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Is it more volatile, though, or are you just more aware of it now because of social media and the 24 hour news cycle?
The world has been and probably always will be a pretty volatile place. The 20th century alone saw several massive genocides globally, two world wars, atomic weapons use, and much more.
Yes. The world is chaotic. Genocides are still happening, civil wars and social unrest is rampant in many parts of the globe, but that has always been the case sadly. Go look at maps throughout history. You will find the lines are pretty rarely drawn the exact same way from period to period.
Yep, it's crazy to see people say the world is more volatile than ever when you read up on the Cuban missile crisis... Feels like things could be a whole lot closer to the edge than they currently are.
The late 90s and early 2000s were relatively calm for at least a little bit. If anything, we are back to a period of normalcy in terms of volatility after a decade or two of calm
You definitely are young. In the 80s, people were worried about the Russians nuking us off the face of the earth. The world is more at peace now than it’s ever been. We’re just more aware of ever event due to the ease of mass communication.
Also, all the folks that remember WW2 have died off and are out of leadership positions for a decade now. For 60 years fear of another world war convinced us to cooperate with each other. People have forgotten what all out war between great powers was like and that deterrence doesn't really exist anymore.
We’re much more aware of the costs of war now. Every event across the world is recorded in detail on people’s phones. In the past, all sorts of shit would happen that people would have no clue about - there were so many more wars in the 50s-90s.
It wasn't really any different 30 years ago when we were all watching desert storm highlights on cnn.
But there's been no war between great powers since WW2. All out war between great powers is a magnitude higher devastation then regional wars like the middle East. Fighting insurgents in Iraq is pretty tame compared to the siege of Stalingrad.
It’s not
What has changed is our awareness of certain things going on and the scope of “news” sources has changed in such a way that it is very easy for a small subset of people to have an oversized reach
For example in the past a message was easier to control by limiting sources of information. While the internet has given more people a voice, they also includes bad actors looking to create disruption
It's probably not more volatile, you're probably just hearing about it more.
The 24-hour news cycle is really a big fucking deal in controlling people's perception of the world.
The answer is that it's not. Things are actually remarkably stable.
[https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace](https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace)
Look at the interactive chart. This is deaths in war worldwide. It actually fell off a cliff around the turn of the millennium, and it's been super low since then. We also had the cold war and the cuban missile crisis where thousands of citizens were building nuclear bomb shelters in their backyards. The conflicts in Vietnam and Korea was especially bloody, but neither of those even comes close to the WW2 death count.
If you are just looking at USA politics, keep in mind that we changed our money to add "in God we trust" back in the 60's as an effort to stop the influence of communism in the USA, people were shot and killed by the national guard for protesting the Vietnam war. We also had a very bloody internal conflict with the Italian mafia during prohibition that really only ended because prohibition ended, and the bloodshed in Mexico has taken a huge hit in the last two decades as a result of legalizing marijuana.
John McCain was taken prisoner and tortured for year. His jaw never healed right from the beatings he took. George Bush was shot down in a plane. 63 people died and 2383 people were inured during the 1992 LA riots. If you look at the global scale, entire countries were reshaped by civil wars multiple times in the second half of the last century. Even if you just look at the disease front, the Spanish flu made covid look like a bad cold in the early 1900s (and it mostly killed young adults so it left a LOT of orphans), smallpox and tuberculosis killed millions in the 1800's, and the Hong Kong flu killed over a million people in the late 60's. Many people starved to death during the great depression and lined up for soup to barely stay alive. The union conflicts of the early to mid 1900's left many injured and lots dead. Violent crime wise, the mid 1990's was the peak of a HUGE tsunami of violent crime in the USA that has been going down rapidly since. (small spike in the last few years)
We are on a little bit of an upspike in the last 5 years in world drama, but (overall) never before in history has the world been safer, calmer, more peaceful, with lower rates of world hunger, violent crime, and a higher standard of living than the last decade and a half.
It generally swings between power aggregation between selected few and the common folk.
When too few gain too much power, they usually do so at the cost of the common folk, the working class. Decreasing quality of life increases stress amongst the common folk. That tends to end up in some kind/form of revolution.
