it's only illegal on the books in China. Still actively practiced and reinforced by the huge disparity between the sexes that cropped up since their one child law started. Reports estimate that disparity as a 30,000,000 surplus in men who won't find Chinese wives without killing another Chinese man to get his. While that's probably an exaggeration, their cultural dislike of women did lead to a lot of Chinese girls getting adopted out of the country, or killed at home to be replaced by a boy. They have to repair that issue somehow, and other reports have made it appear they're kidnapping girls from the rest of Southeast and mideast Asia to compensate. If that ain't legalized slavery, I don't know what is.

In some areas There's new innovations every day but in area ideas, there's some set backs. Doesn't help that not many are stopping global warming but it is being acknowledge and people are trying. The environment is improving some areas but I'm still help bent on finding a way to increase inveterate populations. This seems extreme but some had suggested we give back all the things we take form the animals and end in cities that hold most of the population. (maybe those sky scrapers people be talking about)

I know life might not get better after I die but we"re getting there.

By "slavery" you mean human trafficing, right? Do you have links documenting a per capita rise in recent years?

Even if that is the case, as tragic as that is for millions of human beings, I still think that on average, most people on Earth are better off compared to even 20 years ago.

By slavery I mean the end result of human trafficking, where a person is shoved under the control of another human being who uses them for their own means, and replaces them if they die. That is generally the definition of slavery. Being forced to serve another against your will with little to no hope of escape?

I don't have a per capita source. I've seen several that cite it as worse than ever but haven't really dug into the numbers beyond that one link I posted that estimated the current number as 40,000,000.

The fact that it remains illegal is an improvement. Now we can actually fight slavery by jailing perpetrators etc. Before slavers had the law on their side and the law against those opposing them.

There was a time when killing slaves was even legally recognised as a legitimate way for a businessman to reduce his losses in certain circumstances, see Gregson v Gilbert.

edited 28th Nov '17 12:37:31 AM by editerguy

You have to be careful about definitions. Technically, what you just proposed describes every form of employment, ever. Modern "slavery" (put in quotes, because, legally, no one is property anymore) is about the use of various forms of physical, financial and judicial coercion to extract involuntary labor from someone. It commonly involves kidnapping or fraud to force someone to cross an international boundary (because most frequently the whole point is to move people from where labor is cheap to where customers are willing to buy services for more money). The most common forms of involuntary labor are agricultural and prostitution. Since its technically illegal to do all this, it only works if government officials are willing to look the other way. Such involuntary servitude ("slavery") is present in nearly every country in the world, incl. the US. The number of total victims are at least in the high tens of millions.

However, bad as all this is, it doesnt change the fact that on average, life has gotten better for most people. The fact that conditions can improve for many, but greater worsen for others, is a sad commentary on human nature.

edited 28th Nov '17 6:21:56 AM by DeMarquis