It’s very dangerous to think about how to make life better (as opposed to e.g. how to have a better life), because you might start to feel encouraged to make other people’s life better too.

Living amongst a lot of humans of a purportedly lower civilizational level (according to at least two ideologies I know myself to have been way over-involved with in the unmourned past) has shown me the stupidity of believing that concepts like ‘civilizational level’ are remotely useful as a descriptor of humans. If you think you win something by categorizing, why not rank people according to niceness? (My neighbourhood wins.)

Relative to their power, there might not be that much difference in the amount of happiness/suffering the different civilizations have caused in other beings anyway. And if you think this can and should be measured, and you think the implications of those measurements can be analyzed and used to steer your actions, and predict how awesomely humanist the effects of those actions will be, well: good to know, because it’s good to know that you’re a cold blooded psycho crazy person from Looneyville, and I’ll politely avoid you.