Is the world getting worse than ever?

We live in an age where conflicts are growing, war, corruption and corporate profiteering reign supreme. Our health is deteriorating, disease is everywhere, and values are all but lost.

I read this kind of intro everywhere and hear people state it as fact over and over again. The message is the same: the world is falling to pieces... but is that statement accurate? It seems to me that it is quite the contrary, things are better than ever.

What do you think.

Another thought to make it more complicated, is the world actually getting worse, or is the development of technology, social media, and news, allowing us to become more aware of what has been present for many many years...

We live in an age where conflicts are growing, war, corruption and corporate profiteering reign supreme. Our health is deteriorating, disease is everywhere, and values are all but lost.

I can't back this up - but I would suggest we* are living longer, healthier lives, with far more luxuries than ever before.

Because of this, we are more, let's say "aware" of wars, torture, poverty etc, so when and where those occur, they are more appalling to us.

I believe it has been studied that the "happiness" of a country is related to how small the gap is between the "haves" and "have nots" - not the actual quality of living.

People are happy to be up the proverbial without a canoe, much less a paddle - as long as everyone is right there beside them. It's when you see the guy on the bank in clean clothes and a nice sandwich that you get upset.


Much of the world is....I won't say "softer", but "less exposed" to certain things.

To use a strained example - A person from the city may very well throw up or pass out on seeing a corpse (of any animal), A person who has grown up killing, skinning, and butchering the family meat is unlikely to be repulsed.

Someone who has never been cheated, robbed, or misled may very well become apoplectic at the concept of corruption - others may take it as "part of doing business"


*the "we" that have ready access to devices and internet to read this discussion, anyway.






I've separated the issue of "values" - debate over values is the last thing we have to get through before we reach full globalisation, the question is Which Ones will we select moving forward (or which ones will be selected for us, depending on how you want to look at it)

That argument is one I did a speech on and its patently false. We are living longer, we have better medical care, we have lower and lower violent crime rates and I have stat after stat that back it. The only thing that has changed for the worse is peoples perception of the world. This is caused by the fact that peoples news preferences are towards the dramatic. Below are the links I used in a few threads here and in my school project on this subject. They show a decline in violence, an upswing in medical care/development, an increase in longevity, and finally proof that people prefer drama to reality. Taken in total one can see the world is no where near falling apart.

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence?language=en

http://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html

https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-after-1945/

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/cost-of-war/casualties-by-war.jpg

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=118056

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160704145734.htm

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/01/artificial-pancreas-system-aimed-at-type-1-diabetes-mellitus/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flexible-spinal-implants-help-paralyzed-rats-walk-again/

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/violent-crime/violent-crime-topic-page/violentcrimemain_final

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2014-crime-statistics

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/preliminary-semiannual-uniform-crime-report-januaryjune-2015/tables/table-3

https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/publication/global-health-and-aging/living-longer

http://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2015-press-release-giving-usa-americans-donated-an-estimated-358-38-billion-to-charity-in-2014-highest-total-in-reports-60-year-history/

http://nccs.urban.org/statistics/quickfacts.cfm

http://www.pewresearch.org/2007/08/22/two-decades-of-american-news-preferences-2/

Think back to an age, where communication methods were there, but not as widely spread. Where traveling opportunities were there, but not as feasible. In this world you might hear about a conflict in a country far in the east. The newspapers write about it, there are a few discussions on the radio broadcast. But other than that you hear little about it. And that news you get up to date and fresh? Mostly from your country. Some things are amiss here but hell, you’re well, your family is and that of most of your friends and colleagues is as well.

Today I get news not a day after they happened, even if it is the other end of the world. I can drive to the airport, get on a plane and be in the UK or Ireland in an afternoon. A bit like riding a bus, only this one got wings, still nothing special. There isn’t one newspaper, or five, or ten. There a hundreds, all fighting over who gets to tell me the horrible news first. And the rest of the internet, hyping and reiterating just how wrong everything is.

The world’s gotten smaller, everything that happens is closer now. I get videos with sound from zones I won’t ever go to and still it feels like it is just a step beyond reach as opposed to somewhere far away.

Whenever I feel it is too much, there is too much horrible stuff going on, I switch off the endless blabber coming down the various feeds and take a walk. Walk into the city, watch people being happy with their coffee or being grumpy about a thing as silly as waiting for 30 seconds at a traffic light. Within my ‘sphere of influence’ or within feasible reach actually (not counting air planes) there is surprisingly little going on.

Just my two cents

As it has already been stated, I don't think the world is getting worse so much as we are getting more information about the world, and that that information, unless you make a conscious effort to have it be otherwise, is extremely dramatic and negative. Good news is rarely shared with the same fervor as the dramatic bad news. There is an adage my former pastor used to say "Bad news travels around the world before Good news can get its shoes tied".

There is an adage my former pastor used to say "Bad news travels around the world before Good news can get its shoes tied".

Pratchett said something similiar


Not sure what the "original" text may have been, before either your Pastor or Mine.


A quick internet search (nothing thorough) attributes it to everyone from Mark Twain to Winston Churchill to Alexander Pope, so I doubt we can pin it down. Perhaps that is for the best - If everyone said it, it must be true :laugh:

When a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic non-politically experienced billionaire is running for President against a liar who is just as bad as him, when British people start talking like said billionaire saying 'We need to make Britain Great again' and leaving the EU, when people start to hate Muslims because of terror attacks, when it is only 15 years since one of the worst tragedies the world has seen, when there is a race war in the Land of the Free, when children are starving, drowning, dying. The world itself is dying. People soon will be replaced by machines. Humanity is dying. And yet you say the world is getting better. Fools.

Silas Mercury wrote: When a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic non-politically experienced billionaire is running for President against a liar who is just as bad as him, when British people start talking like said billionaire saying 'We need to make Britain Great again' and leaving the EU, when people start to hate Muslims because of terror attacks, when it is only 15 years since one of the worst tragedies the world has seen, when there is a race war in the Land of the Free, when children are starving, drowning, dying. The world itself is dying. People soon will be replaced by machines. Humanity is dying. And yet you say the world is getting better. Fools.

We are the fools when the facts as linked in the massive list I posted show otherwise? The world is better then it ever has been and is trending better all the time. Human labor might be replaced in some areas by robots but not all and even that is a maybe because we do not know how people will respond to it. Further humanity is not dying we are actually breeding at a rate roughly double the deaths: http://www.ecology.com/birth-death-rates/
If you are going to make such statements its wise to back them with facts. Its wiser still to battle ideas not toss out ad hominems at those that disagree with you.

No, the world is not getting worse -- in fact, it is getting better. There is still violence under various guises, as Silas was pointing out, and people are not all around more apt at critical thinking in their political and consumer choices (which, according to some analytical methods have merged), but considering most factors in the overall evaluation of human well-being, things are getting better.

I can't prove that to you in a short forum post, nor in one of my classic longer diatribes. But ... here, whereas I have the 840-page book, I'll offer you here the talk the author did at the RSA a few years ago. This isn't the only source, there are many others ...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgNsmW_bAKI


Naturally, there is still suffering, there is still injustice. Our mission as Jedi is not to "fix the world." It is merely to aid and extend compassion (which does not mean "fixing the problem," just to be clear) at our local level. 'Our local level' means the persons in front of us at the moment. If we apply our principles, act where we can act, treat one another morally and humanely and curtail our incessant desires while fostering honesty, authenticity and generosity (in other words : compassion, patience & simplicity), then we can get out of that media-driven mindset that the world is going to hell. Indeed, one realises right abruptly that it is not ...