You live in a better world today

Planted July 29, 2016
Pruned June 9, 2025

This has been a very tragic week in Germany. In less than five days, four attacks happened in the southern provinces of Bayern and Baden-Württemberg (the motivation of some of them being disputed, but being mostly assigned to the refugee crisis and open-borders policy of Merkel). After the attacks followed the classical harangue from certain civil and political sectors drawing attention on the rapidly deteriorating social peace in Germany and Europe. Warnings on Europe´s islamization are now in the mouth of most of the European citizens. If you put the news of any media, it smells like fear. Even Trump wants to prevent Germans and French of traveling to the US!

The only problem is that everything is a deception.

Nowadays no state or agency has the monopoly of data or information, and we are only a few clicks away of finding evidence to support or dismiss our opinions (remember always that your opinion must be sustained on empirical data). There is in fact so much information that filtering the right one is a challenge, and this hole is filled by conspicuous conspirators with their own agenda. In “How to lie with Statistics” we are taught how a lie can be told today as a half-truth. Being interested also in the state-of-the-art of our world, I do spend a good amount of time thinking about what I heard and read. Is it really true that things are declining so far? Should I really pack my things and take the next plane to a desert island?

Did you know that the tobacco lobby claimed that cigarettes statistically prevented Alzheimer? Another lecture of the same data is that people die young before developing the disease.

Let´s pay attention at some of the data we can easily access on the Internet nowadays:

The general tendency since a couple of decades has been the decrease of terrorist attacks and its death toll in Europe. A few points worth to remark:

• Most of the previous terrorism in Europe had a nationalist (IRA in Northern Ireland, ETA in Spain) or political causality (Brigate Rosse in Italy, RAF in Germany or GAL in Spain). This trend has shifted towards islamist terrorist groups.
• Whether the number of terrorist attacks did in fact decrease, what we could called the victims-per-attack did in fact increase. There are several factors contributing to this. The lack of instinct of self-conservation of radical islamists lead them to attacks with more effectiveness: if you are not thinking of going back home, you can indeed take a lot of people with you to the cemetery, seems to be the suicide argument.

Numbers are meaningless out of context. Let´s compare them now with the number of traffic related death rate in Europe for 2015:

Taken from Wikipedia

Comparing the 5 major European countries, we have over 14.000 victims in the same year against 150 victims of terrorism. Let´s put this in terms of a comparison: is more likely to die victim of a car accident than to die in a terrorist attack. But I do not see many politicians including in their agendas the transition to fully-automated driving cars or increasing budget for infrastructure maintenance. According to the numbers this should be a national catastrophe, but there is no social alarm. And there are many other threats to human life that we have not even considered here: 700.000 deaths a year due to tobacco in the EU, alcohol death toll, pollution, etc.

Do you smoke and drive? I have bad news for you: statistically you are likely to be dead soon.

Another claim is that Europe is increasingly becoming an unsafe place. Having spent some months of my life in Brasil I personally laugh about this argument. But again, I do want to share the data with you.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Europe has one of the lowest murder rates of the world (paired with Oceania and Asia). The report does also desgloses the data per country, having the Eastern European countries a slightly superior rate than Western European countries. By the way, Eastern European countries have been so far more reluctant to host refugees than Western European countries.

That last fact reminds me of an interesting correlationship happening here also in Germany: Bundeslands supporting Pegida, the right-wing German movement, are also the Bundeslands with less inmigration.

The world is not getting worst every day, the trend is quite the opposite: Global crime is decreasing, economy grows and expands with the inherent ups-and-downs of a capitalist market system, our life-expectancy is dramatically increasing, and will eventually do that in several magnitude orders. Renewable energy usage grows every year. There is a general tendency in the world to the expansion of the human rights for minorities.

In 2001, the first same-sex marriage law was passed in the Netherlands. 15 years ago, look at the map where same-sex marriage is allowed. Could you think of such a fast development of human rights back then?

What is effectively happening is that our perception of the world is getting better thanks to the Internet and the boom of social networks. Only a few years ago, sad and dirty episodes such as May Lay could be easily hidden. Nowadays, information propagates at the speed of light, and you can instantly know what is happening in a far away country. During the attacks in Munich, the Münchner Polizei did use Twitter to communicate with citizens and so did hundreds of people that offered a place to stay to any individual that was lost in the middle of the city.

What are the conclusions to be drawn from this brief exposition?

• Terrorism was, is and always will be used and manipulated for political purposes.
• Immigration and the refugee crisis in Germany and Europe is clearly a new challenge that requires a big deal of effort from governments and citizens. But in general is a good practice to dismiss the singing of the pessimist soothsayers. If I had to put my energy into solving another problem, I would rather do it into the growing omnipresence of the AI in the job market and the wealth distribution. Yuval Noah Harari exposes all this future challenges in his new book: Homo Deus, a Brief Story of Tomorrow.
• A single dead caused by terrorism is a heavy and unacceptable toll for families and society. But, if you seek for maximizing your possibilities of avoiding a death caused by a terror attack, you would better be living today in Europe than in any other epoch.
• If you do care about developing a better society, do not accept any narrowing on your personal liberties and fight against any imposition. No matter what the excuse is, the status-quo will always manipulate any event to favour their own agenda.
• Distrust everything you have heard and read, and very particularly distrust authority. You have in front of your eyes an ocean of information that is waiting for you to go and fish. Do not take any information for granted. Be a social hacker.

Even if the world moves a step back, it moves two steps forward. Keep this as a mantra. The world is getting a better place. Help locally, help your community be part of the change. Bright things are awaiting.

And remember to drive safe.