Perhaps our work to eliminate many of the more primal issues that affect us (the need to hunt, survive in the wild, etc) are only making us worse off?
It would be interesting to hear more about this, as well as what the potential "cures" may be, as alluded to at the end of the article.
There's plenty of "strife" in day to day life, some other jerks on the road, to your co-workers, to your friends and family. Or just working on your long term goals and dreams in the face of the demands of every day life.
I don't think human conflict or violence is necessary for flourishing.
There are examples of great creative people who had come from backgrounds of violence or abuse, but I don't think that means much. If they were exposed to more violence, would they have been even more genius? What is the right amount of violence to expose people to to have genius blossom?
Kind of like the human who makes the rat park and complains the rats are not happy?
Perhaps we will be happy in environments we choose to make for ourselves, not some that others have arbitrarily decided we should be happy in. I would say there's something inherently corrupt in an environment you do not control.
http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13
James Q Wilson, the guy who came up with "broken windows theory," said the manifesto was "a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper… If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx — are scarcely more sane."
I wrote an article about the man a while back, so I'm always interested when ideas like this pop up. Here's the article: http://dark-mountain.net/blog/ted-kaczynski-and-why-he-matte...
And yeah, I used to write TK and he's hard to get along with. But I think a lot of his "antagonism" isn't personal so much as it is an attempt to stir up popular antagonisms, a propaganda of sorts. I can't ever be sure though. Guy's a mystery to me in a lot of ways. Super interesting though.
>Perhaps our work to eliminate many of the more primal issues that affect us (the need to hunt, survive in the wild, etc) are only making us worse off?
this is why we have "strife" of science and exploration, and this is why need to go to Mars - to avoid civilization implosion into always connected-status-updated one big Palantirized Facebook graph of well-fed humans. The key choice of our civilization today - between Thiel and Musk.