So some 70 percent of us, according to the polls, think the country is on the wrong track. The vast majority of us are thoroughly disgusted with the political gridlock and dysfunction of Washington, D.C. We are also unhappy with the economy and polls say that while lots of us feel stuck and miserable in our jobs, we are also petrified of losing them.
We are also scared that the world we are living in is becoming increasingly dangerous. And the nation and world our children inherit will be even worse. ISIS, a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea, Syria, increasing Russian belligerence, increasing Chinese belligerence, global warming, illegal immigration, mass killing sprees, student debt, national debt, jobs going overseas, deteriorating race relations, and a looming national election in which the candidates for office are saying that if you think things are bad now, wait until you see what happens if my opponent gets elected!
Still, historically speaking things have been much worse. Around the beginning of time for humans, for example — say the Neanderthal period of some 40,000 years ago — us homo-sapiens faced very real life-threatening challenges every single day, starting with feeding ourselves and our children, which mostly involved using rocks, sticks and crude weapons to hunt vicious animals that were also hunting us.
Virtually naked, comparatively speaking, we also had to survive the weather, which included vicious cold periods, and natural disasters were a regular occurrence. Also, whatever diseases were out there, we were susceptible to them. Life, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it in his seminal work, Leviathan, was “nasty, brutish and short.”
So true, because in addition to weather, disease, natural disasters and predatory animals, we also had to survive our fellow man. In Leviathan, Hobbes describes our original “state of nature,” in which the only law was the law of the jungle — all against all as we unmercifully destroyed all our neighbors, or they destroyed us, in order to eliminate all human competition for the things we wanted and needed to survive. Thus, in what passed for a village tens of thousands of years ago, we villagers would regularly face roving bands of savages, bent on killing, raping, looting and enslaving us, and depending on when was their last meal, even eating us.
So take a deep breath and remember that bad times are relative. The state of the nation and world may be depressing, and the thought of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and many other presidential candidates may worry significant numbers of us. But it’s a lot better than waking up in a cave each morning wondering — to the extent we had the capacity to wonder — if we would still be alive by evening.
