[ExI] Just some thoughts, nothing new really

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

Just some comments I posted somebody's blog today:

While a culture change towards a nirvana of reason, compassion and good
cheer would be nice, I wouldn't keep my fingers crossed.

We are all human, therefore fallen. Evolution optimizes for individual
survival in a social context, and the payoff matrix of this game, given the
very physical underpinnings of our reality, does reward mendacity,
manipulativeness and mayhem under many circumstances.

It's a simple fact that lying jerks exist, that they flock to power, and
that coalitions of jerks controlling sheeple have been in constant warfare
since time immemorial. As long as lying jerks exist and are able to gain
power, the underlying mechanism at the core of social dysfunction will not
change. Sure, the content of what lying jerks say changes all the time - it
used to be that they spoke a lot about piety and god, when the social
Zeitgeist was of a sacerdotal persuasion. Now lying jerks are staying out
of the pew and flock to the NGO, the campus and to Twitter.

The old Soviets wanted to create the homo sovieticus, well-adapted to run
in the vanguard of the proletariat. They failed but they were onto
something: You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. A society made
of humans will necessarily simmer with constant low-level warfare of
everybody against everybody, with occasional catastrophic upheavals. But
technology will come to the rescue - genetically engineered Good People
will eventually replace the wild type. I hope.
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