POTENTIAL SPECIES SELF-DESTRUCTION BY HUMAN BEINGS
Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D. 11-24
Human beings have evolved to be rather marvelous creatures, with amazing abilities given their organic nature, but evolution proceeds willy-nilly rather than in an orderly fashion, and we also have some characteristics that seem “natural” to us but that bode ill for our future as a species. In fact, several of them are such that if unchanged in the near future they could lead to extinction for our species. Physical evolution might eventually result in changes in our brains that could enhance our coping possibilities in dealing with our problems (better assessment of future consequences, lower satisfaction threshold, higher violence threshold, less automatic fear of difference, etc.), but human beings are now changing the environment so quickly that it is impossible for evolution to provide help before the species destroys itself, if it is unable to use its current capacities to avoid that destruction.
This is not a prediction of assured self-destruction, since we have the capacity to change our ways if we are convinced that that is necessary for survival, but we are now encountering issues that are so complex and that have outcomes so far in the future (like climate change) that we have great difficulty estimating those outcomes or “believing in” them (nuclear destruction, investing tax revenues in space exploration with so little assurance of financial pay-off in the future).
RESTLESSNESS
Human beings are eternally restless, particularly in our younger years, with an endless need for stimulation. When awake, we are always looking for something to do or something to focus on. Particularly in our younger years, when we don’t have full reality-perception capacities yet, our restlessness makes us prone to get into trouble. We are also very influenceable and have limited ability to tell truth from lies (or from complex reality), so that we can harm other people for the wrong reasons (e.g., becoming convinced that someone or some nation is a mortal danger to us when that is not true). Our needs for stimulation and activity motivate us to activity that is sometimes productive (new discoveries, etc.), but they also prevent us from being content.
We are vulnerable to stimulation that gets our attention, such as movement and flashing lights, and internet advertising works on us in this way to sell us or convince us of things. We spend considerable time attending to things that have no value for us other than their initial stimulus value. Many of us “waste” considerable time in this way, at home and at work when we could be using our time to do things that enhance our self-esteem and our feelings of agency and success in the world.
We do many activities for no reason other than that we can, such as mountain-climbing. Many inventions occur from the exploratory activity that is fueled by our restlessness, but we also sometimes create things that are destructive to human beings, including armaments, guns, biological weapons, and poisons. We make some efforts to control this destructiveness, such as signing treaties regarding atomic weapons and biologic agents, but we are all capable of breaking those agreements when fearful or when we see it as being more to our advantage than staying with the agreement. Regarding new inventions like the internet, they can give us new opportunities to interact and to learn, but many people end up feeling worse because of the comparisons they make between themselves and what they see of others on the internet. When the majority of citizens adopt a new invention, it can make it almost mandatory that others adopt it, too, even if they don’t want to, in order to continue to manage their lives in necessary ways (being only able to vote on some things or apply for some insurance benefits by using the internet).
BLANK SLATE STATUS
We our born without programming as to morals and how to interact with others. This blank slate status is a double-edged sword, since it adds to our flexibility and capacity for change, but it also makes us vulnerable to lies and to our own inaccurate perceptions, including our perceptions of ourselves—leading often to poor self-esteem and self-destructiveness. Our blank slate status results in considerable willingness on our part to violate whatever moral standards we establish and to harm others if we see it as to our advantage. Evolution is very slow and is not adequate for correcting these errors fast enough to save us from ourselves.
COGNITIVE ERRORS
Our cognitive abilities are limited, since our brains operate only by association, which makes us vulnerable to unfortunate associations, such as falsely concluding that someone is a witch because we think we see suspicious behavior (talking to self, hoping for harm to others, collecting things symbolic of evil or danger) or concluding that because we have been sexually molested, we must be dirty or worthless. As noted already, we have limited ability to tell truth from lies, since we are not pre-programmed to do this and we have only our own experience to reason from. These sorts of cognitive errors can lead to unnecessary aggression and killing, on the part of both individuals and nations.
