Chicken Zombie Apocolypse

I am just about 62 years old. Even in my own generation I was a very rational person because I worked on it; that was an era when being rational was still treated as an admirable trait. You were meant to test claims, separate evidence from narrative, think about alterantives, ask whether the mechanism made sense, etc. This was once considered adult behaviour.

As I got older, I was called cynical more often. I do not become became more cynical; the social baseline moved.

These days if ask for evidence, people hear hostility. Ask whether incentives match the stated purpose and people hear bad faith. Ask what happens when the optimistic assumptions fail and people hear obstruction. Look for alternative explanations and people call it cynicism.

Cynicism assumes the worst whereas rational thinking asks what the evidence supports. Those are not the same thing, but modern culture often treats them as identical because both are inconvenient.

People, at some level, have always preferred stories to facts, certainty to doubt and belonging to accuracy. That has not changed. What has changed is the embedded status of irrationality.

For a moment there we humans did OK at predicting the near future, even if we did misuse this capability to selectively enrich ourselves at the expense of future generations.

Now said future generations have mistaken the outcomes and the causes, and discarded any chance they have of saving themselves. A cargo cult in reverse. Odd karma that.