It’s easy to think that the world is falling apart, and while there are certainly many things we need to improve, things are really going pretty well. Crime is down, medical care is always improving, and even things like sex trafficking are far less pervasive than we’re led to believe.
The problem is our standards. Crime shouldn’t exist, medical care should be better, and sex trafficking is horrific at any scale. It just feels like things should be better than they are, even if they’re better now than they’ve ever been.
In his book “Enlightenment Now“, author Steven Pinker puts it like this:
“When I grew up, bullying was considered a natural part of boyhood. It would have strained belief to think that someday the president of the United States would deliver a speech about its evils, as Barack Obama did in 2011. As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.”
There are a lot of things in this world that need to be fixed, because our standards continue to rise. This is a healthy cycle of standards chasing improvements, and it’s one that should always keep pressing onward.
