Do we have a different relationship with time and change
There is a hypothetical going around posing that everyone is presented with a pair of buttons, one red, one blue, and made to press one. If you press the blue button you might die unless more than half of all people also press blue. If you press red there is no chance for you to die.
Seeing the people trying to justify pressing blue button has really driven home that I have a different perception of time and the change that comes with it.
I think I see this the most in medicine, where we would rather torture people for years than spare them that and let the die peacefully. Everyone will die not everyone has to be tortured for years.
But there is a broader sense of stasis that people apply to deeper time. They say humans have change the world the most, when clearly it is chloroplasts and by a margin that is not remotely close. The thing though is that there was no environmental stasis, so there is no magical natural order to return to, so we should make the climate good, and not think that there is some natural paradise state to return to.
Some of this also comes into play in terms of considering what the alternative is. People say they live animals so they will not eat them, but they do not consider the life the wild versions of the animals we eat would be. Those animals would constantly be wary of predators, running, hiding, watching. And if they weren’t preyed upon enough they would go through rounds of starvations as the population grew past would could be supported. There deaths would be violent and drawn out, and their lives moderately terrible. The bar for a better life and death for these animals is so low ( not that some times people find a way to go below it) that it is hard to not see that as the standard instead of wishing a cruel return to wildness upon them. (Or the considerations of all that goes into making most vegan lifestyles possible). [There are other arguments but the one about animal cruelty doesn’t hit for someone who has seen nature documentaries]
Getting back to the hypothetical. There is the choice now. And there are an equal number of people who will through lack of an ability to understand will place red or blue. the people who say they need to press blue button because the innocents that accidentally pressed it need to be saved, even if they pressed it as a way out. but they ignore the people who accidentally pressed the red button. They ignore the world they will be subject to if the blue button people are just one person shy. what villains are going to press blue. who needs them more the survivors in the red dominant world who will suffer from their absence, or the accidental blue button pushers who will not suffer, just not be alive anymore? It seems like the thinking is stuck at the moment and sees death as the ultimate peril without being able to conceive of the suffering to be abated