• Lauchs@lemmy.world
    862·
    11 个月前

    “But I read a book written by one of the few people who were privileged enough to read and write, and things didn’t seem so bad!”

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
      10·
      11 个月前

      This is a real issue though. A lot of the writings on the actual lives of random people are from the perspective of “look what these weird foreigners do, instead of being normal like us”. And that’s not the most objective source.

    • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
      8·
      11 个月前

      This is what I dislike about most historical dramas. They focus almost entirely on the pampered (thought no doubt dramatic) lives of the rich and privileged, and lettered, ignoring the great majority of humanity that 1) were engaged every day with the drama of survival, 2) did all of the labour that allowed for those frilly few to write their letters all day.

      EDIT: I write from the comfort of my home office on break at my WFH job… >_>

      • Prunebutt@feddit.de
        381·
        11 个月前

        We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

        Ursula K. LeGuin

      • Cowbee@lemm.ee
        162·
        11 个月前

        There’s little that’s legitimately out of your control. Of course, I don’t mean 1 person can topple Capitalism or anything, but 1 person can set up a union, join a protest, or set up a co-operative farm, educate others, or make meaningful grassroots change.

        1 person can make a big difference in the lives of the people around them.

        • ElectricCattleman@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          11 个月前

          One person can do something, but one person can’t do everything. If you are already running a farm co-op, leading a union, or so on, you simply don’t have the time to address the hundred other things you can see in the news in a single day. The point still stands, you can’t control everything, so even if you are making change on one or two points, you have to avoid being angry about the hundred other things you cannot.

        • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
          43·
          11 个月前

          It is, because nobody is willing to do what’s actually necessary. People talking about voting and protesting, that doesn’t do or mean shit.

          Now if you set up the gallows and the BBQ to cook up the rich, I’m all for it and ready to help. That’s how you gonna get any real change.

          • Dr. Jenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tubeEnglish
            31·
            11 个月前

            Yeah voting is largely useless. But the gallows don’t happen without a revolution, which doesn’t happen without people getting in the streets (protest).

    • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
      181·
      11 个月前

      I don’t think that was the point of the post.

      It was more “Never fall for a ‘things were good back then’ narrative because actually shit sucked even more in the past”

    • lars@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      82·
      11 个月前

      And the… non-WASPs knew their place. They loved it too in fact!

      (I’m paraphrasing some actual things that actual people have actually said about the good old days (but I can’t remember their actual euphemisms (dysphemisms) for non-WASPs))

      • kase@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 个月前

        It’s not plagiarism if you plagiarize yourself! 😎👉👉

        (Disclaimer: this is a joke, pls don’t tell hbomberguy I said the p word) (that was also a joke, no offense hburgerguy)

    • Prunebutt@feddit.de
      30·
      11 个月前

      The other comments are quite sarcastic and I want to give you a bit of a less antagonizing response why Steven Pinker is kind of a hack.

      He more or less “cooked the books” when it comes to explaining how much good capitalism helped the people around the world by doing very selective data analysis. In the end he really advocates for being complacent with the status quo and basically argues for the argument of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (which has been disproven a lot by anthropologists.

      These videos are quite long but go into more detail:

      And if you prefer to read: I’d recommend The Dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

      • Haggunenons@lemmy.world
        15·
        11 个月前

        Thanks for the information, I had no idea that Pinker had such an anti-following. I’ve not read or even thought about him in years. I just vaguely remembered that that book did a lot to make me more thankful for the current state of things compared to how they used to be. I appreciate you letting me know that he is such a questionable fellow.

        • Cowbee@lemm.ee
          8·
          11 个月前

          Yep, I have found that just accepting one person’s words alone, especially in a field as politically charged as economics, is a terrible way to gain knowledge and understanding, just more misunderstanding. Pinker does a great job of being technically correct, but like the other commenters have pointed out, he is very careful of showing only some numbers and ignoring others, in order to massage a narrative that the status quo is flawed but ultimately not to be challenged.

          • Haggunenons@lemmy.world
            51·
            11 个月前

            The main things that stuck in my head after all those years was that stuff like assault, rape, murder, torture, entertainment-based animal abuse all used to be much worse. He said that people used to nail cats to posts around town so they would flail around until they died, just for the hell of it. I never fact-checked these claims.

            • Cowbee@lemm.ee
              6·
              11 个月前

              I certainly believe it! Colonization and Imperialism in particular have an absolutely brutal history. Japanese soldiers occupying China and Korea used to catch babies on bayonets, and had quotas for how many ears they cut off. Dutch occupiers of the Congo would cut off the hands of underperforming workers, including children, and give the hands to their parents.

