I've been quietly festering over the past couple of years over how the world has been changing, and at this point, I can no longer stay silent.
First though, a caveat: I design and build computer systems to achieve specific data management/business processes to inject intelligence into the data and actuation that can be controlled by such systems. That particular perspective is the source of my inherent bias in what I am going to say next.
The chief problem with the world today is that everyone seems to be too damn focused with the outcome that they do not stop to think carefully about how they are achieving the outcome. It is a problem because human institutions and systems are largely evolved through trial and error (i.e. mostly reactive) instead of being ``well designed'' on the get-go, mostly because of nearly a century of devolving power to more democratic (or in some cases, socialistic) processes.
This means that precedent plays an outsized role in governing how the systems evolved. Each time something happens, and is successful, it becomes a new precedent that the vox populi use as evidence of its legitimacy. This means that if some ethically/morally sketchy steps are taken just to reach a desired outcome, those ethically/morally sketchy steps are now part of the herd memory as precedents to be trotted out in the eventual uprising demanding a change of the system, no matter who next is in power.
That last emphasis is of utmost importance. The means in which an outcome is achieved is the demonstration of a tool, and while who is in power can change at the whim of an election or revolution, tools tend to outlast everyone. This means that if one is happy with a law that bans discussion of topics that the Other Side loves, that same law, should the Other Side come to power, can also be used against the original side who become the minority.
Thus, in trying to right a wrong, one ends up with a future where the same manner in which the wrong was righted can be used against one.
This is why I get angry at how the world has changed. We are supposedly more knowledgeable than the past, we are supposedly more developed than the past, and we are supposedly more integrated as a whole than the past, ergo we ought to be cognisant of the ramifications should we choose one particular course of action over another. Instead, we are seeing all the tribal loyalties playing themselves out the way feudal systems had been doing for the few hundred years before capitalism and globalisation swept those antiquated systems away, and more importantly, we are seeing each tribe yelling out ethically indefensible actions to be taken against the Other Side. And this is not even a case of the well-educated versus the less educated---such problems cut across the entire education strata, which makes it all the more likely that the primary cause is the type of underlying primal tribal instinct that we would have thought that we had out-evolved by now.
Apparently, we were wrong. All the ``enlightenment'' we had thus far seems to be part of a passing fad, of a glorious golden age that has since passed. I really fear for the future.
