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There is no social reason. chaos and destruction is the human normal without civilization to stop them. Increasingly we have been happily destroying those thing

There is no social reason. chaos and destruction is the human normal without civilization to stop them. Increasingly we have been happily destroying those things which make a civilization, such as the ability to enforce and make laws, our public art and symbols, our values, even our history. We have come to be a nation that loathes itself and we are reaping the consequences.

edmundsauto 5y ago
This is certainly a valid take, as espoused by Hobbes. John Locke famously took the other side - humans are honorable and nobel creatures. What is your life experience that makes you prefer one over the other? They both seem equally valid, depending on ones choice of available amplified evidence.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Both are correct. Most humans are honorable, but the damage done by the few who are not is so disproportionate in scale to their numerical strength that a society is lost if it does not aggressively bring its worst impulses to heel.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    Correct The universe tends toward disorder. Order requires many times more effort than disorder. An orderly society requires many times more people to buy in to its precepts than the number of disorderly people needed to make a bad society. Once a small segment of a society no longer buy in, disorder follows fast.
- iammisc 5y ago
  My life experience is one where I have confronted the fact that the universe itself is quite terrible. Disease, death, destruction are all inherent parts of a universe that depends on the increase of entropy in order to provide us with the fleeting pleasures of life. Two experiences bring me here. Firstly, losing several children before birth made me realize that the universe is not some happy place filled with goodness. By its nature, it tends toward destruction and disorder. The byproduct of such things is suffering and it is omnipresent. Like entropy, overcoming suffering (which is permanent and the normal state of things) requires the expenditure of energy and effort and even then the results are localized and fleeting. Sometimes, by sheer luck, spontaneous bursts of order arises as when all the particles in a fluid in Brownian motion once in a while align in their trajectories. But, suffering and disorder is normal and happen without reason. Only order and goodness and beauty need reason and effort to occur in a prolonged state. Secondly, my visit to my parents home country as a five year old. Going from a pretty safe suburb in America to the abject squalor of that place, with death and sickness all around and poverty everywhere made me understand that the good society we have in america is abnormal in the grand history of the universe. Good society takes effort and is easily destroyed. Humans and our behavior do not escape from this system of chaos. It is only through constant expenditure of energy that life itself is able to impose order on small parts of our universe. Human society is no different. We have been handed down how to use energy to have a good society by generations upon generations of humans who have succeeded in doing so and whose processed has been homes by natural selection. Our current technocratic society has little trouble accepting Darwinian natural selection producing life saving instincts, while simultaneously rejecting the notion that cultural tradition has been similarly honed by natural selection for human survival. By our own hubris in deciding to undo lots of traditional behavior and values just because, we now find ourselves once more lost, trying to explain to ourselves why this is happening. But we miss the obvious because we don't want to see, which is that the squalor we are currently in is a byproduct of having thrown away and ignoring the results of the very process that gave us the thing we valued. Edit: reworded some things Edit2: I'll also add that none of what I said makes me think most humans are not noble or dishonorable. To the contrary, my religious convictions teach me that human beings are naturally driven towards the creator of the universe, who is the source of all order. Most humans are still mostly drawn to that. It's just that when we abandon that drive and refuse to acknowledge it, then the marginal change in our behavior is enough to tip the fragile scales of order into the direction of chaos. That is to say, even though most humans are good, and no one can be perfect, there are varying degrees of perfection. no need to let perfection be the enemy of good enough Edit3: the two philosophies are not equally valid. Mine, which acknowledges our universes fallen nature and tendency toward eventual absolute chaos, is backed by empirical observation.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    What makes you believe that your experience is representative of others? Or, for that matter, how do you know you aren’t just reinforcing your own presuppositions with how you process information, ie confirmation bias? Fwiw, it’s not a particularly interesting argument to say “my experience has taught me this so this is the way it is.” What if you’re just wrong, have you considered that? I spend most of my time thinking I’m probably wrong - it’s the best way to become less wrong over time.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      My observation of the universe is subjective. Nowhere did I imply it wasn't What I did state is that there is a difference between the school of thought saying human nature is inherently good and the one saying humans are predisposed to evil. Because we can observe human nature and it does not seem oriented towards good. All people do evil things from time to time including myself. Some do evil that is disproportionate to the average though. I have considered if I'm just wrong. Have you considered if I may be right? Nowhere have you offered any argument against what I believe. You just asked pointed questions. I directly responded to a post literally asking me for what experiences I had that led me to my beliefs. I gave an accurate accountings focusing mainly on my subjective experience. And your response is not to disagree with my conclusions but to attack the fact that I just provided the very experiences demanded of me... If that were the best argument I could make against someone, I'd reconsider my own beliefs
      - edmundsauto 5y ago
        My personal belief is that it's not meaningfully true or false to talk about human nature, as if we can simplify the complexity of contextual behavior into a single boolean variable. At various points, I have believed that human nature tends towards the bad. As I've gotten older, I realize that people sometimes behave in good ways in bad situations; they sometimes behave poorly in situations where it would be easy to do the right thing. The same person could do both, within a 10 minute span. Heck, I even believe that people's behaviors would change if the simulation could be rewound and replayed. Human interaction is so complex. If you expect me to behave poorly because you're in a bad mood right now, and I live down to your expectations, how should we interpret it? I don't believe it says anything generalizable about either of our natures - we could simply be having a series of bad days that makes it more difficult to act nobly. If one of your key beliefs so colors your view of your fellow humans, it's probably a very limiting belief. For me, I don't think there's much value or truth in predisposing myself to negativity by projecting it forward. Especially when there's no real benefit to doing so.
beamatronic 5y ago
I do not choose this. How can I opt-out? I want to return to a law abiding society.
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
I think there is a social reason. It only takes a small number of people acting destructively to create chaos, even if the vast majority of people are law abiding. When society refuses to deal with people acting destructively, that is a social reason for the chaos we are witnessing.

