“Incremental Progress is Best” Fallacy.

Incrementalism or gradualism is a social construct and a historical façade.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash, Always Baby Steps???

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The main reason incremental progress is best rings false has to do with our selective memories, and historical flattening. It is like saying humans are the greatest animals that evolution could have produced merely because we are the most advanced hominid species that survived. Modern progress occurs in various spurts and starts, leaps or lurches forward, retries and redos, and backpedaling. The Middle Ages for western culture was a stalled era in many ways, and a backward move in others. Going further into the past, there have been five mass extinctions since life began on earth, and before humans arrived on the scene. For evolution, often considered a gradual process, this means — in the most profound sense — it is the survival of the survived. The concept of fittest, as most think of it today, is stripped of all its proportions and importance, once you introduce a seven mile-wide asteroid to the mix, and mash. While blazing pell-mell into the future is problematic, the slow-go, status quo flattens history’s waves of change, and by sleight-of-hand, whitewashes down our leaps forward, to sanctify, and satisfy their own selfish purposes and ideologies.

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