Originally Posted by The Batlord

I mean I totally agree with that, that humanity can very much work together and not be tribalistic. But what happens when you're not living in a post-scarcity, Western society? What happens when the human race REALLY meats the balls to the wall? Do you think we DON'T become so tribalistic?

And even that isn't so awful when you consider how far we've come. Thousands of years past the time when tribalism was the law of the land everywhere every day all day 365 days a year, we really have come a distance that you'd have to actively ignore to pretend hasn't happened. But the question is just how much is that progress worth in 2017? It's probably worth more than it was a thousand years ago. And worth more than that two thousand years ago. But how much is it actually worth right the **** now? With genocide still a very going concern? Just how unmurderous is the human race?

Do we have the amount of cooperation necessary to deal with very ****ing immediate concerns like global warming? Even people from the same country can't agree that manmade global warming is even a thing, and I doubt that people from different countries across the globe can, or what is to be done about it, or that even anything should be done about it.

And even if we can, nuclear war has kind of become a joke after the Soviet Union collapsed, but... we all still have ****ing nuclear weapons and all still talk **** to each other at the drop of a hat. At some point someone is going to say one thing to far or someone is going to be just a tad too crazy, and then... what?


And all of this is in the most general sense. Hutus killed Tutsis for... what? Turks killed Armenians for... what? Whites enslaved blacks for... what? Just how much suffering is the human race capable of inflicting upon each other? I'd ask if you could quantify it but clearly you can't. We could say that the human race is advancing, and we are, but what happens if modern society takes a nose dive and we return to barbarism? Does all of our progress come with us? Or does it all die with our society, and barbarism truly return with all of the death and genocide that it will inevitably bring? Is all of this pretty progress just a comfortable illusion to believe in because we have the money to keep it going?