No, we don't. We live in a local minimum based on what we're actually well equipped to define and measure, and what people in positions of power are willing to treat as actionable information.
Politics is swinging to the extremes, violence is changing it's clothes, taking on other less familiar forms. Trust in the system is at a low.
Economic inequality is rife; infrastructure and the environment is approaching levels of instability previously unheard of.
These aren't media bubbles. These are failures to maintain or achieve higher order awareness. All of these things are feeding into each other in myriad ways; they can't be reasoned in individual contexts for solutions. That's the thinking that got us where we are. They need to be reasoned about as a whole.
Problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them in the first place.
If you are suggesting that we aren’t able to say we’re at all time lows due to a lack of good long term historical information, then you also can’t draw the opposite conclusion that we _aren’t_ at at an all time low. We simply don’t know. But I’d bet it’s highly unlikely that a lack of measurement and/or recording led to better results.
I do agree that trust is probably at pretty low levels — exactly because communication is more accessible than any time in history and therefore people have more opportunity to question authority.
But a lack in trust doesn’t translate directly to violence. I think that people are becoming very complacent with distrust. The daily media barrage of reasons to distrust so many things has reached the point where it doesn’t cause outrage anymore. It has convinced some people that distrust is normal.
every issue salawat mentioned wasn't something that would result in violence and deaths today so its not refuted by citing current statistic.
They're warnings for the future, because while its true that we're currently living in a pretty safe environment and are overall pretty well off, our children won't have that luxury.
Once these issues actually start getting reflected in global statics, its going to be way too late to actually realistically pull this proverbial ship around.
And he didn't even mention half of the things on the horizon with the potential to seriously harm society such as global warming and the evermore increasing amount of automation destroying the livelihood of a lot of people. (automation isn't bad, its just going to cause a lot of problems and unrest very soon)
What's clear is the data about the recent past, and the trends are very good, both for accidental and deliberate death (among other things) on a time-scale of decades to centuries.
There are indeed some reversals (in the last few years: some kinds of crime, pedestrian deaths, opioids) which the optimists hope will be short-lived.
It's incredibly easy to lay a lot of skepticism around your idea that things might have been better before we had our recent ability to define and record various safety metrics.
This can be accomplished by pointing out just a few recent innovations that have extended the global expected lifespan.
- The S bend flushing toilet and access to improved sanitation
- The era of vaccination
- The discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics
- The invention of the movable type printing and subsequent information technologies accelerating knowledge transfer
- Precision medical equipment: MRIs, CT Scans, surgical scopes, ultrasounds, X-Rays, and minimally invasive surgery
- Mechanized agriculture and the era of food surplus
All of the above along with quite a few other innovations cement the idea that anyone wishing to go back to any time period before something like the 19th century is basically out of their mind.
Say what you want about politics, I'm not sure it's anything we haven't seen before. Nationalist right-wing politics isn't new. Political disunity isn't new. Overall, "Trust in the system" doesn't have anything to do with how likely I am to make it to 80 years old.
Our era may have some turbulence, but it's got nothing on dying young because you ate your own shit and didn't even realize it.
