“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”
Brings to mind the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park, who said something along the lines of 'if you know that you're oppressed, then you're not truly oppressed. North Koreans do not know the word oppression.'
Brilliant piece. Although I do wonder, does a healthy dose of pessimism help enable progress? We clearly need optimists to get inspired by our past human trajectories, imagine even better futures, and work towards these futures. On the other hand, if we were all optimists, then perhaps we wouldn't see the problems anymore that we are trying to solve? After all we created this whole fantastic trajectory of progress despite the presence of so much pessimism.
A balance of optimists and pessimists is definitely needed. The problem is, the extended reach of traditional media and the rise of social media has greatly increased the number of pessimists in recent decades. In general, the utility of pessimism is positive so long as the pessimists seek to rectify their complaints through incremental reform, such as through legislative, economic, or non-profit means. When the pessimists resort to revolutionary or radical reforms, i.e., the French Revolution, the Soviet Gulags, or the One Child Policy, things tend to go horribly wrong. The likelihood that pessimists will resort to radical means is a function of the magnitude of pessimism - both the number of pessimists and the degree of pessimism within each pessimist. Because of the negativity inherent in traditional and social media, we are currently flirting with a magnitude of pessimism that lends itself towards radical reform. Remembering and frequently discussing these seven laws of declinism should hopefully held bring the pendulum back towards optimism.
Definitely food for thought! Since the Arab Spring I haven't observed massive uprisings fueled by social media. That doesn't mean that they couldn't occur in the future of course. But even the coups in Africa in recent years do not seem to be massively triggered by the use of social and traditional media. Luckily there is lots of uplifting content here on Substack!
As someone whose specialty is infectious diseases, I feel #1 and #6 in my soul. I mean, come on, guys, look at all the things that used to kill people on the regular that we have now eradicated. Why can't y'all be happy?
But I do worry that our inability to see the progress we've made will cause society to regress, if we fail to recognize that how awesome things are now is not an inherent feature of the universe, but a carefully constructed and maintained human invention. Also, while I agree that things will continue to get better over the long term and in aggregate for humans, on a local, short term scale things could collapse very badly and very quickly. To use a historical analogy, it's easy to imagine Jewish-German immunologist Paul Ehrlich* being optimistic about the trajectory of human progress just prior to his death in 1915--after all, look at all the progress that had been made through international collaboration in just the previous couple of decades. Imagine, he might think, how much better things will be in 100 years, in 2015. And he wouldn't be wrong--things would be much, much better in 2015 than in 1915. But that progress was still punctuated with an extremely bad catastrophe, especially for Dr. Ehrlich's country and his family, and someone who warned him, "I don't think you should be so sanguine about what happens after this Great War" would not have been wrong, either. I'm using this analogy to underscore that "local" can mean huge swathes of the whole world, and that "short-term" can still mean encompassing a whole generation.
(*not to be confused with professional pessimist Paul Ralph Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb.")
Wonderful piece. I love when we can take concepts back down to the first principles of physics. It has been argued, that we humans, and indeed all life on Earth, further and accelerate the universe’s natural tendency toward energy dispersion by creating vortexes of order out of the disorder.
This may explain why we find counter-entropic forms beautiful, such as flowers and architecture. At the same time, it may explain why we pay such close attention to pro-entropic forces. It’s counterintuitive, but perhaps we give outsized emotional weight when something slides back into disorder because it means that our island of order is threatened. The media preys upon these innate fears, our biological hardwiring, which creates a sense that things are getting worse when they are actually getting better.
“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”
Brings to mind the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park, who said something along the lines of 'if you know that you're oppressed, then you're not truly oppressed. North Koreans do not know the word oppression.'
Thank you for this thought-provoking read!
Very enjoyable read!
Brilliant piece. Although I do wonder, does a healthy dose of pessimism help enable progress? We clearly need optimists to get inspired by our past human trajectories, imagine even better futures, and work towards these futures. On the other hand, if we were all optimists, then perhaps we wouldn't see the problems anymore that we are trying to solve? After all we created this whole fantastic trajectory of progress despite the presence of so much pessimism.
A balance of optimists and pessimists is definitely needed. The problem is, the extended reach of traditional media and the rise of social media has greatly increased the number of pessimists in recent decades. In general, the utility of pessimism is positive so long as the pessimists seek to rectify their complaints through incremental reform, such as through legislative, economic, or non-profit means. When the pessimists resort to revolutionary or radical reforms, i.e., the French Revolution, the Soviet Gulags, or the One Child Policy, things tend to go horribly wrong. The likelihood that pessimists will resort to radical means is a function of the magnitude of pessimism - both the number of pessimists and the degree of pessimism within each pessimist. Because of the negativity inherent in traditional and social media, we are currently flirting with a magnitude of pessimism that lends itself towards radical reform. Remembering and frequently discussing these seven laws of declinism should hopefully held bring the pendulum back towards optimism.
Definitely food for thought! Since the Arab Spring I haven't observed massive uprisings fueled by social media. That doesn't mean that they couldn't occur in the future of course. But even the coups in Africa in recent years do not seem to be massively triggered by the use of social and traditional media. Luckily there is lots of uplifting content here on Substack!
As someone whose specialty is infectious diseases, I feel #1 and #6 in my soul. I mean, come on, guys, look at all the things that used to kill people on the regular that we have now eradicated. Why can't y'all be happy?
But I do worry that our inability to see the progress we've made will cause society to regress, if we fail to recognize that how awesome things are now is not an inherent feature of the universe, but a carefully constructed and maintained human invention. Also, while I agree that things will continue to get better over the long term and in aggregate for humans, on a local, short term scale things could collapse very badly and very quickly. To use a historical analogy, it's easy to imagine Jewish-German immunologist Paul Ehrlich* being optimistic about the trajectory of human progress just prior to his death in 1915--after all, look at all the progress that had been made through international collaboration in just the previous couple of decades. Imagine, he might think, how much better things will be in 100 years, in 2015. And he wouldn't be wrong--things would be much, much better in 2015 than in 1915. But that progress was still punctuated with an extremely bad catastrophe, especially for Dr. Ehrlich's country and his family, and someone who warned him, "I don't think you should be so sanguine about what happens after this Great War" would not have been wrong, either. I'm using this analogy to underscore that "local" can mean huge swathes of the whole world, and that "short-term" can still mean encompassing a whole generation.
(*not to be confused with professional pessimist Paul Ralph Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb.")
Wonderful piece. I love when we can take concepts back down to the first principles of physics. It has been argued, that we humans, and indeed all life on Earth, further and accelerate the universe’s natural tendency toward energy dispersion by creating vortexes of order out of the disorder.
This may explain why we find counter-entropic forms beautiful, such as flowers and architecture. At the same time, it may explain why we pay such close attention to pro-entropic forces. It’s counterintuitive, but perhaps we give outsized emotional weight when something slides back into disorder because it means that our island of order is threatened. The media preys upon these innate fears, our biological hardwiring, which creates a sense that things are getting worse when they are actually getting better.