Humanity 3.0

We are currently asking who was responsible for the breakdown in security that led to the near death of a prominent politician and the very real death of an innocent bystander? It is an appropriate question, but there are other, even more relevant questions, that remain unasked.  My guess is that we will eventually satisfy our curiosity with the chastisement and/or firing of one or another official and some pontification about how we need to cool down the political rhetoric, but we will not come close to addressing the more fundamental issue, because it is too difficult and frightening for most people to even conceive it's nature.

The Trump assassination attempt is far too rich in peripheral facts to encourage a deeper consideration of the conditions that generated it.  An amateur assassin brings his gun, his rangefinder, and a ladder to a building that the police were inside of, climbs to the roof, where he has a line of sight shot at the president, is seen with his weapon by multiple people in the crowd before he opens fire, cops are told about him before he starts shooting, one of them actually confronts him, and on and on...  The specifics are far too rich for anyone to think about the deeper problems that remain with us.

Lest anyone be confused, I am a supporter of all of the men and women involved in providing security to politicians and other prominent people.  They have a difficult and dangerous job.  In this particular case, it would appear that serious errors were made by people at all levels and I expect that the incident has attracted enough attention that punitive measures will be taken.  I am less optimistic that any thought will be directed at resolving the basic problem.

The fundamentals involved in the Trump shooting are exactly the same as those underlying Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and most if not all of the remaining horrendous stupidities that currently blight lives all over the world.  The only difference is scale.  Too many humans actually think that they can convince/coerce their fellow humans to live according to their set of rules, while simultaneously creating technology, so complex and powerful as to ensure that will never occur.  Back in the day, when weaponry was limited to what an individual could carry to the fight, our "reach" was sufficiently limited that we could pretty much ignore the danger to humanity as a whole.  Today, we have an imperfect, massively overcrowded world full of small minded humans possessing horrible weaponry that will almost certainly eventually destroy humanity as we know it today.  While I am curious as to what humanity 3.0 will look like, I am not at all desirous of experiencing it firsthand.