I always feel that desiring power shouldn’t have to be mutually exclusive with making the world a better place. Everyone wants a bigger piece of the pie, but the best way to do that is to help expand the pie altogether. It’s not a zero-sum\u00a0game.<\/p>\n
“The human race is fucked beyond measure” is a loaded and convoluted statement. You could just say that the human race is beyond measure altogether.<\/p>\n
But is it? There are no absolute metrics but there are always relative, and we’re always making progress- slavery, women’s rights, LGBT equality, etc. So today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still.<\/p>\n
That said, even if it IS fucked up, what is the specific area of the problem? The knee-jerk response is “human nature”. But people are capable of doing things that are good just as much as things that are bad- and bad things always stay in our minds longer because we’re wired that way (which is the foundation of Murphy’s Law).<\/p>\n
Human nature is not context-independent. Being fucked up is not intrinsic.<\/p>\n
I put it to you that the only reason why humans are “fucked up” is because of structural failings and outdated, under-examined decision-making. We’ve made tonnes of progress in the sciences, but we’re all still terribly bad at managing emotions. We obsess about winning more than we obsess about truth.<\/p>\n
I’d say the most important path out of “fucked up”ness is heightened emotional awareness and understanding, empathy, compassion, for all of us, as a species. It doesn’t need to be cheesy and lovey-dovey- we just need to talk about it enough for it to seep into our culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I always feel that desiring power shouldn’t have to be mutually exclusive with making the world a better place. Everyone wants a bigger piece of the pie, but the best way to do that is to help expand the pie altogether. It’s not a zero-sum\u00a0game. “The human race is fucked… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-PU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9238,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions\/9238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}