Downhill
Why cruelty spreads on its own, why everything decent has to be carried, and the slope that is inside us.
Cruelty coordinates for free. Cooperation has to be built.
A crowd turns vicious in an afternoon: no plan, no leader, one sharp word moving through people the way a crack moves through glass. The trust those same people once built took a year, and it can fall in an hour.
Downhill is about that asymmetry, and why it is built into the ground, not into anyone’s character. Cruelty and outrage coordinate strangers for free; cooperation must be made on purpose, under conditions that do not hold themselves in place. Every load-bearing claim is stated at the strength the evidence supports, with the counter-evidence printed beside it.
No villain, and no verdict on human nature. An account of the slope itself, and of the part of us, older than the cruelty, that the last pages land on.
By the same author: Outsourced — an evidence audit of AI and the mind, written in the same discipline: every claim at the strength the evidence supports.