Our limited cognitive abilities and the separation within us between our cognitive activity and our emotions/needs makes us poor at predicting the outcomes of our own actions, especially how we will feel after changes occur. We don’t know many of the outcomes of aggressive actions toward other groups, and we don’t know many of the outcomes of marrying a particular person. We ignore the horrors of war when our group feels threatened, and we are eager to fight to defend ourselves, completely discounting and denying the numbers of group members who are likely to be killed and maimed.
As noted above, our brains are limited in the amount of complexity and uncertainty that they can handle. We very often decide on courses of action based on what we want the outcome to be in the future rather than on what we can best predict that those outcomes will be.
SEEKING HELP FROM A STRONG LEADER
It is natural for us to sometimes feel vulnerable and inadequate in our unforgiving and probabilistic world, since our individual survival capacities are limited and often ineffective, so it is natural for us to seek help from parents and from strong leaders who promise to help. Strong leaders are unfortunately often those who are most aggressive and the least concerned about the social contract and treating others decently, and this leads to unnecessary wars and could lead to nuclear destruction of the species.
We all as individuals seek to feel good about ourselves (self-esteem), to feel valued, and to feel safe and secure, but we don’t know how to achieve these things and bumble about trying first one thing and then another. We are willing to follow a leader to the death without even understanding why we are sacrificing ourselves. We associate value with wealth and status, since we imagine those who are wealthy and of high status feel better than we feel, even though this is often untrue or is true but actually insignificant. Our often lifelong quest even to feel OK (but not good) about ourselves is an example of the painful results of our discontents (see below).
AVOIDANCE OF PAIN
Human beings are “built” to avoid and escape from pain and to laud and enjoy pleasure, yet this “normal” and habitual response is not always the best thing for us.
Addictions
We label as “addictions” repeated behaviors that are potentially harmful to oneself and that in most cases the individual cannot reliably refrain from doing. We are most familiar with drug and alcohol addictions, but people can be addicted to food (compulsive over-eating), sex, the internet, and many other things. The key to understanding addictions is that the person feels and probably believes that doing the behavior is desirable because it leads to feeling good, while he could know with his rationality that it is not good for him (has significant negative consequences) even if it produces pleasure. This point must be emphasized, because the major purpose of this essay is to point out that there are a number of circumstances in which one part of us evaluates a behavior as good while another part of us evaluates (or could readily evaluate) it as harmful.
The most modern addiction is to our phones and TV’s. Human beings are built to naturally pay attention to things that flash or make noise, so our screens are designed to give us such attention-getting stimuli (in order to make money for others through attracting us to ads as well as to whatever content we were originally attracted by). Our exposures to our screens can have some benefits, of course, in terms of diversion and learning, but spending time simply being diverted and entertained or endlessly watching other people do things takes away from our opportunities to be active agents in the world ourselves and thereby accrue good feelings about ourselves and what we can create.
Dealing with addictions requires allowing and empowering the part of us that knows what is truly best for us to have greater strength than the part of us that seeks pleasure while ignoring the costs of a behavior. If that part of the person that should be able to evaluate potential benefit versus harm is too weak or is purposely disempowered, then we are likely to believe that the immediate pleasure of the behavior in question is what is truly best for us, when in fact repeating that behavior in an addictive fashion will almost certainly lead to very bad consequences for us.
Another key human problem becomes apparent as we look deeper into these decisions. Human brains are wired to be biased toward immediate pleasures when compared with future benefit (or harm). People will usually prefer an immediate pleasure over a greater future pleasure for which they would have to wait (just look at the rush to immediate pleasure that the internet and cell phone have promoted), and they usually prefer an immediate pleasure even if it is likely that there will be a significant cost they will have to pay in the future. We “know” that our efforts at predictions of what will happen in the future are often wrong, so it seems better to take the known and surely available pleasure and hope that our prediction of a future cost turns out to be untrue. In order to “just say no” or to resist acting (like not sending the nuclear strike), we must learn to balance our bias toward the immediate pleasure by taking the future harm more seriously, so that we can counteract our “natural” bias toward taking what we can get right now. One way to do this is to concentrate on the future benefit and harm in your consciousness until it seems as real as the current benefit and harm (and then make a more objective decision).
