• the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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    17 days ago

    I don’t like blaming us humans too much. I do it too but fo real a lot is being asked of a species that are evolutionarily, literally the same dirty monkeys who stumbled out of caves. Nothing has changed in our guts. We are all “unfrozen caveman lawyer”.

    We like to think we’re smart, but that’s not our strength. It’s our communication, our ability to combine strengths and abilities to shore up individual weaknesses. This, our greatest strength, has been co-opted by interests who have spent a great deal of time learning how to manipulate opinions.

    Years and years of advertising data go into think tanks who then spend their whole work day trying to figure out how to push our buttons to get is where they want. These bullshit artists are paid to do this, why would we poor dirty homo sapiens have a chance?

    It’s not our fault, this is what society looks and sounds like when every level of discourse has been co-opted by a rich fuck who bought the only bullhorn.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      a lot is being asked of a species that are evolutionarily

      Oh I fully agree, we’re trying to process a world of instantaneous communication, rapid transportation, industry and production and complex political lines drawn between 8 billion people… with a brain designed for surviving the ice age. This is why we’re all having so many mental health problems, this is why suicide is a climbing epidemic. Our brains are trying to help us survive a world that it has no tools inherent to it to navigate.

      Ice age brain has no idea how to handle having access to billions of different voices at once, it will naturally retreat to what feels most safe and makes most sense, no matter if it’s connected to reality or not, because the brain doesn’t want a logical, sensible world, it wants a story that connects how you feel to what’s going on around you. The story doesn’t even have to make sense, just slap some wrestlemania villains and heroes into the mix and we have crack cocaine to the brain’s desire to simplify the world around us.

      But I have to blame us because we’re the only thing that can save us. No help is coming. AI or aliens or Jesus are not going to appear suddenly and guide our whole species to a better place. We HAVE to start taking responsibility for our world, or what will be left of it in the coming decades.