Evil People Have Plans
From Zanecorpwiki
WIP There's like 2-3 ideas here that run together. Totally useless for anyone else to read.
A little monologue by comedian Lee Camp: "Evil people have plans". Good people don't bother with plans, they just live their lives. This strike me as kind of true, and a big problem.
I'm a good person with plans. Lots of plans. I think about my plans constantly. I make plans to save the world. Literally. I think about whether it will ever be possible to reach back into time to save everyone that's ever lived. And everything.
And the truth is, I'm pretty on my own with that. I'm not really complaining, because it's pretty clear that A) people tend to complain a lot that things are getting worse and worse and worse, while B) all the evidence is that on the whole things get better and better and better.
That isn't to say that there isn't backsliding everywhere, and certainly there are areas of the world that are going backwards. But for the most part, most of the time and certainly "on the whole" (pretty much anyway you want to define "the whole"), things get better.
And recently they've been getting a lot better a lot faster. 1,000 AD was, by our relative measures of today, not that far from 0 AD. For the "classical world", things were perhaps even a little worse (though the conception of the dark ages is a bit overdone in my opinion). For people in general, 1,500 AD was better than 1,000. But the difference between 2,000 AD and 1,900 AD was, by most measures, vast. More progress in that one century than in the millinia before. Of course, it depends on your measure, but in terms of technology, science, materials engineering, medicine, raw standard of living, "real" income, and probably even things like art and music, the progress in the those 100 years eclipsed that of the 1,000 before.
This dislocation can be problematic, but that's a lesser problem than a world without a cure for maleria and a smallpox vaccine. The problem we worry about are more than not the result of our progress. When I think of the problems we have now-a-days, it gives me nothing but hope.
A story Ruth told me the other day: "I was talking with this African [in Africa] and they were telling me how great America was and how it was such a wonderful, caring, safe place. I was like, 'Oh, it's not all great. We still have discrimination.' And they said, 'Oh... like the genocides?' 'No... it's more like, people might call you a name or you won't get a promotion.'"
Obviously, discrimination is a problem in America and we are right to fret and worry. And sometimes discrimination does kill. Maybe much more than I think. But it's not genocide. It's not entire families being wiped out because of their religion or tribal affiliations. We used to have genocides in America. There used to be organized of state and socially sanctioned death squads in the south. Maybe the Founding Fathers did have some magically pure vision of the future, but everyone that looks back to the good old days is making a serious, serious error if you think things were better. It would be hard to articulate a rational, non-morally repugnant world view that considered an honest view of the past and said, "I'd rather live there." It's one thing to imagine yourself hob knobbing with Washington and sitting in on the Constitutional Convention--I might go for that myself--but if you a median person now-a-days, to be a median-person then--or even a non-Founding Father rich person--would mean that you'd live a short, relatively boring and uneventful life filled with danger and sickness that are unknown to you today. In winter you'd eat dried meat, vinegared vegetables and mouldy bread. In Spring you'd wait for the thaw to bury your dead. You'd need to have a dozen children so that half of them could survive long enough to keep you in some kind of comfort in your old age. Which, if you were lucky, would be your 50's or 60's.
Sure, we have our problems now-a-days. Some are very, very serious. But the fact that we have the simple ability care about atrocities in other nations bespeaks to how far we've come. We might not do enough, but 100 year ago, we couldn't have done anything if we'd wanted (and no, atrocities are not a modern thing).
So, let me pull this back to the Camp monologue. I sometimes literally weep when I think how much farther along we'd be if we tried a little harder, planned a little more.
And stayed positive! Ahh... I'm listening to people talk about the union busting going on and the transfer of wealth to the rich and all that, and I agree it's horrible, and it's unfair, and the rich don't pay their fair share, etc. but on the other hand I keep thinking "If we spent all this energy working on a better society for everyone, maybe it wouldn't matter so much that the rich screwed us." I mean, for the sake of argument assume that the rich have "unfairly absconded with 10% of middle class wealth" (whatever that means). Now, that's unfair and we should make sure that doesn't happen again, but at the same time if my choice is fight a long, politically divisive, uphill struggle to reclaim a small percentage of that wealth or to instead restructure my position to be resistant to future incursion and get back to doing what I love and rebuilding my position myself, I'd prefer the latter.