edmundsauto 5y ago

This is certainly a valid take, as espoused by Hobbes. John Locke famously took the other side - humans are honorable and nobel creatures. What is your life experience that makes you prefer one over the other? They both seem equally valid, depending on ones choice of available amplified evidence.

spoonjim 5y ago
Both are correct. Most humans are honorable, but the damage done by the few who are not is so disproportionate in scale to their numerical strength that a society is lost if it does not aggressively bring its worst impulses to heel.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Correct The universe tends toward disorder. Order requires many times more effort than disorder. An orderly society requires many times more people to buy in to its precepts than the number of disorderly people needed to make a bad society. Once a small segment of a society no longer buy in, disorder follows fast.
iammisc 5y ago
My life experience is one where I have confronted the fact that the universe itself is quite terrible. Disease, death, destruction are all inherent parts of a universe that depends on the increase of entropy in order to provide us with the fleeting pleasures of life. Two experiences bring me here. Firstly, losing several children before birth made me realize that the universe is not some happy place filled with goodness. By its nature, it tends toward destruction and disorder. The byproduct of such things is suffering and it is omnipresent. Like entropy, overcoming suffering (which is permanent and the normal state of things) requires the expenditure of energy and effort and even then the results are localized and fleeting. Sometimes, by sheer luck, spontaneous bursts of order arises as when all the particles in a fluid in Brownian motion once in a while align in their trajectories. But, suffering and disorder is normal and happen without reason. Only order and goodness and beauty need reason and effort to occur in a prolonged state. Secondly, my visit to my parents home country as a five year old. Going from a pretty safe suburb in America to the abject squalor of that place, with death and sickness all around and poverty everywhere made me understand that the good society we have in america is abnormal in the grand history of the universe. Good society takes effort and is easily destroyed. Humans and our behavior do not escape from this system of chaos. It is only through constant expenditure of energy that life itself is able to impose order on small parts of our universe. Human society is no different. We have been handed down how to use energy to have a good society by generations upon generations of humans who have succeeded in doing so and whose processed has been homes by natural selection. Our current technocratic society has little trouble accepting Darwinian natural selection producing life saving instincts, while simultaneously rejecting the notion that cultural tradition has been similarly honed by natural selection for human survival. By our own hubris in deciding to undo lots of traditional behavior and values just because, we now find ourselves once more lost, trying to explain to ourselves why this is happening. But we miss the obvious because we don't want to see, which is that the squalor we are currently in is a byproduct of having thrown away and ignoring the results of the very process that gave us the thing we valued. Edit: reworded some things Edit2: I'll also add that none of what I said makes me think most humans are not noble or dishonorable. To the contrary, my religious convictions teach me that human beings are naturally driven towards the creator of the universe, who is the source of all order. Most humans are still mostly drawn to that. It's just that when we abandon that drive and refuse to acknowledge it, then the marginal change in our behavior is enough to tip the fragile scales of order into the direction of chaos. That is to say, even though most humans are good, and no one can be perfect, there are varying degrees of perfection. no need to let perfection be the enemy of good enough Edit3: the two philosophies are not equally valid. Mine, which acknowledges our universes fallen nature and tendency toward eventual absolute chaos, is backed by empirical observation.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  What makes you believe that your experience is representative of others? Or, for that matter, how do you know you aren’t just reinforcing your own presuppositions with how you process information, ie confirmation bias? Fwiw, it’s not a particularly interesting argument to say “my experience has taught me this so this is the way it is.” What if you’re just wrong, have you considered that? I spend most of my time thinking I’m probably wrong - it’s the best way to become less wrong over time.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    My observation of the universe is subjective. Nowhere did I imply it wasn't What I did state is that there is a difference between the school of thought saying human nature is inherently good and the one saying humans are predisposed to evil. Because we can observe human nature and it does not seem oriented towards good. All people do evil things from time to time including myself. Some do evil that is disproportionate to the average though. I have considered if I'm just wrong. Have you considered if I may be right? Nowhere have you offered any argument against what I believe. You just asked pointed questions. I directly responded to a post literally asking me for what experiences I had that led me to my beliefs. I gave an accurate accountings focusing mainly on my subjective experience. And your response is not to disagree with my conclusions but to attack the fact that I just provided the very experiences demanded of me... If that were the best argument I could make against someone, I'd reconsider my own beliefs
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      My personal belief is that it's not meaningfully true or false to talk about human nature, as if we can simplify the complexity of contextual behavior into a single boolean variable. At various points, I have believed that human nature tends towards the bad. As I've gotten older, I realize that people sometimes behave in good ways in bad situations; they sometimes behave poorly in situations where it would be easy to do the right thing. The same person could do both, within a 10 minute span. Heck, I even believe that people's behaviors would change if the simulation could be rewound and replayed. Human interaction is so complex. If you expect me to behave poorly because you're in a bad mood right now, and I live down to your expectations, how should we interpret it? I don't believe it says anything generalizable about either of our natures - we could simply be having a series of bad days that makes it more difficult to act nobly. If one of your key beliefs so colors your view of your fellow humans, it's probably a very limiting belief. For me, I don't think there's much value or truth in predisposing myself to negativity by projecting it forward. Especially when there's no real benefit to doing so.

beamatronic 5y ago

I do not choose this. How can I opt-out? I want to return to a law abiding society.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

I think there is a social reason. It only takes a small number of people acting destructively to create chaos, even if the vast majority of people are law abiding. When society refuses to deal with people acting destructively, that is a social reason for the chaos we are witnessing.