Why do people always imagine that there was a time when people were less corrupt & evil?
Brutal slavery & rape & violence were the norm all over the world for basically all of human history. When primative ideas or people from primative places invade modern societies we see a return of those behaviors.
I guess maybe people are so disconnected from the harshness of the natural world that they have just lost touch with everything?
You’re spot on! Sometimes people romanticize the past, thinking that things were simpler or better back then. Throughout history, we've seen some really brutal and terrible things happening, like slavery, rape, and violence, which to your point,were unfortunately quite common.
I think part of the reason why people might have this idealized view of the past is that they're disconnected from the harshness of the natural world. With the advancements we've made in technology and society, it's easy to forget the struggles our ancestors faced. We live in a more comfortable and relatively safer world today, which can make it harder to fully understand the harsh realities of the past.
We bitcoiners know all too well that most people want to pull a vail over the truth. They’d rather not know and feel the emotions that coincide with raw truth.
Resource scarcity brings those behaviors back regardless of the cultural distance from those times it seems.
I don't think it's scarcity so much as a lack of ability to coordinate. Scarcity doesn't help tho.
The current state likely isn’t abject scarcity, and hopefully it never will be because as the degree of scarcity increases, the behavioral guidance from enculturation and social mores melts away. A person can see it in stressed animal populations, and well, at the end of the day, we’re just monkeys with lots of intellectual dressage.
I'm convinced England 200-300 years ago was less violent, but still far from perfect
When people were escaping England to come to America...? Listen to the recent Bitcoin Standard podcast on Conceived in Liberty. That is now high on my reading list.
I think the peak of English idyll is after the peak of US-bound migration
Another historical episode I think was relatively peaceful was the Wild West / Old West period. I think the "outlaw" system did a better job retarding crime than modern mass policing.
This purports to show US homicide rates marginally lower in the 50s & 60s
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-homicide-in-the-us-since-1950/
I guess I’d agree with this from a human nature perspective, but I do think it’s fair to say that there were times in the past when a lot of incentives were better. Those incentives definitely influence human behavior for the better too, even if human nature remains the same.
I’ve had similar conversations with people many times.
People seem to readily complain about the state of the world today but objectively the average western individual is safer and able to be more productive / wealthy than at any other point in known human history.
True we have less freedoms in many ways and there are still problems - fiat and big government being the two main issues. But survival and productive endeavor opportunities are at ATH.
I think people are profoundly disconnected from historical precedents (how brutal the past was), while being simultaneously inundated with scary news on their screens (selection bias) and are self-centered (conflate their minor problems as serious issues).
Soft, ignorant people make up the bulk of humanity right now and it often makes me think we’re ready for a fall. To clear out the dead weight. Nature doesn’t favor helpless organisms well long-term…
