I don’t understand how people can read all the way through articles like this and think that the human experience is somehow overall worth it, hedonically speaking. When you’re being tortured and abused, what’s the point in ever hoping for escape if all you have to look forward to is a lifetime of mental health issues and never getting your life back, all while knowing that the world is always filled with people who have it even worse than you and abusers who live long, happy lives filled with praise and without a shred of guilt because of, not in spite of, what they do to their victims?
Like, we spend our whole lives being unhappy over minor things and happy over similarly minor things. And maybe most people manage to stay in the black, but then there are so many Sufferring Georg’s in the world with no positive counterpart.
The road to paradise lies through Hell, WW, and our armored convoy must continue to press on until victory is achieved, scavenging what we can as we go.
I have no idea what the fuck this is supposed to mean but this is a fully general argument in favor of doing almost anything unpleasant that looks vaguely helpful.
Early agriculture sucked, the bronze age sucked for most people, the iron age sucked for most people, and so on and so forth.
In global terms, absolute poverty is actually down even now, despite population growth. Violent crime is still down in this country, relative to previous decades.
We’ve developed democracy, and air conditioning, and justice systems, and so on.
We’ve been chipping away at crippling-for-life issues much faster now than we did before.
Eventually we’ll be able to repair mental health issues at a level that we can’t right now, much like we can repair hernias at a level that we couldn’t many years ago. Maybe with stimulated neurogenesis, maybe with epigenetic changes. We’ll be able to, in much larger part, undo what these people have done. (“But you can’t undo time-” so what? If we extend the lifespan, even the cost of lost time is significantly diminished.)
It’s a crime that damage done to bodies can be permanent, now. But that won’t hold in the future.
And the flipside to your fears of surveillance is that when everyone has cameras for eyes, this sort of thing becomes far more difficult.
Also, if we play our cards right, we’ll have so much economic production that we can just pay people to take six or ten years just recovering from trauma.
But, to get there, as a species, we must endure. As our ancestors endured, and their ancestors endured.
The “people won’t be able to get a way with violent crime when everyone has cameras” thing is a lot less significant when video evidence of crimes can be easily, reliably, and convincingly forged, which I feel is likely to happen soon.
It’s in real time. Not only recording, but transmission and tracking, allowing deployment of LEOs in response, or simply locating the exact position where someone went missing.
A price to pay, to be sure, but it does create these capabilities.