Appropriate Responses

[ashnistrike]

I love my wife.

I got home today and saw a copy of The Watchtower on the coffee table.

Me: Oh, did we get Jehovah's Witnesses today?
S: Yes, apparently some live nearby.
Me: So, what happened?
S: They asked whether I'd noticed all the bad things happening in the world, and whether I agreed that things seemed to be getting worse all the time, and didn't I think that was a sign of the coming apocalypse?  I explained to them about the availability heuristic* and about how rates of violence are actually getting lower.
Me: I love you--what did they say?
S: That it made sense. And they stayed and rested a while before they went back out in the rain.

And now I feel like I ought to put these things together in a convenient pamphlet for the benefit of people not married to psychologists.


*I can't find a good link for this aspect of the heuristic, but in general it's easier to think of bad things that happened recently, because it's generally easier to think of things that happened recently.  And it's definitely easier to think of bad things that have happened during your lifetime.  This leads to every generation imagining a recently lost golden age when this stuff was unheard of.

Comments

[page-of-swords.livejournal.com]

Smile. But the end of the world is coming. On a long enough time line.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

If someone comes around the house with a pamphlet about the inevitable heat death of the universe, they will totally get cookies.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

That is awesome.

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Had a similar run-in with JWs in my youth:

Them: Biblical prophecies came true, therefore we should read the Bible.
Me: Herodotos relates how the Delphic Oracle also made prophecies that came true.
Them: Oh. Really? Perhaps we should look at this Herodotos of yours...

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

They should. Herodotos tells some pretty wild stories.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

I always figured a big part of the "wah wah the world was better when I was ten and a child in the suburbs, everything was safe and economically peachy and the sky was full of cotton candy" tendency, at least among people of good faith, is that the world seemed better when you were ten because YOU WERE TEN and, in most middling/upper families, probably had no idea what your parents' worries and frets and economizations were. Life's lovely when all you have to do is deal with school and add to your lifetime sheaf of skills and contacts; not so much when you have to handle a mortgage and employment and managing an entire family's health, wealth, and welfare.

Also, the postwar suburban environment was designed ground-up out of greenfields to support the raising of children, and worked great for a while (until its insupportability caught up with it; see also all the dead strip malls in the near-ring suburbs of most US metropolises). Lots of uncounted externalities went into making their childhoods more effortless.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's part of it. And, too, we have records of people saying that everything was fine until this corrupt modern generation, going back pretty much to the dawn of writing.