Admit it: We look back at our grandparents’ generation, and pretty much any earlier generation, and guffaw at how unscientific and backwards they all were.
But we’re advanced. We dropped all our cognitive hangups. We’re driven by data, not superstition.
Groupthink and witch trials are things of the long long agos. Religion was cast aside, replaced by ideally rational modern thinking and technological wonders.
We’re the first generation to have gone over that special line, one that will later be historically recognized as the first generation to really have their shit together.
Everything from here on is clear sailing, with no qualitative leaps left, because… just look at all our accomplishments for gosh sake!
I must admit that I often find myself thinking exactly these thoughts, and I always have to slap myself out of it.
There’s at least two ways in which life has taught me that.
One, I have long been a researcher at the border of evolution, psychology and culture, and so have a good grasp of what we humans really are: apes that have been harnessed to seem to be much more than that by cultural evolution, something I talk about in my books like Vision Revolution, Harnessed and Human 3.0. …and talk about in this Moment.
Two, more experientially, I’ve seen science from the inside, and have seen ideas which are completely unsubstantiated — and sometimes even conceptually incoherent — but nevertheless took hold and were accepted as gospel for generations. I’ve made a variety of well known discoveries in science, each time overturning not some brilliant but wrong prior hypothesis, but almost always just some backwards meme that “everyone believes” for basically no good reason. If even science was a shit show, just imagine everything else!
For example, the idea that we get pruney fingers when wet because of osmosis makes no sense in terms of design, and doesn’t even make sense on its own terms given that things that absorb water get less wrinkly, not more. See my cartoon TED presentation below.
No. We’re not the first generation to get beyond our true old timey human selves.
But many of us might not have had the sorts of science experiences I had.
So, imagine their surprise when March of 2020 hit and — unless you were in the resulting hysteria — you learned first hand that we humans are all still very much old timey.
Any illusion you may have had that we’re “the future” — the opposite of old timey — was unceremoniously incinerated.
Future generations will look back at what “we” did — panicking and engaging in draconian, ineffective and devastatingly counterproductive interventions — and laugh at how dumb we were.
But the joke will be on them, because they still won’t be “the future.” Humans will forever and always be old timey because humans will forever and always be humans.
At FreeX we’re actually researching ways in which social networks can function so as to better suppress the old timey.
I always find it funny when we look back at previous generations and laugh at their "unsophisticated" ideas. The accomplishments were amazing. Rome had a pretty impressive plumbing system all things considered.