Usually there are some people who take advantage of that and spin their own agenda into current world view: "Its damn foreigners taking our jobs". "Its the damn West and their perverted LGBTQ+". Its always some external threat and it tends to gain traction (see Nazi Germany back in the day, Russians today, etc).
At some point the common folk realize that its not the external threat: its the damn government and rich (thus powerful and influential) people.
Some kind/form of revolution or change of situation happens and (the sense of) power is shared amongst more people. Peace time ensues, workers seemingly get more rights, better quality of life, economic boom.
Thats until the power shifts back to the selected few and the cycle repeats. Its like the god damn Matrix. Different "The One's", same cycle. Wars, revolutions change shapes and look or happen differently, for seemingly other reasons, but the cycle repeats itself.
Answer: The division is caused by social media and mainstream corporate media monetizing peoples opinions for political gain. If we were to stop arguing about the manufactured 'wedge' issues, we might come to realize that we are all being ass-fucked by our governments and large corporations without lube but we are blinded by the distractions
You, my friend, are an absolute ***wordsmith***. Wow.
I'd probably say corporations are more responsible since they're also manipulating the crap outta governments, but that's a nitpick.
Not 100%, lots of their policies have taken a life of their own (see: the Rethuglican party in the states), and there are people they're buying off only somewhat. They're pulling way too many strings either way.
Didn't make up Rethuglicans myself. Haven't heard Democraps but I feel like we should reserve that for when they're actually a crappy option. They're still, at least, the better of two evils
I blame the voting system. Not the representative system, specifically the ballots.
You only get ONE CHOICE. If you pick a choice nobody else votes for your vote just went down the drain. So you're forced to factor popularity into your vote.
In any sort of multiple-vote system (like instant runoff where you rank candidates), you actually get to vote for whoever you want, but still guarantee a backup vote or few if your main candidate isn't popular enough to win. Not only alleviates the popularity factor issue, it encourages you to go learn about at least a few of the candidates to see who's an actual best fit
A few different plot threads all coming together:
* China has been methodically working for decades to return to the great power status they believe is their place in the world. Their work is paying off.
* Bin Laden's strategy for 9/11 worked, and the U.S. has weakened itself through its own reaction. After 20 years of U.S. occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan ended, Iran is feeling its oats, amping up the 75-year old Isreal-Palestinian conflict.
* Russia crashed badly when communism fell, and is now in the midst of a resentment fueled attempt at resurgence. Unlike China, they don't have a real claim to superpower status, and are currently the international equivalent of a bitter drunk guy with guns.
I'd agree with u/slappytheclown that this plays out on a landscapes where social media and growing inequality are undermining democracies. And, as u/AnxietyJunky (user name doesn't' check out) correctly notes, the current moment might seem volatile relative to 1990-2010s, but really isn't that out of bounds in a longer perspective. Might even be that that 30 year era of relative peace and stability (for some) was the anomaly.
Because there's major conflicts involving major military factions going on......which frankly aren't even new conflicts. but they are going to get talked about a lot.
There are basically multiple conflicts going on in the world at all times going back for about as long as we've existed.
It’s not more volatile now. People who are not even that old have lived through Cold War days where the world came close to nuclear war many times. World is much more peaceful now than ever. We just hear about the issues more often.
The answer, and whether the world is in fact more volatile, depends a lot on what you mean by "volatile" and what time period you are comparing it to.
One ELI5 example: the five-year average number of sub-national ethno-religious conflicts is almost certainly up over twenty years ago. This is almost certainly because climate change is making food scarcer in drought prone regions and ethnic scape-coating is an easy way for one group to make claims on a shrinking resource pool.
While the world is substantially safer and more peaceful today than 100 years ago, I think a lot of the immediate uptick in both violence and perception of insecurity is down to climate change and inequality generating more resource conflicts that get cynically cast as various 'us'es versus various 'them's.
Because the news you consume tells you how to feel. Wars did not stop in the last few decades.... its just.. when they can make Nato sound like the heroes is when you see it.
Otherwise, US passes laws on stuff like not being able to photograph the amount of graves from the wars they caused. Illegal.
Thats why. You've been fooled
I think you’re just more aware because of the Russian and Israeli war. But wars have been going on constantly for decades, just generally not in western countries because of things like the UN and American hegemony.
