The older I get and the more I see of what humankind is truly like, the more I find to dislike. Life in this world is already short and often difficult due to the forces of mere chance. Why do people (not just people of a certain race/religion but people in general) seem so eager to torment their fellow human beings? It disgusts me.
It seems like people with enough awareness and compassion to treat people reasonably seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule.
It’s that old confirmation-bias thingumajiggy. You don’t hear about ordinary, kindly folk in the nightly news reports, just the horrid things that people do to each other and extrapolate from that, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
It’s not. Bad things do happen, sometimes perpetrated by bad people, sometimes by the hand of otherwise decent people. It doesn’t mean shit in the bigger scheme of things.
I don’t know, do the rest of us really deserve any credit for not stoning people to death? We might as well conclude that the people who do stone people do death aren’t really evil either; most of the time they’re not killing anyone, but no one is reporting on that.
I’m not really sure if I’m being whooshed here Gustav: I’m certainly not attributing brownie-points to folks who refrain from hurting others just by virtue of their lack of malice etc. In fact, I was responding to the OP who feared that the majority of our worlds citizens were of the evil kind rather than the non-evil sub-sector, and I was hoping to disabuse her of that notion.
I suppose it adresses the last line of the OP, which taken literally is an overstatement, but I would say that the question should be if there are enough good people to weight up for the evil. “Generally decent” is pretty much the bare minimum, somewhere slightly above or below 0. If most people are generally decent and only a minority are evil, that’s still a pretty serious indictment of humanity in my eyes.
I think those who seek the power to have control over other people are exactly the people who lack the compassion to do it well. And the rest of us often lack the drive to interfere.
As a counter to the OP, one of the things that gets overlooked as well is that Iran’s highest courts have issued a moratorium on stoning, and as I understand it all stonings since 2003 have been in defiance of the national government rather than at the behest of.
