by Don Hall

Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. —Seneca

Among the most shrill in our daily discourse is a small group of Utopians suffering from utopian idealism. Utopians compare the present with what might be called the future perfect, not the past imperfect. Instead of seeing the present as a vast improvement on the past, they see the present as failing to live up to some sort of an imagined utopia. 

From that angle, things can never be measured from a metric of where we've been and how we've improved but where we are in contrast to perfection.

If you've ever dated a perfectionist, it sucks.

The pursuit of perfection is just as pointless as the pursuit of fame. Perfectionists rarely find joy in the act of creation and instead let the Ouroboros of desire for utopia eat the tail of constant dissatisfaction. The results are generally that there is much industry with no work to show for it because the work is never ready.

For a utopian compromise equals failure. When polled about how many unarmed black men were murdered by police last year, the majority felt it was "thousands" and the second highest silo thought it was "perhaps tens of thousands." It was fourteen. In the mind of the utopian, fourteen is not substantially different than "tens of thousands" and this becomes an intellectual trap.

It makes sense. No one is going to take seriously a group of people marching declaring the horrors of fourteen people killed. On the other hand, inflating the perception of actual harm into fantasy numbers is not helpful in the pursuit of progress.

So, how about some good news for a change?

In the last month, over five billion COVID-19 vaccines have been administered around the world, more than 30 million a day. 

Almost a third of humanity has now been vaccinated. By the end of 2021 half the people on earth will have been jabbed. This represents the single most extraordinary public health achievement in our species’ history. 

The vaccines are remarkably effective. Less than 1 in 25,000 of fully vaccinated people exposed to the Delta variant have ended up in hospital, and only 1 in 100,000 have died. The pandemic isn’t over, but an end is firmly in sight.

There will be more pandemics but we're far more prepared for them than ever before.

The world has produced more electricity from clean energy—solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear—than from coal in the past two years. 32 countries have absolutely decoupled their emissions from economic growth, and global emissions will start falling this decade as the energy revolution takes hold. 

Solar panels have dropped from $66.00 apiece in 1976 to six cents apiece today.

Legal slavery has decreased from 193 countries in 1800 to three.

200 years ago only 10% of adults in the world had basic literacy capabilities. Today, that number is up to 86%.

In the United States a combination of stimulus checks, food stamps, unemployment benefits and child tax credits reduced the number of Americans living in poverty by nearly half this year. The largest short-term poverty reduction in the country’s history, a 45% decline from 2018. 

Two bills are currently working their way through Congress, the biggest investments in remaking the economy, rebuilding infrastructure and expanding the social safety net since the New Deal, and the most significant action to confront climate change in US history.

Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then were suddenly abolished. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the numbers they did a few decades ago. Rape, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse—all substantially down.

—Steve Pinker

Not perfect. Not utopia. But not too fucking bad, either.

We’re being torn apart by a hysteria of mutual accusations against each other. It makes it impossible to do normal political things like agree to disagree about some stuff while collaborating on some otherproblems. It eliminates the possibility of the trade across issues that delivers a win to progressives on something they care about in exchange for a win for conservatives on something they care about.

There an awful lot of thinkpieces in circulation declaring the end of democracy in our lifetime from fascists and corporations and the Woke or the Alt-right. The end of democracy is most likely to be done in by a nagging and constantly fueled fear of the worst-case scenarios over and over again until we can no longer accept progress.