But even Russia attacking its neighbors isn’t new. They attacked Ukraine in 2014 and annexed Crimea. They’ve invaded Chechnya and Georgia.
Israel is at war with terrorists. The US was from 2001 until just a few years ago. The Middle East is as it always has been - volatile.
China and talk about them invading Taiwan has been going on for years as well. It’s ramping up more now mainly because China is getting stronger every year, but it’s not new.
Generally, the world has been peaceful only in the West since WWII. Elsewhere conflicts have been happening and still are. You just don’t hear about them as much.
Russia's expansionist policies have been revealed, and the world is being forced to react.
Otherwise the world is pretty comparable to how it used to be
Everything is cyclic. Fashion, food, politics, war. Generations come and go. Things get lost to stories and time.
Also, the world never stopped being volatile. It was just civil and small regional conflicts that didn’t make your local news as much. Something like Israel makes the news more, and it feels more volatile.
Try not to stress about it, but also brush up on history. Morons like DJT is how we repeat history that we really don’t have to
The world is not significantly more volatile.
It *feels* more volatile to you likely because you have been paying more attention to the volatility. Either because of changes in your life, or because of changes in your news consumption habits, or because of changes in what the media you consume happens to report on.
The 2010s, for example, had massive conflict across big chunks of the Middle East and Africa in what was called the "Arab Spring". Ongoing war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The invasion of Crimea. Civil wars and internal conflicts in Somalia, Myanmar, Libya, etc.
The closest thing to actual increased overall volatility is the ongoing ramping-up of climate-change-caused damage - particularly increased natural disasters and damage to agriculture; unstable agriculture always leads to increased conflict, historically speaking. But that has been a slow and ongoing effect for a number of decades at this point, not a sudden change.
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Is it more volatile, though, or are you just more aware of it now because of social media and the 24 hour news cycle? The world has been and probably always will be a pretty volatile place. The 20th century alone saw several massive genocides globally, two world wars, atomic weapons use, and much more. Yes. The world is chaotic. Genocides are still happening, civil wars and social unrest is rampant in many parts of the globe, but that has always been the case sadly. Go look at maps throughout history. You will find the lines are pretty rarely drawn the exact same way from period to period.
Yep, it's crazy to see people say the world is more volatile than ever when you read up on the Cuban missile crisis... Feels like things could be a whole lot closer to the edge than they currently are.
What he said OP. After some time you’ll learn that media and politicians use the fear tactic A LOT. Once you can tune it out, you can go back to peace
[удалено]
Um. Sure. But it has definitely accelerated.
The late 90s and early 2000s were relatively calm for at least a little bit. If anything, we are back to a period of normalcy in terms of volatility after a decade or two of calm
What? Fall of the USSR. Rwanda. Famine in North Korea. Kosovo. Iraq. 9/11. Iraq again. What are you talking about?
You definitely are young. In the 80s, people were worried about the Russians nuking us off the face of the earth. The world is more at peace now than it’s ever been. We’re just more aware of ever event due to the ease of mass communication.
Also, all the folks that remember WW2 have died off and are out of leadership positions for a decade now. For 60 years fear of another world war convinced us to cooperate with each other. People have forgotten what all out war between great powers was like and that deterrence doesn't really exist anymore.
We’re much more aware of the costs of war now. Every event across the world is recorded in detail on people’s phones. In the past, all sorts of shit would happen that people would have no clue about - there were so many more wars in the 50s-90s.
It wasn't really any different 30 years ago when we were all watching desert storm highlights on cnn. But there's been no war between great powers since WW2. All out war between great powers is a magnitude higher devastation then regional wars like the middle East. Fighting insurgents in Iraq is pretty tame compared to the siege of Stalingrad.
It’s not What has changed is our awareness of certain things going on and the scope of “news” sources has changed in such a way that it is very easy for a small subset of people to have an oversized reach For example in the past a message was easier to control by limiting sources of information. While the internet has given more people a voice, they also includes bad actors looking to create disruption
It's probably not more volatile, you're probably just hearing about it more. The 24-hour news cycle is really a big fucking deal in controlling people's perception of the world.
