And yet doesn't history also show us that it gets sorted out eventually? Even, sadly, though that may mean generations of rebellion, war, strife, hardship....
>And yet doesn't history also show us that it gets sorted out eventually?
That's called "whig history" and it's mostly an idea of religious origin: the idea that the world progresses to some moral or enlightened end.
Technology and scientific knowledge do accumulate over time. Actually, even those can be lost (tons of techniques were lost for centuries, and some are still unknown, when empires like Rome fell), but generally they accumulate, based on their technical and informational nature.
But society, morality, government enlightenment etc. don't accumulate. They can revert to totally worse than previous times at any point, and often have. That's based on human character (not so malleable outside of evolutionary time spans), interests (national, folk, and private), resource availability and contest for resources, who is in power, and trends, ideology and moral ideas prevalent at each era.
(E.g. post golden-era Athens compared to before, post-Roman empire medieval times, the Renessaince (the quentessential era of slaughter and war in Europe, and also when the Inquisition was founded and operated), WWI and WWII compared to the "belle epoque".
And those regressions was in regular, non existential danger times. What can happen under lack of resources like water (in most of the planet), climate change catastrophes, or even nuclear war, is even worse.
> And yet doesn't history also show us that it gets sorted out eventually?
No, it does not.
It does show that it sometimes gets “sorted out“, but it sometimes just gets institutionalized. And even when it does get “sorted out“, sometimes the sorting out...unsorts.
That's called "whig history" and it's mostly an idea of religious origin: the idea that the world progresses to some moral or enlightened end.
Technology and scientific knowledge do accumulate over time. Actually, even those can be lost (tons of techniques were lost for centuries, and some are still unknown, when empires like Rome fell), but generally they accumulate, based on their technical and informational nature.
But society, morality, government enlightenment etc. don't accumulate. They can revert to totally worse than previous times at any point, and often have. That's based on human character (not so malleable outside of evolutionary time spans), interests (national, folk, and private), resource availability and contest for resources, who is in power, and trends, ideology and moral ideas prevalent at each era.
(E.g. post golden-era Athens compared to before, post-Roman empire medieval times, the Renessaince (the quentessential era of slaughter and war in Europe, and also when the Inquisition was founded and operated), WWI and WWII compared to the "belle epoque".
And those regressions was in regular, non existential danger times. What can happen under lack of resources like water (in most of the planet), climate change catastrophes, or even nuclear war, is even worse.