We Are Barbaric, Here Is Why
As societies mature, the total amount of acceptable pain decreases. What was once normal becomes barbaric. What’s acceptable today will be unthinkable tomorrow.
Pain Reduction Through History
Here’s what humans used to consider normal:
| Era | Pain That Was Normal | How It Ended |
|---|---|---|
| Ancient (384 BCE) | Burying servants alive with rulers | China banned it, used clay figures instead 1 |
| Classical (97 BCE) | Fathers legally killing newborns they didn’t want | This was legal under patria potestas in Rome 2 |
| Late Antiquity (500 CE) | Forced religious conversions | Church and imperial reforms stopped it 3 |
| Medieval (1215) | Marrying 9-year-old girls to old men | Church gradually raised marriage age 4 |
| Early Modern (1666) | Young boys seized from families, converted, forced into millitary service | Abolished under Sultan Mehmed IV 5 |
| Industrial (1833) | Child factory labor | UK banned it, mandated school instead 6 |
| Contemporary (2024) | Gayness is a mental disease | Gay marriage is allowed in many countries 7 |
Each generation looks back at the previous one and asks: “How could they?”
Three Types of Pain We’ve Reduced
1. Physical Pain
The most obvious category.
- Torture as legal punishment (Prussia 1740 8, Sweden 1772 9)
- Gladiatorial killings (Rome 404 CE 10)
- Dueling for honor (France 1626 11)
- Public executions as entertainment
2. Systemic Pain
Pain built into how society operates:
- Homicide rates dropped 95% from medieval to modern times 12
- Child mortality: 12.5M → 4.8M deaths/year (1990-2023) 13
- Unsafe water access: 2.1B people gained clean water (2000-2022) 14
- Cousin marriage: Banned in most Western countries by 1900s 15
3. Hidden Pain
Pain we didn’t even recognize as pain:
- Animal testing for cosmetics (45 countries banned by 2025) 16
- Wild animals in circuses (dozens of bans 2000s-2020s) 17
- Fur farming (production collapsed 2014-2024) 18
- Child marriage (dropped from 1-in-4 to 1-in-5 women 2013→2024) 19
What Pain Are We Solving Now?
Current trends show what’s disappearing:
| Pain Being Reduced | Progress | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Deadly diseases | Guinea worm, HIV deaths plummeting | 1986→now 20 |
| Air pollution | Clean air acts, EV adoption, coal phase-outs | 2000s 21 |
| Factory farming | Lab meat rising | 2020s 22 |
| Mental health stigma | Therapy normalized | 2010s 23 |
What Pain Will We Solve Next?
Physical pain:
- Genetic disorder (designer babies)
- Needing to brush teeth
- Aging (treating it as a disease)
- Disabilities (prostetics organic eyes, ears, limbs)
Systemaic pain:
- 2 billion without clean water
- 150M children in labor
- 700M people in extreme poverty
- 1B living in slums
Hidden pain:
- We don’t know what we don’t know yet.
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The pain we accept today will be tomorrow’s human rights violation.
Sometimes Pain Increases
Not all progress is linear. Sometimes we invent new ways to hurt before we learn to heal.
The Pain Curve
Most “pain increases” follow this lifecycle:
Innovation → Pain spike → We adapt → Better world
New tech creates pain. We notice it. Fix it. End up better.
When Pain Gets Worse Before It Gets Better
| Innovation | Pain It Created | How We Fixed It |
|---|---|---|
| Cars | 1.3M deaths/year at peak | Seatbelts, airbags, traffic laws → safer than horses |
| Factories | Child labor, industrial accidents | Labor laws, safety regulations → safer than farms |
| Leaded gasoline | Poisoned entire generation | Banned globally → IQ recovery |
| Social media | Depression, addiction, polarization | (Ongoing) Age limits, time limits, algorithm changes |
| Plastic | Microplastics in every human body | (Ongoing) Biodegradable alternatives, cleanup tech |
New tech creates new pain. Society notices. We fix it. End up better than before.
Overtime, the pattern looks more like this, with lots of spikes. Where some pain takes 10 years, some takes 500 years to decrease.
The Pattern
- Recognition: Someone points out the pain
- Resistance: “That’s just how things are”
- Regulation: Laws and social norms restrict it
- Replacement: Better alternatives emerge
- Disgust: Future generations can’t believe we allowed it
This pattern repeats. Always has. Always will.
Conclusion
You can measure a society’s development by how much pain it considers unacceptable.
We went from burying servants with kings to thinking a stern email from HR is abuse. From burning witches to giving woman voting rights. From 6-year-olds in coal mines to mandatory kindergarten.
Every generation has blind spots. Ours does too.
What pain do you accept today that your grandchildren won’t?
References
1 Terracotta Warriors Museum - Why Terracotta Warriors were Built
2 Penelope - Patria Potestas: Fathers’ Life-and-Death Authority in Roman Law
3 Oxford Academic - Forced Conversion in Late Antiquity
4 Wikipedia - Marriageable Age
5 Wikipedia - Devshirme
6 UK Parliament - The 1833 Factory Act
7 Wikipedia - Same-sex Marriage
8 Lumen Learning - Prussia Under Frederick the Great
9 Nordstjernan - Swedish History
10 Penelope - The Roman Gladiator
11 JSTOR - Honor versus Absolutism: Richelieu’s Fight against Dueling
12 VRC Cambridge - Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime
13 UNICEF Data - Under-five mortality
14 UNICEF Data - Progress on household drinking water
15 American Reformer - A Protestant Approach to First Cousin Marriage Bans
16 Encyclopedia Britannica - International Cosmetics Animal Testing Bans
17 Four Paws - Worldwide Circus Bans
18 Vox - The biggest animal welfare victory of the 21st century
19 UNICEF USA - Child Marriage: Latest Trends and Future Prospects
20 The Carter Center - Guinea Worm Cases 2024
21 WHO - Global status report on road safety 2023
22 The Good Food Institute - U.S. Plant-Based Market; Business Wire - Singapore Cultivated Meat Approval
23 PMC - Mental Health Stigma Reduction 2008-2019; CDC - Mental Health Treatment Uptake