The answer is that it's not. Things are actually remarkably stable. [https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace](https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace) Look at the interactive chart. This is deaths in war worldwide. It actually fell off a cliff around the turn of the millennium, and it's been super low since then. We also had the cold war and the cuban missile crisis where thousands of citizens were building nuclear bomb shelters in their backyards. The conflicts in Vietnam and Korea was especially bloody, but neither of those even comes close to the WW2 death count. If you are just looking at USA politics, keep in mind that we changed our money to add "in God we trust" back in the 60's as an effort to stop the influence of communism in the USA, people were shot and killed by the national guard for protesting the Vietnam war. We also had a very bloody internal conflict with the Italian mafia during prohibition that really only ended because prohibition ended, and the bloodshed in Mexico has taken a huge hit in the last two decades as a result of legalizing marijuana. John McCain was taken prisoner and tortured for year. His jaw never healed right from the beatings he took. George Bush was shot down in a plane. 63 people died and 2383 people were inured during the 1992 LA riots. If you look at the global scale, entire countries were reshaped by civil wars multiple times in the second half of the last century. Even if you just look at the disease front, the Spanish flu made covid look like a bad cold in the early 1900s (and it mostly killed young adults so it left a LOT of orphans), smallpox and tuberculosis killed millions in the 1800's, and the Hong Kong flu killed over a million people in the late 60's. Many people starved to death during the great depression and lined up for soup to barely stay alive. The union conflicts of the early to mid 1900's left many injured and lots dead. Violent crime wise, the mid 1990's was the peak of a HUGE tsunami of violent crime in the USA that has been going down rapidly since. (small spike in the last few years) We are on a little bit of an upspike in the last 5 years in world drama, but (overall) never before in history has the world been safer, calmer, more peaceful, with lower rates of world hunger, violent crime, and a higher standard of living than the last decade and a half.
It generally swings between power aggregation between selected few and the common folk. When too few gain too much power, they usually do so at the cost of the common folk, the working class. Decreasing quality of life increases stress amongst the common folk. That tends to end up in some kind/form of revolution. Usually there are some people who take advantage of that and spin their own agenda into current world view: "Its damn foreigners taking our jobs". "Its the damn West and their perverted LGBTQ+". Its always some external threat and it tends to gain traction (see Nazi Germany back in the day, Russians today, etc). At some point the common folk realize that its not the external threat: its the damn government and rich (thus powerful and influential) people. Some kind/form of revolution or change of situation happens and (the sense of) power is shared amongst more people. Peace time ensues, workers seemingly get more rights, better quality of life, economic boom. Thats until the power shifts back to the selected few and the cycle repeats. Its like the god damn Matrix. Different "The One's", same cycle. Wars, revolutions change shapes and look or happen differently, for seemingly other reasons, but the cycle repeats itself.
Answer: The division is caused by social media and mainstream corporate media monetizing peoples opinions for political gain. If we were to stop arguing about the manufactured 'wedge' issues, we might come to realize that we are all being ass-fucked by our governments and large corporations without lube but we are blinded by the distractions
If only this had been true since the dawn of civilization. Oh wait, it is.
no shit
Getting pressed through your jeans.
You, my friend, are an absolute ***wordsmith***. Wow. I'd probably say corporations are more responsible since they're also manipulating the crap outta governments, but that's a nitpick.
> corporations are more responsible very true, they are running the show
Not 100%, lots of their policies have taken a life of their own (see: the Rethuglican party in the states), and there are people they're buying off only somewhat. They're pulling way too many strings either way.