Food
We know that being overweight is likely to cause us health problems (as well as appearance problems), but eating and food are so valued and pleasurable that many people overeat (and cannot keep from overeating) and then suffer health consequences farther down the road. Most of them are responding to the physical pleasures of eating things that taste good (sugar, fat, salt), though a fair number of people overeat to improve their feeling state (usually to get a sense of OKness or support), probably because we associate our earliest eating experiences with feeling comforted and taken care of by our parents, so that eating in the present can give them (and us) some of those same feelings.
Once again, our “natural” desire can mislead us if it is not balanced by our knowledge of what is truly good for us. To control our eating, we would need to pay greater attention to that part of us that can gauge our actual need for food, instead of giving over control completely to what tastes or feels good. Once again, the ability to not act when appropriate can save (or extend) our lives. It can help to pause when eating until one can really sense one’s level of fullness, which then provides a counter-motive to the good taste we are pulled to pursue.
People with anorexia provide us with another example of control gone askew, as they become convinced that the consequences of eating for them (usually (1) feeling out of control, (2) feeling controlled by parents, or (3) being overweight and unattractive) are so dire that they restrict their eating so much that their health and even their lives are threatened. These beliefs seem unrealistic to other people, but those afflicted believe them with great force. These convictions are difficult to change but must be changed in order to “cure” the disorder, because the person must rebalance his or her sense of the pros and cons so that objectively sufficient eating can seem OK.
Drugs and Medicines
There have been great advances in healthcare over the last fifty years, including more and more medicines that are used to allay psychological pain. These treatments for depression, anxiety, and other problems help some sufferers, but our society has adopted the attitude that drugs in general are an acceptable means of seeking desired emotional states. There is a general assumption that pain is bad, that all pain should be minimized, and that we “should” always be able to be in a good mood. More states are starting to make marijuana legal. Emotionally-related sexual problems are addressed through drugs. Children’s disruptive behavior is being controlled by medicines. Young people are using drugs and medicines to enhance academic performance. More states are making it legal to force some persons with mental disorders to take medications that supposedly will keep them sane enough that others will not be annoyed or fearful of them.
This trend demonstrates ignorance of the fact that the human organism depends on pain to guide and protect itself. Those few persons who for physical reasons lack pain sense are in constant danger of physically harming themselves inadvertently because they do not have the guidance of pain, and persons with painful emotions are placing themselves at greater risk by ignoring the warning and informational value that psychological pain contains, which causes the person to ignore changes in behavior or lifestyle that are necessary for his or her well-being. To use medicines to enable one to stay in a bad marriage or a debilitating job is to compound the problem instead of solving it (even though, of course, making those changes itself involves a certain amount of pain). Once again, our impulse to get away from pain is sometimes destructive to us, and in most cases the better course of action is to not use the drugs and medicines and acknowledge the reasons for the pain and do something about them. Think of us eternally running on a hamster wheel, driven by our restlessness and desires but trying at the same time to have no pain in the process (which is impossible for human beings in our current state of evolution, since pain is a key guidance factor telling us that we need to change something). Our efforts to avoid pain themselves are a discontent which we attempt to remedy by running harder, which creates more pain, etc. etc.
Emotions
To expand on the point made above, human beings have “emotions,” which are signals to ourselves that indicate what things are important and prompt us to act with regard to those things. Some aspects of emotions are for the most part “hard-wired” in, such as fear and terror, but some of these as well as other emotions are shaped by conditioning from our experiences in the world.
