Thread by @marcushjohnson

The reason I like watching sports drafts so much is they are essentially selling you hope. In the cynical and outrage fueled world of internet and social media I think hope is under supplied.

A cynic might say you’re delusional, how can anyone have hope in a cruel and self interested world where only the powerful make the rules and have agency? And I would reply that over the past 100 years, the world has made unbelievable strides in reducing poverty & mortality.

Generally when you look at social media it makes you think everything is going to collapse and fall apart. And sometimes things do. Entire governments fail, businesses die, people get hurt. But in the aggregate, are we better off than we were a century ago? Undeniably yes.

There are far fewer wars than a century ago. The ones that do happen now are much smaller in size and scope. We can debate the reasons why, but the post WW2 global order has clearly worked. Many nonwhite countries have gotten wealthier and are steadily closing the gap w the west.

On a geopolitical scale the gap between the nonwhite developing world and the developed world is shrinking. Democratic erosion is problematic depending on pov, but its happening in part because western influence is falling.

Even inside developed countries marginalized people are acquiring more political, economic, and cultural power. More voices who were previously shut out are being heard about oppression.

So generally in the aggregate I think doom is oversupplied and hope is undersupplied. Why? Well partly because people have short time horizons and don’t see the long term progress. Also because we’re psychologically programmed to be biased towards more negative events.

But I think the less talked about reason is white elites who’ve directly benefited from the geopolitical order understand the gap between them and the rest of the world is shrinking and they don’t like it. And they’re disproportionately represented in media/thought leadership

So we constantly hear dooming about how bad things are + how everything sucks because that’s their perspective and frame. But for a majority of the world, things have gotten much better over the past century via all types of metrics, GDP, mortality, less war, tech, infrastructure

Important to remember that structures and even entire governments that feel oppressive and restrictive now may be wildly different and better in the future. Even if progress seems slow, our time horizons are just small.

Imagine talking to an enslaved person from 160/170 years ago and describing the modern political system. Now imagine another century. Things can get dramatically better for marginalized people. Even if the present reality is bad.

But yeah I wrote all that to say we need more hope.