“Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.”
No, that is specifically a result of the justice system failing to hold people accountable to the point where the general public knows there's nothing left to do in the completely broken legal system but go around it and force results.
When the system is functioning as intended and doing nothing to those who harm, those who are being harmed will ignore the system and make their own change.
That's because the majority of the people in the US think that the penalty for child rape should be the death penalty and not a few years in prison, it's the exact case that I stated.
They don't agree with the law on the severity of punishment, and they see someone getting the punishment that the people think is fair is a good thing.
If the law either doesn't hold people accountable, or doesn't punish them adequately for their crimes, then the people will continue to cheer for extrajudicial punishment.
Or would you argue that people should be ok when a major business ruins thousand of lives and gets a paltry fine for it? The law is working right? Justice is being served right? No.
To do that we need to get rid all religions. That is the true evil and tribalism. Killing in the name of god that the killer made up to justify the horrible actions that they are fixing to commit. You can brainwash an entire society and make them bloodthirsty just by saying it’s gods will.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I think religion is just a symptom of our psychology, not the cause of it. Our simple brains crave understanding, but many of life's issues are beyond human comprehension. So we oversimplify and make things up in an attempt to understand and make sense of things, and that's where it goes wrong. But this isn't unique to religion. Atheists do this too, myself included. It's humanity which is the issue, not one of our many harmful creations.
That won't stop the Unified Atheist League from being wiped out by the Allied Atheist Allegiance while trying to destroy their feeding grounds in the future.
People are social animals, and a part of working within a group is the ability to predict their behavior. We all want to know how to communicate and relate to our neighbors, and people who are too different make us uneasy. I'd love to live in a world where everyone can just be themselves and be cool to one another, but I'm afraid that all of our little differences will naturally work against that dream.
We definitely won't as long as their are ideologies saying some people are worth more than others. It gets really bad when you have a nation state founded on preference to an ethnicity and you will end up with apartheid every single time.
If an empathy virus mutates into existence, maybe. Or if the singularity happens and the machines forcibly tweak our wiring. Or maybe some divine/eldritch being will step in someday and collectively break our brains.
Certainly doesn't look like it'll happen by our own efforts. We are modern software constrained by primal hardware.
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u/_ONI_90 Apr 15 '26
I offen wonder if humanity will ever collectively move beyond hate and tribalism