I know things are arguably better now than they ever have been before. That doesn't mean things can't be vastly better. "End of history" my ass. We've still got a long way to go. In some regards I think we've even regressed- the historian Yuval Noah Harari outlines in his book Sapiens that hunter-gatherers enjoyed many things modern humans don't: a more egalitarian structure, an abundance of leisure time, a tight-knit community with strong social ties. I'm no anarcho-primitivist, and I think technology and science have immense emancipatory potential for the human race. But for all our high-tech fancy gadgets and gizmos we sure operate under some primitive, even barbaric institutions. No civil society should have citizens struggling to meet their basic needs. No civil society should be predicated on the inherently coercive paradigm of "work or starve". What's the point of living in a society if not to harness the collective power of its citizens to uplift them all? We are squandering our potential.