Sunday, August 18, 2019
Future people will be appalled by what we now accept as "normal"
Things we once accepted as totally normal, but we now realize are very harmful:
Slavery
DDT
Driving without seatbelts for yourself or the kids
Not letting women vote
Smoking tobacco
Playing with drops of Mercury
Trusting celibate male priests to watch the kids
Things we now accept as normal, but future generations will find appalling:
The fossil-fuel burning economy
The ubiquity of single-use plastics
Prescribing heroin-strength pain pills like crazy with no precautions against addiction
Citizens of wealthy countries dying of treatable diseases because health care is prohibitively expensive
The cavalier use of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides
The expectation of never-ending fast growth of populations and economies
Eating animals
The insanely high risk of dying in a car accident
Expecting men to wear suits in summer and women to wear skirts in winter
The USA still not using the metric system in 2019
I would add: a world in which we take omnipresent advertising/propaganda as a normal, even desirable, feature of life. Aside from the moral nihilism of designing an economy based on the imperative of ceaseless brainwashing to induce people to desire things they don't need and otherwise wouldn't even know they wanted, it is stupefyingly inefficient. To take one example, tens of millions of people are bombarded with the following ad copy multiple times a day on cable news channels: "If you or a loved one have been diagnosed with Mesothelioma, you may be entitled to financial compensation. Contact the Sokolove Law offices today". Yet at most, only about 1 in 20,000 viewers will ever have such a diagnosis! Never mind, though - it is taken for granted that this is a reasonable price to pay for "free" TV.
ReplyDeleteOMG, yes, totally! They keep cranking up the amount of advertising in every form of media higher and higher, and we keep sucking it right up. Some people say lawyers are the lowest form of life, but my dad maintains that it's marketers.
ReplyDeleteWell, ironically below the post and comments was a nice ad for used Kona windsurf boards. The marketers are doing an ok job picking ads for this blog... But my point was going to be that someday society will look at us and say "they didn't do enough for the 12% of the world that doesn't have access to clean water to drink - let alone windsurf on."
ReplyDelete