Comment by CoastalCoder 15 hours ago
> If only we didn't need to resort to selfish reasons for accessibility.
I agree, but I think that's tantamount to wishing humans were more kind and empathetic.
If that we're the case, I suspect the world would be souch better as to be unrecognizable.
I believed this, too, before COVID hit and I saw ~half my country try to throw everyone else under the bus so that they could continue to eat at their favorite restaurants, and buy their khakis, and hoard goods to price gouge their neighbors, and just making a belligerent scene any time they were unable to do something the way they want to. Many people will naturally pull together and act cooperatively and altruistically, but also many, many people just live to grief everyone else.
I genuinely believe humans are kind and empathetic by nature. I believe that humans have invented systems that penalize kind and empathetic behavior and adhere to those systems because they are familiar.
Look at what happens after a disaster or when a neighbor falls ill -- people band together and feed one another. They care for one another. They pick up the slack. Not because anyone pays them, but because it's what they intrinsically want to do.
But it only occurs during disruptions from the norm.