Having just had my first child, I can tell you how odd it is to feel joy in home life, while be horrified by the decay of the outside world. I have a lot of mi

Having just had my first child, I can tell you how odd it is to feel joy in home life, while be horrified by the decay of the outside world. I have a lot of millenarianists in my family who think of the chaos today as being signs of the "end times". I can't really buy into that, given that we're not in a crisis of WWII-level carnage. The fact that a human being today is far less likely than ever before to die a violent death is absolutely remarkable. On the other hand, humananity is quickly evolving more ways of plausibly extinguishing or crippling itself, either by action of a small number of humans or prisoner's dilemma-like failure of large numbers of human to cooperate. Nuclear weapons were first, but it will soon be joined by other technologies. What's depressing to me is that we're clearly not evolving the means to manage our power, wasting that energy on extremely petty concerns, instead. In fact, we seem to be moving backwards.