I was thinking the other month whilst watching the August riots and recession troubles on TV and asked myself, 'Is modern society a good thing?'
Considering you even have a TV to watch that and the computer to post this, it seems to be working out pretty well for you.
My point is that if we had not created a society of which we all need to conform, would there be any troublemakers or stereotypes?
How exactly are we all conforming? If anything, to me people appear to conform on the idea that nonconformism is good. Students are told all the time what special snowflakes they are in schools, for example, but they're far more unruly today than back when the teacher whacked them with a cane and told them to sit down and shut up like all the others.
I'm not saying that that was great, but there's certainly less discipline these days than back when people were actually compelled to conform more often.
If we hadn't created money, would the recession and thefts exist?
Why do you think a trade and barter system would be so much better? We wouldn't have recessions because we wouldn't have an economy. Surely you can see how that would be a bad thing, yes? Stealing is obviously also going to happen, since if you look to several tribal nomad societies they had no money but were still very eager to loot and rape their way through rich places when they had the opportunity.
If we hadn't have created jobs, would we have people depressed over losing their jobs and monetary troubles?
You know, a job is a job, whether it's called that or not. Even if you're working for yourself to grow crops in your backyard or hunting something, that's still work that needs to be done for yourself. If there are no jobs, there is no food, and you die. Now it's a bit more abstracted by that people need jobs to get money with which to purchase food, but the bottom line is that if they don't do anything, they die.
If we hadn't created weapons, armies and bombs, would their be wars?
Yes, because someone else would have created them and used them on you! There were some really isolated and peaceful tribes of people with no real concept of weapons, they got wiped off the face of the Earth. If you have weapons, it gives you some degree of safety since the person who might otherwise attack you has to balance that impulse with the question, "But is that worth potentially getting hurt or dying?"
I personally believe that this is the case, as when we look at animals who live in the wild with the most basic of societies, we see a life which is troubled with minimal problems,
Which animals are these that you speak of? There are animals that engage in wars, that torture for the fun of it, ones that live in constant fear of being devoured, ones that engage in rape and cannibalism... I can specify those if you want me to, but I don't think I should need to do that.
whereas humans are now constantly plagued by fears of war, recession and negativity. But what's your outlook on this?
We need something to complain about, don't we? But overall, we're living far better lives than our forefathers could have dreamed of. For example, wars: which wars are you talking about? Ones like the war in Afghanistan and Vietnam are absolutely miniscule when compared to the massive costs of either World War, for example. The recession might be bad, but certainly not so when compared to the Great Depression, or any time when economic hardship meant literally starving to death.
I will agree that we're much more negative now. It seems strange that the happiest people in the world are living in some of the worse conditions while incredibly privileged first-world nations are leading in rates of suicide, but there you go.
