Humanity, as a species, attained god-like power over the physical world and then used that power to create a massive sprawling hell.

It obviously depends on where you draw the lines, but the majority of the participants of civilization, right now, are being tortured¹ in factory farms. For every currently living human, there is currently about one cow or pig living in hellish conditions, and about 3 chickens living in hellish conditions.

(This is not counting the fish or the shrimp, which massively increases the ratio of civilization-participants-in-hell-on-purpose to not. It’s also not counting the rats, raccoons, pidgons, etc, which pushes the ratio down. Leaving all of them out, the humans are only about 20% of the participants of human civilization, the other 80% are living in continuously torturous conditions.)

We did that. Human civilization built a hell for the creatures that it has power over.

If you told a fantasy story about a race of gods with massive power over the non-god races on their planet, and the gods used their power to breed the other races to massive numbers in constant conditions that are so bad that never having been born is preferable, there wouldn’t be the slightest question of whether the gods were good or evil.

Depending on the tenor of the story, you might zoom in on the evil-gods living their lives in their golden towers, and see their happy and loving relationships, or their spaceships and computers and art. You could tell whole stories that just take place just in the golden cities, and feel charmed by the evil gods.

But it would be the height of myopic bias to focus on the golden cities and call the gods, as a collective, Good.

When I think about the state of human civilization, the overwhelmingly important facts are 1) humans are rushing to build a more capable successor species without thinking very hard about that and 2) humans have constructed a hell for most of the beings that live in their civilization.(There’s also the impact on wild animal suffering “outside of” our civilization, which does complicate things.)

There other things that are important to track—like the decay of liberal norms, and the development of new institutions, and the the economic growthrate—because they are relevant for modeling the dynamics of civilization. But, if the quality of life of all the humans doubled, it wouldn’t even show up on the on the graph of total-wellbeing on planet earth.

Humans are an evil god-species.

1. One might rightly object to calling what’s happening in factory farms “torture”. Torture, one could claim, means taking actions specifically to make someone’s experience bad, not just incidentally making someone’s experience very bad. I think this is arguable. If a mad scientist kidnaped someone and slowly skinned them alive, not out of any ill will towards the kidnaped, but just out of a scientific interest about what would happen, I think it would be reasonable for that person to say that the mad scientist tortured them. Doing harm to someone that is so bad that you might do to someone if your goal was to specifically cause them enormous pain, can be reasonable called torture. ↩︎