Thursday, June 17, 2021

Dehumanization Part II

 Human beings took over the earth because we're nature's greatest problem solvers, but if our solutions were foreordained, they wouldn't really be problems. The world eventually acclimates to every problem, but the world does not acclimate to any problem at all before sacrificing millions of people along the way. Whether the selection is natural or artificial, that's how evolution works.

We weren't brought onto this planet to enjoy ourselves. Organisms have been struggling to survive on this planet for billions of years, why would we be any different? On the one hand, it's through struggle that things gradually get better. On the other hand, do they really get better? Did the world truly get better if the price for the industrial revolution was half the world living in totalitarian/imperial hells for their entire lives? Is the world truly getting better if the price of our greater technology is the mass extinction of a million species and a large part of the human race?
And even if the world gets better, the ways of improvement are completely unpredictable. It's only by the conflict of opposites that future generations find ways forward that synthesize the best of oppositional arguments into something new that provides better solutions, but solutions that solve problems always create new problems; which then create new divisions.
And sometimes, new solutions require a new civilization with a completely different perspective, because certain problems are unsolvable for hundreds of years and turn lethal along the way for millions of people.
Furthermore, it's only because of conflict that both sides can ever truly understand or hone their ideas, and it's only through conflict that neither side can impose ideas which common sense knows are absurd.
Still further, once your headspace is filled by the propaganda of your side, even common sense is warped, and no two ideological movements can agree on what common sense is anymore.
So what then do you do when either side of an argument believes that common sense favors them?
It's not provable that the truth is somewhere in the middle of every argument, and it's particularly not provable when neither side communicates with one another, but what's clear is that when no solution's agreed upon, the problem grows, infects other problems, which also grow from their symbiosis, and together they multiply in importance until the problems become existential.
It almost doesn't matter whether the truth is in the middle of every argument, what matters is that two sides of every argument come to a workable solution that temporarily assuages them both to the point that they won't go to war over it.
There is no absolute right or wrong, there's only context; there is only "this is right because of that." There is eventual good that finds its way through even the worst evil. Even the mass slaughter of Genghis Khan resulted in the reforestation of the world. Imagine if the Industrial Revolution had happened without it - would global warming occur before we even had the technology to fight against it? But I doubt anyone would ever crave a solution to any problem that drastic.
So what, if anything, can end the conflict with a satisfactory conclusion? Is there anything at all that could do it?
Well, something nobody wants to hear is that, at least some of the time, turning the other cheek works. What you call justice is often what other people call vengeance, and they're usually more powerful than you. It's sad, but when there is a true power imbalance, the powerful have many more ways of keeping things the way they are than the powerless do at overturning them. However many gains there seem to be now in certain causes, the establishment waits, regroups, searches for new and often brutal ways to put things back to the way they want it.

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