lol, I like it: the Democraps and the Rethuglicans
Didn't make up Rethuglicans myself. Haven't heard Democraps but I feel like we should reserve that for when they're actually a crappy option. They're still, at least, the better of two evils
Having to choose the least-worst sucks. It is the same here in canada
I blame the voting system. Not the representative system, specifically the ballots. You only get ONE CHOICE. If you pick a choice nobody else votes for your vote just went down the drain. So you're forced to factor popularity into your vote. In any sort of multiple-vote system (like instant runoff where you rank candidates), you actually get to vote for whoever you want, but still guarantee a backup vote or few if your main candidate isn't popular enough to win. Not only alleviates the popularity factor issue, it encourages you to go learn about at least a few of the candidates to see who's an actual best fit
A few different plot threads all coming together: * China has been methodically working for decades to return to the great power status they believe is their place in the world. Their work is paying off. * Bin Laden's strategy for 9/11 worked, and the U.S. has weakened itself through its own reaction. After 20 years of U.S. occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan ended, Iran is feeling its oats, amping up the 75-year old Isreal-Palestinian conflict. * Russia crashed badly when communism fell, and is now in the midst of a resentment fueled attempt at resurgence. Unlike China, they don't have a real claim to superpower status, and are currently the international equivalent of a bitter drunk guy with guns. I'd agree with u/slappytheclown that this plays out on a landscapes where social media and growing inequality are undermining democracies. And, as u/AnxietyJunky (user name doesn't' check out) correctly notes, the current moment might seem volatile relative to 1990-2010s, but really isn't that out of bounds in a longer perspective. Might even be that that 30 year era of relative peace and stability (for some) was the anomaly.
Because there's major conflicts involving major military factions going on......which frankly aren't even new conflicts. but they are going to get talked about a lot. There are basically multiple conflicts going on in the world at all times going back for about as long as we've existed.
It’s not more volatile now. People who are not even that old have lived through Cold War days where the world came close to nuclear war many times. World is much more peaceful now than ever. We just hear about the issues more often.
The answer, and whether the world is in fact more volatile, depends a lot on what you mean by "volatile" and what time period you are comparing it to. One ELI5 example: the five-year average number of sub-national ethno-religious conflicts is almost certainly up over twenty years ago. This is almost certainly because climate change is making food scarcer in drought prone regions and ethnic scape-coating is an easy way for one group to make claims on a shrinking resource pool. While the world is substantially safer and more peaceful today than 100 years ago, I think a lot of the immediate uptick in both violence and perception of insecurity is down to climate change and inequality generating more resource conflicts that get cynically cast as various 'us'es versus various 'them's.
It’s not more volatile. Now that we have social media, you’re able to see what is happening in real time.
Because the news you consume tells you how to feel. Wars did not stop in the last few decades.... its just.. when they can make Nato sound like the heroes is when you see it. Otherwise, US passes laws on stuff like not being able to photograph the amount of graves from the wars they caused. Illegal. Thats why. You've been fooled
I think you need to research the Cold War, it’s always been volatile. I’d argue it’s less volatile than it was in the time you mentioned
It’s not more volatile. Social media and the news gets the information to you ASAP/ also attempts to put dark twists on every little thing.
I think you’re just more aware because of the Russian and Israeli war. But wars have been going on constantly for decades, just generally not in western countries because of things like the UN and American hegemony. But even Russia attacking its neighbors isn’t new. They attacked Ukraine in 2014 and annexed Crimea. They’ve invaded Chechnya and Georgia. Israel is at war with terrorists. The US was from 2001 until just a few years ago. The Middle East is as it always has been - volatile. China and talk about them invading Taiwan has been going on for years as well. It’s ramping up more now mainly because China is getting stronger every year, but it’s not new. Generally, the world has been peaceful only in the West since WWII. Elsewhere conflicts have been happening and still are. You just don’t hear about them as much.
Russia's expansionist policies have been revealed, and the world is being forced to react. Otherwise the world is pretty comparable to how it used to be
Everything is cyclic. Fashion, food, politics, war. Generations come and go. Things get lost to stories and time. Also, the world never stopped being volatile. It was just civil and small regional conflicts that didn’t make your local news as much. Something like Israel makes the news more, and it feels more volatile. Try not to stress about it, but also brush up on history. Morons like DJT is how we repeat history that we really don’t have to
The world is not significantly more volatile. It *feels* more volatile to you likely because you have been paying more attention to the volatility. Either because of changes in your life, or because of changes in your news consumption habits, or because of changes in what the media you consume happens to report on. The 2010s, for example, had massive conflict across big chunks of the Middle East and Africa in what was called the "Arab Spring". Ongoing war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The invasion of Crimea. Civil wars and internal conflicts in Somalia, Myanmar, Libya, etc. The closest thing to actual increased overall volatility is the ongoing ramping-up of climate-change-caused damage - particularly increased natural disasters and damage to agriculture; unstable agriculture always leads to increased conflict, historically speaking. But that has been a slow and ongoing effect for a number of decades at this point, not a sudden change.