If you go far back enough in human history people were mostly hunter-gatherers. Living on the plains in Africa, they were nomadic, travelled in small groups, and gathered whatever food they could, whether it was via capturing animals or relying on plant-life.
The popular conception of these people today is that they were a peaceful and noble people, and that paradise was lost when we moved from the innocent plains of Africa and into bigger towns and cities after the agricultural revolution. However, a closer examination of history shows that this wasn't the case. Even tribal, nomadic people's could be quite violent.
Once cities started to develop a few millennia ago this came with other problems. People were no longer nomadic, became property owners, and had to devise ways to protect their property, whether that was wealth, or their families. To make a long story short it was this dynamic that started leading to large-scale war between different societies.
So from those two points we can infer that, whether it was during pre-history, or post agricultural-revolution, one way or another violence has always been a part of the human condition. One could argue that conflict is built into who and what we are.
Fast-forward to 2017 and from a small-scale perspective things just got really weird for a lot of us, and especially those who've never been so up close with a politician as unnerving as Donald Trump (read: those under the age of 40). Since his election last year it's felt like the media has been constantly bombarding us with unbelievable thing after unbelievable thing. Real people, and real people who are in power, deliberately abusing their power in the name of corporate profit, greed, and racism.
And yet, stand back a little further and take a broader view. Conservatives in the UK systematically lied to voters in order to break from the EU. Saudi Arabia is creating one of the biggest humanitarian disasters in recent memory in Yemen. Further east the Chinese government still has an authoritarian model, and even the president of a capitalist country like South Korea was charged with corruption. Look at Africa and there are political problems as far as the eye can see. None of this even mentions the crisis in Syria.
And so with a broader perspective we can see that Trump and current events in the U.S. are not isolated incidents. Human rights issues are global. This is us. This is the same violent us that was warring with other tribes on the plains of Africa, and with other communities in every society that's existed since then.
But we're in Canada, and that's the really odd thing about it. In the world today Canada is actually a bit of an outlier. Genuinely decent government, good health care, robust coffers. Things are peaceful, our media is free, and most of us live pretty good lives. In fact, our lives have been so good for so long that we'd been in a bit of a bubble before Trump's election. Because things were good here, they must have been good everywhere else, right?
With Trump's election and the ensuing chaos, however, we're starting to wake up to the fact that maybe things don't always turn out right. That maybe sometimes governments do bad things and the world gets worse than it was before. We're waking up to the fact that history is not always the march of reason and progress.
Back to the broad view, though, and one can see that it's always been this way. This is us.
Moving toward the point of this blog post, the question becomes, what now? In my view the key point here is that to live a good life we need to stop waiting for the revolution. In the back of our minds we have a vague idea that if someone, somewhere does some math, crafts the right policy, everything will be great, everyone will be cared for, and the world will live happily ever after. I'd argue, that's not us, that's not how it works.
And so if we're always waiting for that revolution, that idea in our minds that things can be perfect some day, we'll always be dissatisfied. If the world we live in now is never good enough we'll always be striving, and never arriving. Always looking to make change, never stopping to have a beer on a Tuesday night with that friend you haven't caught up with in a while, because you're always on Twitter discussing politics.
This is all not to say that we should stop fighting, or stop caring. In fact, now is the time that it might be worthwhile to turn it up a notch. But that is to say that with all of the negative things happening in the world, at some point it may be worthwhile to look for a level of acceptance. Yes, this is the way things are. No, I'm not satisfied with that, but I'm going to choose to be happy and enjoy my life despite it.
