I’m curious where people are on this issue. When I was a fundie, I believed the dogma including the “utter depravity of man”, that we aren’t reformable apart from god-magic. After I deconverted, I went through a period of relative optimism – the notion that most people mean well and try, in their way, to do well, and although they can be inept, most aren’t malignant.
This pendulum swung partly back the other way even before Trump 1.0 for me, partly because of the Tea Party, the lack of progress on social justice, the general fact that I essentially have nothing to show for my support for Sanders in 2016 & 2020 other than a couple of sad tee shirts I sleep in, etc.
And of course apart from how the system seemed to reject and even betray anyone into substantive reform, now it feels subjectively at times like a gosh-awful lot of my fellow humans were nursing barely-restrained resentments, even hatreds, and now that they have license to get away with it, they are strutting it loud & proud.
For awhile there one could convince themselves that a certain liberal / egalitarian / tolerant baseline had been installed that would be very hard to dislodge, but in retrospect it seems pretty fragile now, and a lot of the people who should be defending it seem befuddled and confused about what to do and when and how. Schumer and his “sternly worded letters” come to mind.
Antonio Delgado, the progressive candidate primarying centrist Gov Huchul here in NY (Nov '26), who is also our current Lt. Governor, gave a speech the other day where he pushed the importance of having some kind of faith in humans, and related a (probably anecdotal and possibly embellished) story of how MLK was marching in Chicago once and an angry white lady came up to him with a look of pure hatred and stated how much she hated him. He smiled benignly and said, come on, you’re too beautiful to act so ugly. And she stalked off. But shortly after she came back and said, please forgive me – I don’t know what got into me. That was wrong of me. To Delgado this is what it means to “see the promised land” and to work for it even if it’s a multi-generational project with lots of setbacks.
Which I get, but I still wonder if humans aren’t in some sort of doom-loop where they build civil society and then wreck it, over and over again. Except that this time there are meta-systems like climate that aren’t going to sustain that sort of screwing around much longer.
If you are in any way optimistic about where all this is going, I’d like to entertain your rationale for that. I promise not to carp or argue; I’m genuinely looking for something to grab hold of.
Not that I think I have to be nihilistic or despairing if, for the sake of argument, I’m just being realistic about how dicey things are. I really am not by nature an anxious or depressed personality. It’s also late in my life, so I am relatively content. It’s just that, sheesh, I don’t see much of a sustainable way forward for humanity any more. Convince me I’m wrong. Please!
, but things have been a bit bleak lately.