The difficulty that emotions pose for us is that to act solely on their prompting is often destructive and not in our best interest. In acting on jealousy or despair, for example, we may harm ourselves or others. To act on the embarrassment of being disrespected or the shame of being rejected by a loved one can lead to murder. To act after using our cognitive capacities to plan our actions is more adaptive, but to do that requires first “doing nothing” (not acting on our emotional impulses so that we can have time to reflect and plan), and this is a learned skill, which many human beings do not learn adequately. “Freezing” (being still to avoid being seen by an enemy) seems to be part of our built-in systems, but purposely not acting on jealousy or despair is a learned ability.
Sex
Sex is obviously very important to human beings, and our almost constant sexual awareness and stimulability have no doubt ensured our survival and growth in numbers as a species. However, in organized societies we have determined as a group to consider some sexual behavior, such as, in our own society, sex with minors, as potentially destructive to the persons involved and to the social fabric and therefore to prohibit it.
The stories of sexual attractions and resultant behaviors can illustrate for us destructiveness in terms of betrayals and violence, but this does not seem to change the incidence of such behavior. This could only happen if we can better manage to “not act” on our desires in this area.
Exercise
It has become clear that the human body requires use to maintain health and successful functioning. Persons who are confined to bed for several days start losing muscle strength. If hands are not stretched every day, they stiffen up and cannot unbend. If adults do not get enough exercise, they lose function gradually in various ways, which speeds them on their way to the end of life. This loss of function is gradual enough that we rarely notice it, and our ignorance is enhanced by the fact that most people don’t exercise enough, so we presume that our deteriorating state must be OK since it is the same as that of most other people.
Our “natural” tendency as human beings is to avoid “work” if we don’t have to do it. Leisure is touted as the ultimate good, but since most of us no longer work manually, most of us are, without knowing it, only weakened versions of our potential selves. The boom in gyms and exercise groups is of some value, but it is motivated more by the wish to be attractive than the wish to be healthy, and most people give it up in mid-life. In order to maximize health. 95 percent of the population needs more activity to be maximally healthy, yet this is not happening because we unthinkingly honor our “natural” tendency to save our strength by avoiding strenuous activity. In this case, enduring some pain can give us additional years of life. We can make a conscious decision whether or not to choose this pain, instead of always giving in to our impulse to avoid the pain.
Keeping Everyone Alive
Our compassionate desire to help those who are ill or disabled to have the best lives that they can is ethically laudable, but it is unavoidable that to make it more possible for those with chronic illnesses and disabilities to have children acts to weaken the total species genetically and to make us less able to survive. Our natural tendency to want to help others and to want to “fight” against limits to our complete functioning are, to a small degree at least, harming the species.
Difference
In order to function smoothly and efficiently, human beings need to be in an environment that is familiar to them, with only small variations, since we are easily confused by and fearful of unfamiliar things. This includes people who are “different” from us, in dress, language, skin color, mannerisms, beliefs, customs, etc. We like to be able to anticipate everything that’s going to happen, and we don’t know how to predict what those who are “different” will do.
Our first impulses in response to difference are annoyance and distancing, or, if the threat seems great enough, to kill the “different” person. We readily classify people as either “in” and part of our group or “out” and not in our group, and the loyalty of most people is only to people in their own group. The impulse to destroy is enhanced by the fact that we can easily view those who are different as being not fully human in the way that we are human. When the issue seemed crucial to one’s welfare and eternal soul, these differences have led to wars and terrible atrocities.
These issues point out that adjusting to difference takes effort and does not come naturally, which is the reason that living in a multicultural society takes more effort than if everyone is more similar to each other. People would have to believe that the benefits of such multicultural environments were greater than the required adjustments if they were to continue to tolerate difference and work to get along with those who are different. In this case, the adage to “not act” would translate to not acting on our initial impulse to be annoyed and to distance ourselves but rather to reflect on our belief (if we believe it) that adjusting to difference leads to more rewards for us than not adjusting.
Discontent
We human beings are built to respond to discontent with efforts to eliminate the discontent, whether that is increased attempts to get enough food or to eliminate boredom or other unpleasant emotional states. We are ingenious in our attempts to feel better, such as eating to eliminate unpleasant emotions. We can also be very destructive, as when we make war on another country in order to take some of their territory for growing our food or building the houses we need.
