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Friday, 19 August 2016

The world’s not ending — journalists are just making you feel as if it is

The world is not ending. And if you feel like it is, that’s probably Enterprise’s fault: Take the rise of Donald Trump, add in Islamophobia, Brexit and a dash of terrorist attacks, failed coups and mass shootings, and it’s easy to fall prey to the argument that we’re in the end times. But we’re not “backsliding toward a more violent, less tolerant time in history.” In fact, the Harvard researcher who has “meticulously documented a steady decline in violence over the last several centuries” — something he claims "may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species” — says we’re actually in really good shape today. Among the reasons we don’t feel this way, he suggests, is that following the news is a “misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened, not about things that didn’t happen.” Read “You may think the world is falling apart. Steven Pinker is here to tell you it isn’t.

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