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by bryanlarsen
405 days ago
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> Progress has tapered down. Maybe you can argue that it's slower now than it was in the late 20th century. But it's still far faster than it was at any other point in history. You may think we're locked on course, but we're far less locked on course than we were in medieval times or pretty much any other time in history. Changes in medieval times happened, but took centuries, and those advocating for change got burned at the stake. Of course, it matters less what actually was than the way people thought. It's an almost universal constant throughout history that people thought the future was doomed. |
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But the past was decoupled. There were many pasts, moving at different paces, in different ways. We don't know what most of these pasts were even a thousand years ago, for the majority of life on earth! We have such a eurocentric view of history, have such incredibly poor knowledge of how most of humanity (by area at least) lived, what was really happening, what life was like, how people saw the world and saw history & time.
Theres still many things happening, sure. But the dominant themes of the world today trace to Thomas Pikerty Capital in the 21st Century overarching economics, something he shows happening over a 250 year arch. The many free hands of the world are reduced to many many less hands than before.
The locality of power is gone. The availability of new lands and new resources to tap into has peaked. We have gobsmacking amounts of people and we don't know what to do to harness this bios-power, we don't have true missions available for people to get up to, and almost no governments are able to generate good causes and good trouble to get themselves up to. We devolve into shitty posturing and jingoism as purpose and exploration/expansion (and alas yes imperialism) fade away, after a time of great prosperity & strong social character.
We're at the end of a lot of curves. It's so so so unclear how incremental GDP rising is supposed to tide us over spiritually. Especially when such a lions share of the GDP is captured by such monsters at the top, when no government or system seems willing to set the sparks of motivation to get the populations excited and moving on their own.