It’s unjustified rudeness however you personally define it.
Who decides what rudeness is justified and what isn’t?
You realize that this would also completely eliminate comedy? Humor, after all, is our pleasure reaction to bad things happening - to others, and to ourselves.
Do you really think so? Obviously there are important differences, but I can easily imagine far more disparate environments, and I’d say our evolved abilities are guiding us pretty well considering. Evolutionarily, by far the biggest problem is the reluctance of humans to reproduce in modern conditions with the ready availability of birth control. Literally one developed country (Israel) is above water on birthrate, and that’s a special case.
I always heard it was the reaction to unexpected and tension-reducing things happening. I don’t think humour has to be bad?
DC Comics had a period where they were deconstructing the tendency of older stories to meddle with the minds of civilians uninvited at the drop of a hat for the personal convenience of the heroes (usually to keep a secret identity).
It didn’t occur to me as a kid, but it really is kind of a fucked up attitude to take towards someone else’s personal autonomy. This thread reminded me of that.
You’ve got it backwards - humor is a way of reducing tension by having a positive reaction to a negative event. Not being able to take pleasure from pain means not being able to laugh things off.
Who defines anything? For the sake of simplicity and so the thread doesn’t get bogged down in minutiae I think however you personally define it is a good enough metric. The OP is asking you your personal opinion so obviously your definition could only ever be personal. Would you press a a magic button that could eliminate unjustifiable rudeness for its own sake forever? That’s it.
You’re missing the point. Since none of us can define unjustified rudeness, how can we impose any definition on human brains? No matter what definition is used, most people will disagree with it.
I don’t think that’s a pleasure reaction to bad things happening in that sense.
And I don’t think all comedy is about bad things happening. We might lose slapstick, sure.
We already have at least 10x the number of humans earth can sustain and you think failing to make even more babies is somehow a problem?
I’m out. That’s beyond foolish.
You said we’re still evolving now. Purposely not reproducing is extremely maladaptive in the evolutionary sense, and a trait that natural selection will quickly eliminate if something else doesn’t change first.
The the word “developed” is the key to that sentence for that poster.
Hopefully, in the future, the entire world will meet our definition of “developed”. If and when that happens, the global population will drop - which will be a good thing, at least for a generation or ten. After that, we’ll figure something out. My guess is that matters will probably correct themselves, as people who are inclined to have large families will naturally become the majority.
IIRC, this was the plot of a book by Stanislaw Lem.
Lem has a lot to say about this sort of dilemma. In The Star Diaries, Tichy encounters a civilisation that has near omnipotence. These entities have the ability to change anyone’s mind in any way to make them believe anything. However they do not, because their credo is ‘non agam’ (do not act), and by not acting they preserve freedom.
Even Iain Bank’s The Culture do not act to remove ‘rudeness’, or a dozen other annoying traits of human civilisation; their citizens revel in their disrespect, and several of the human characters in the stories are murderers and borderline psychopaths. Sure, the Minds and their slapdrones will act to prevent their worst excesses, but this often seems to be a case of ‘non agam’ and bad things happen anyway. After all, they are supposed to be anarchists.
If we’re moving to fictional examples, there is the greatly flawed Sci-Fi ( with strong fantasy tropes, but it’s all scifi) novel “There Will be Dragons” by John Ringo. It’s actually a free download (being the first in a series) from Baen’s free library.
WARNING - Ringo, along with some other authors I chose not to mention tends to have what I would consider unhealthy male / female relationships in their writing. Others might just say they embrace less conventional relationships. I found this and other novels by the author to be good, but that the emphasis on those relationships sometimes detracted from my enjoyment. YMMV.
Anyway, this is, per the OP’s mention, a post-scarcity AI empowered utopia, with sufficient power and control and observation to make most anything possible, although it does touch on the dropping birth rate, which becomes an excuse for change. It does not go well.
In my 37 years of assisting art students from all over the world with thesis projects, I soon came to realize I was hired, and paid, to help ALL of them. Some were gracious with their queries, some belligerent with intractable problems, many just incomprensible - it was certainly EASIER to help the friendly grateful ones, but often more rewarding to engage with the others. The students presented on several many varieties of spectrum - I posited a ‘new’ one that I needed to understand and tolerate: “Asshole to Angel”
There are examples; Olaf Stapledon took a stab at it in Last and First Men and Star Maker, both of which heavily focused on what we’d call transhumanism today (or the nonhuman equivalent.
Interestingly, one of the most common outcomes was failure. A species would try to improve itself and end up with an unforeseen result, or the “improvement” would be a dead end or worse. A common one was natural or artificial group minds that fell into a “the lowest common denominator dominates everything” trap and stagnated. Or you ended up with entire species that were violently insane superhuman “failed ascensions” rampaging across the universe, for the worst cases. Or for a mildly example there was a posthuman race that was tormented by some subtle psychological issue that they couldn’t describe to their creators and went voluntarily extinct after designing their successors.
I do think he made a valid point that even really well meaning people fiddling with the psychology of a species might cause disaster just by screwing up. I do think that human psychology is badly flawed and could be improved; but even ignoring the likelihood of bad intentions on the part of anyone trying are we competent enough to actually do so?
At the very least any such attempt should be taken carefully and slowly, and not with the entire population at once. A “grand redesign” of all humanity is just asking for absolute disaster.
If civilisation doesn’t collapse due to the inverted population pyramid, or revert to 3rd world status due to too-rapidly changing demographics, the Amish and Quiverful and Haredim will inherit the earth. IMO none of those outcomes are good. YMMV.
Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake is about a mad scientist who tries to create human race 2.0, and to make sure his experiment takes, also creates a global pandemic that kills everybody (including himself). The genetically-modified humanoids leave the lab and go out into the world.
The mad scientist (Crake) had genetically programmed his creations to reproduce by pure instinct, like animals, with zero sexual jealousy or romance. He also programmed them to be free of religion.
Spoiler alert, at the very end of the novel, the new humanoids invent an ad hoc religion all on their own. Atwood seems to be suggesting that, even with the most extreme intervention imaginable, it’s impossible to de-religionize us.