When were we better, really?

I am looking at all the anguish that people feel these days and all the atrocities that one fraction of people does to another.

In the developing world there’s bombardments, killings, population displacement, infrastructure disaster, exploitation and armed thugs who will kill in the name of a nation or religion.

And in the developed world, there’s corruption, scandal, persecution, disregard for human rights, poverty and lawlessness.

The planet is a mess. And it could be better. No question about it.

My question, however, is when was it better?

In prehistory? I can’t think that people even had stable food security. If you couldn’t kill to eat, you were very dependent on the seasonality of berries of the nearest bush.

In antiquity? The first organized nations only recognized rights for few citizens and literally enslaved whole nations. People had no voice and could be killed off just for entertainment. No excuse needed.

In the Middle Ages? You could get killed just for speaking your mind (heresy!), or just the usual: famine, war, plague,violence, travel and plain old being in the right place at the wrong time.

In the Renaissance and till the 20th century, the risk was from infectious diseases, uprising, national or international conflicts, which again led to food insecurity and disease.

It wasn’t till the 20th century that humans started to introduce sanitization in their lives to avoid the mass infections. And just then, we discovered the joys of two World Wars to kill off a few million generations of people and depopulate the Earth, just because the Germans got pissed off.

Since then, how are we being killed off? Well, half the world still lives in their own Middle Ages. And the rest of us who have access to Apple products, we mainly die from lifestyle diseases and occasional violent death.

Of course, we all die in the end.

But, really, when in history did at least half of the people die… better?