Is the World Getting Worse?

Is the world getting worse? Are things going to hell in a handbasket? Here's what Socrates thought in 400B.C.

‎"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."

"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress."

People are how they've always been. We haven't changed one bit. There are those of us that accept this as the natural way of things... and then there are the alarmists who are so afraid of the world itself that they want to shelter themselves from it and create an artificial world view that has never and can never be realized. As a student of history, the world becomes much clearer when everything can be seen in perspective. Nothing ever changes...

I'd be willing to bet the average person in ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Napoleonic France, the American Old West, and Chin Dynasty China would all recognize the same humor, tell the same jokes we still tell today, have the same day to day problems in their marriages, and hope for the same things in life. Even the gladiatorial games in Rome can still be felt today at an American football match. As much as people want to paint the past as somehow better than the present, it just isn't true. The myth of the "Greatest Generation" that returned home from WWII being the leading culprit in this interpretation of history, we all long for a bygone era but in truth, people are people.

With a constantly rising population, and news channels still stuck in a 24 hour time cycle, more and more only the bad news is reported because there's more of it. The ratio is always the same though. If there is one person murdered per 10,000 people, there are 100,000 per billion. And it all needs to be reported sadly. No, the world isn't getting any worse, it's just becoming more populated and our methods of keeping ourselves informed are creating an illusion that creates fear. Yes, in the 50s people generally didn't lock their doors and trusted their neighbor. But when all you hear about is crime and murder, it does seem like today is worse than yesterday, doesn't it... even though yesterday was exactly the same as today...