DigitalDuality said:
Yes we still have gang fights, we still fight just and unjust battles through military means, (though there's lots of us that oppose it.) You still have your occassional horrific tragedies such as Columbine and the VA/DC/MD sniper. But IMO we're far less barbaric than we used to be. We don't have slavery anymore either...But most people today would vomit or shit themselves in fear if they had to experience half the barbaric things we used to do, watch, etc...
I'll concede to that. There has been a decline in violent crime:
Interestingly, the decline began one year after Clinton took office.
(Also see:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/fsbr/crime.html)
So you may have something there. At the same time, I am still not convinced that there isn't the potential of some kind of sociological "critical mass" could be reached. What could, or would, occur once the simulations can no longer provide the next extreme? There is a technical limit, and I expect that we will reach it some time within the next 10 to 20 years (perhaps sooner).
So.. if that's your theory, and this is what you see wrong in the world..or with us as a species, how would you go about fixing it?
I don't think there is a true fix. In my thinking, this whole issue is largely due to a collection of survival strategies related to being tribal animals. And it is all interrelated to "our" desire for heros, distrust of those who are "different" from ourselves (this is constantly a theme throughout our 5,000 or so years of recorded memory), and the tendency to align ourselves with the "alpha" leader.
"Fixing" this is a rather elusive topic. To me, the idea of a "fix" would be to remove the tendency from the hardwiring. That is to say, that even without behavior enforcement from software (i.e., sociological conditioning) that the trait would not appear. This would allow us to simply "cruse" without the possibility that we'd ever have the possibility of returning to the "Coliseum."
There are only a few ways that this change (in the sense of being a "real" fix) could be accomplished.
[1] One of them is for our species to evolve away from these tendencies, which I doubt will ever happen because we [I think] are far too successful from nature's standpoint to evolve further.
[2] Another way would be to remove the trait via bioengineering means. I am totally against this because I, quite frankly, don't believe that humans are smart enough to not fuck things up at that level of genetic manipulation.
[3] The third way would be for this trait to be considered "undesirable" in the mating game. Those who possess the trait don't get laid and, as a result, don't get to contribute to the future gene pool.
I don't think that any of these options are within the realm of reality today. But I do believe that option
[3] had a great deal to do with both our aggressiveness as a species, and in there being a tendency, in a small subset of the human population, to using rape as a survival strategy (I don't mind explaining myself about this, if you are interested, but it is kind of off topic for this discussion).
No matter where this is all headed, I think that it will be very interesting to see what occurs in either the next generation, or the generation after that one. All of the most compelling sociological occurrences (the civil rights movement, the peace movement, WWII, etc.) will be looked upon as ancient history (much like the way that the civil war is seen today). That's not to say that there won't be other compelling sociological occurrences that will happen in the future. Rather that, those dealing with the fundamentals of civil rights will be long seen as just another part of the cultural bard.
