Safety of what? Of pure physical life? Wouldn't prospering life imply some kind of vitality?
Then how come we all just sit there and "hope" something will be done about climate change or nuclear proliferation? How come rising drug deaths? How come the need for a dedicated WP page about the suicide problem in Japan? How come the best we can hope for is for some to condemn war criminals - instead of their brothers and fathers and children disowning them as they rot in jail? How come Trump is president and Snowden can't go home? Prosperity? We cannot even afford same rights and laws applying to all period. We shine the boots of crazy sadists who get nothing out of it but a prolonging of their suffering and the damage they cause, and we just bite our lips and give a sympathetic shrug to those who should be in their place, or at least not get trampled in the dirt.
Not that I'm saying there was ever justice for all, but we know a lot these days, we can do a lot these days, we have a lot these days; we could technically afford a striving towards instead of away from justice, just like we could afford everybody on the planet having food and shelter. Just like there is no need to plunder and mutilate language and thought, but we still do it. Workers used to be proud of reading and educating themselves, now even so called intellectuals can't face weighty authors. We truncate at best, and usually ignore outright. Not because that's milk and we now have meat, but because that's meat and we no longer have teeth.
I hardly see anyone who can afford to just take in their surroundings and the people they are faced with. We now actually call movies franchises ourselves, as if the soulless way was the more advanced and correct one. Something "making sense" always has to take the backseat to "making business sense", and boo on anyone daring to more than shrug their shoulder and bite their lip. I see a lot of people who individually have and are nothing, who always have to refer to someone or something other than themselves. My main criticism isn't historical, it's that I see people getting weaker and lamer by the year, more and more without thoughts that are truly their own, everything is being handed off.
I remember that recent discussion about tech "taking Saudi money", and many pointing out that it's just money. We cannot afford to distinct between 10$ taken from the purse of an elderly woman, and 10$ earned by fixing a chair. That's the biggest destruction of information I can think of. Oh, and we no longer can afford to print things on paper, and what we print on paper today often doesn't last as long as older books, kind of like houses. Please download the manual from a website that will be gone in N time units. Please upload your "culture" to YouTube, and put all your means of contact into the hands of Gmail and Facebook, put your free time into the black holes of EA and Disney and stream your reactions [sic, it should be called facial expression plus mouth noises] on Twitch. Those who do can't afford to talk in the first person singular just because we can't afford anything too grounded, since that would attract other grounded things and before you know it someone is turning on the light in the insane asylum torture chamber, and we can't have that.
You cannot afford owning anything, and oh, we updated the terms of our license, you'll have to agree again to continue using our "services". We serve you. Just like in "the industry", we're being industrious.
We no longer can afford to be alone with our thoughts and creations, and judge their value freely. Yet if that goes for everybody else, with what authority do we outsource judgement? And if it doesn't, with what authority do we let our own ability to judge to rot?
> I am using statistics. Do I need to cite sources for you to believe that this is the safest and most prosperous time in the history of humanity?
No, you need to put forward your own definitions, and you haven't even attempted to make the argument why only countable things should count. That in itself is the poverty of thought I am also referring to. You might say you're making part of my point for me.