A global village

One of the problems with society today, is that it is easy to stay anonymous, and anonymity reduces negative response to destructive behaviour.

Consider society anno 1800. Almost every person in the world lives in a small village or a minor town, and they know only the people in their vicinity. If someone in such a tight-knit community doesn’t respect the people around him, the entire community will quickly learn of it, and will be more careful around him. And if he completely malfunctions, they may throw him out – which was a terrible thing back then. In this society, people with empathy and respect for others will flourish, as success (food, mates) comes much more easy if they work together.

That is different today. While it is bad for you to be entirely unsympathetic, putting myself first certainly helps gain success (wealth, power). Take for example the many investigations that show that psychopaths (people entirely without empathy) hold many positions of power (CEOs etc), compared to the number of psychopaths among us. (I really need to start citing sources… I’ll get to that.) And the internet is quite bad as well – many people say on the internet things they would never say in the real world.

What we need is to get some of the small-community dynamic into the global community. To make a global village. I think that some part of this is learning that we all have almost a duty to rate things we experience, especially bad experiences, so other people can avoid the same experiences. Technology makes this easier than ever before, but I think it can be made much easier still. How many different rating sites are there? Rating apps? What I would like is one central place to post my rating, which would then figure in all of these sites. Centralised rating. Possibly this could be extended to people as well – if a person has treated me badly, other people should know – but I can’t yet see the many possible effects of this. Has it been tried anywhere?

I think maybe it should be… But that is for another time. Now I will go rate everything I remember.