              The thing is, generally, humans are guided and shaped by material conditions, and material conditions improve with democratization and industrialization.

        • Prunebutt@feddit.de
          51·
          11 个月前

          Cool that you weren’t scared away by all the Toxicity in he other comments.

    • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
      21·
      11 个月前

      Love me some Steven Pinker. Should probably read one of his books. Does he do the reading of the audio books, does anyone know? He has lovely diction.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
    241·
    11 个月前

    There’s a reason most historical fiction focuses on nobles and land-owners. You can tell interesting stories about them, and modern people can sort-of relate to their lifestyles. If you told stories about the common people, modern people wouldn’t be able to focus on the story, and would get distracted by how brutal and awful their day-to-day lives were.

    • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      11 个月前

      Now fairy tales, that’s where the brutality comes in. Ever heard of “The Death of the Little Hen” collected by the Grimm brothers? The last line is, I kid you not, “and then everyone was dead”. Gotta get those kiddos used to pandemics and family sized tombstones.

  • Fixbeat@lemmy.ml
    222·
    11 个月前

    Remember, they used to prescribe real drugs instead of placebo bullshit. Those were the good old days.

      • IDontHavePantsOn@lemm.ee
        22·
        11 个月前

        I mean my wife sure is more productive around the house on amphetamines and morphine, and my kids sure are easier to deal with at bedtime when they take their heroin.

      • mriguy@lemmy.world
        9·
        11 个月前

        To be fair, if you take a sufficiently high dose of mercury, syphillis will no longer be your biggest problem.

    • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
      13·
      11 个月前

      Ah the good ole days when children and infants were dying left and right, a splinter could mean a slow painful death by infection, and the local doctor prescribes drilling a hole in your head to release bad spirits

  • machiabelly [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    102·
    11 个月前

    Hawaii was great until the haoles fucked it up. So was a lot of pre colombian america. And parts of pre colonization africa.

    Just because Europe was shit doesn’t mean it was shit everywhere. Europe is pretty unique in that it has been total warring itself for over 2000 years straight. The streak ended in world war 2, but goes back to the bronze age.

    Could those places I listed be improved by modern medicine and trains? Sure. Doesnt mean they were terrible.

    • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
      43·
      11 个月前

      Those areas are also wildly romanticized. Let’s not forget that one of the ways that some Europeans got established was by trading guns to indigenous people so they could go off and kill other indigenous people for their land.

      • Catfish [she/her]@lemmygrad.ml
        9·
        11 个月前

        The idea that we were warmongers was made up to justify stealing our land. Who was it that welcomed the colonists with open arms until they spat in our ancestor’s faces? Our stories talk about war parties going out and coming back home with zero blood shed. What conflicts we did have were extremely low intensity, we didn’t have the numbers for the horrific wars like the ones waged against us by the colonists.

        Many of the tribes were nomadic, we didn’t have oil reserves to war over. We had hunting grounds and fishing spots and art, and just about everyone agreed that these things weren’t worth dying for.

        • ElHexo [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          3·
          11 个月前

          Similarly in Australia there were a lot of symbolic battles that never resulted in serious injury or death.

          That said I wouldn’t characterise pre-invasion Australia as great, most of the country is pretty fucking hard to survive in (let alone over 60k years of climate change)

    • Zink@programming.dev
      5·
      11 个月前

      Life seems like the result of such an unlikely complex Rube Goldberg machine where everything was just right to let life start then survive for a very long time. Plus we are made of various elements that had to be created in some of the universe’s biggest explosions.

      It seems then that life should be something to be cherished while we briefly have it. I try to do just that.

      …then we get to watch people around the world working hard to make life worse for those around them.

  • DashboTreeFrog@discuss.onlineEnglish
    2·
    11 个月前

    Was just having a conversation recently on whether things have always been this close to a complete existential crisis for humans or is the current global situation unique. Most people felt like things have always been bad but I still feel like, with everything going on in terms of global conflicts and climate change, things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past.

    • lars@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      1·
      11 个月前

      Ugh. I totally get it. And I feel like my older family felt the same way about the Cold War. Like can you imagine sitting through Bay of Pigs listening for potential incoming annihilation?

    • lars@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      1·
      11 个月前

      things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past

      I’m with you. But also, has every generation said exactly this?

      • DashboTreeFrog@discuss.onlineEnglish
        2·
        11 个月前

        Yeah, I imagine a lot of people alive during the world wars thought things were going to collapse any second as well. But I just feel the added background anxiety of the status quo causing the Earth to heat up catastrophically but slow enough to be ignored adds a novel layer of messed up to everything.