That people can be persuaded by factual or scientific arguments to change their minds is demonstrably false. Confirmation bias—we take in information that supports our existing beliefs and mostly ignore or reject the rest—is only one of the many tricks the human mind plays on itself. Hence we respond to new facts in less-than-rational and often sub-optimal ways.
Statistics that purport to show that humankind has never had it so good are not untrue. However, they ignore not just the reality of ecological overshoot but also the political reality identified by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan: a society cannot long exist in peace without a “Sovereign,” a governing entity that lays down and enforces laws designed to keep citizens on their best behavior and working together for the greater good.
No ship is unsinkable, and long experience has taught prudent mariners to provision lifeboats and practice abandoning ship against the eventuality of shipwreck. We should do no less by bequeathing posterity the tools it will need to erect a new civilization from the ruins of the old.
[T]echnologies are problem-solving tools that we create using energy and information to exploit properties of our physical environment.
Most things in life can be solved with more responsibility and awareness.
And for all the failings of Western medicine, it offers evolutionarily unthinkable powers to treat acute illnesses.
The social and historical optimism of democratic life, for instance, represents the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for the progress of the world.
The universality of relation (which is perhaps the only positive ontological doctrine taught by either Sextus or Nagarjuna), combined with the denial of real-being to relatives, effectively disqualifies human experience from any metaphysically definitive verbal description whatever—for the term “unreal” as well as for the term “real.”
