[ExI] Just some thoughts, nothing new really

[Dave Sill]

On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 10:42 PM Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>
Fallen? Sinners? I'd say we're all human and carry evolutionary baggage.

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.
>

I'm not sure how you go from a world of wild humans to a world of man made
Good People, but we're a way off being able to create Good People. And a
single Bad Person could easily take over a planet full of Good People.

-Dave
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