We are extremely sensitive to discontent, as when we are doing nothing and experiencing no pain but become “bored” and feel the need for stimulation. Immersion in warm water with no annoying sound, light, or touch stimulation was promised to provide serenity and contentment, but most people could not stand it for very long! This unending sensitivity makes it very hard to be contented! We may say that we want to eliminate our various discontents, but we are unable to (since they keep popping up, even in our wealthiest societies), unless we purposely cultivate the ability to be satisfied with what we have and not automatically seek more or larger amounts of our pleasures.
The point here is that most people will always have discontent in their lives, and this implies that humans will eventually use up all of the world’s resources and be in a perpetual state of war trying to take others’ resources just to survive, unless our societies encourage their members to be satisfied and contented. Most of our politics currently encourages the opposite—getting more and more, even in societies that have great wealth (we must have “growth” so that everyone can become rich). Much of our economy’s “business model” is built on amping up our desires for more and bigger and better, but most people find that in the end this is no more satisfying than before (at least after wealth reaches a point where true needs are generally met).
Pleasure-seeking or the fantasy of having perpetual pleasure is not workable, either. It is incorrect to think that you can find enough pleasures that you won’t want more. Look at the difficulty that persons with an alcohol problem have in stopping with two or three drinks, since it feels to them like more will help them to feel even better or at least maintain their current pleasure state. We must recognize that human beings have a built-in limit—you can only feel so good and no better.
We still have societies on the planet in which people have very little, and we can sympathize with those who often do not have enough food for their children or who suffer exposure to the elements because they have inadequate housing. Right now, these people are unlikely to be open to trying to steer themselves to be more content, but given our current abilities to exploit the planet’s resources, we could bring all human beings up to a point of comfort and wealth that being content would become a legitimate goal. We may think that the ideal life would be a perfect existence, with no desires, no problems, and no stress, but human beings are not naturally adapted to be contented, and we must cultivate our ability to be content, or we will eventually destroy ourselves!
Competition
Humans are born with a certain amount of “aggression” (which simply means motivation to do what is needed for survival), and this, plus sibling rivalry and the hurly-burly of childhood, lead to a sense of necessity to compete with others in order to guarantee one’s survival and thriving. Aggregates of human beings (nations) behave the same way.
Competition is fueled by the feeling that one does not have enough (material goods, love, acceptance) and that, without competing, one will not have enough in the future. Human beings will do almost anything (including kill) to assuage these fears. Competing is tiring, and our fears of the consequences of not competing can lead to war and genocide. The most common means of competing are establishing physical dominance, striving to be the most special among siblings to one’s parents, accumulating material goods (which often substitute symbolically for self-value, love, and acceptance), and seeking positions of status in the group. Of course, the reality of this fear that one must compete to survive hinges on what is “enough.” At the survival level, we will always have competition, but when we actually do have enough for survival, there is a chance that people can be satisfied and content, if they believe that it is OK to be satisfied and content.
Nations Competing
Human beings have evolved from living in small groups, like a village, to living in huge societies. Our abilities to use the environment for our own purposes (grow food, mine minerals, etc.) have increased so fast that we can support many, many more humans on the planet, but we have not evolved through natural selection (because that process takes so long) very far in being able to live comfortably and amicably in these large societies. Our nations seem to be always competing and looking for ways to take advantage of people in other countries (to address our own discontents), and this naturally leads sometimes to war. We now have the capacity to destroy our species through nuclear war, and we threaten each other with it quite often. Sooner or later, some deranged leader (or some leader who feels insulted or wronged) will start that kind of war, if we don’t change our ways and learn to be more content with what we have (when what we have is sufficient for our survival and for the fulfilment of most of our actual needs, rather than our wants).
Population
For the last fifty years there has been considerable concern about the growing human population on the Earth–generally that it would eventually overwhelm the world’s resources resulting in famine and death. Human ingenuity has so far managed to avoid that outcome by producing more and more food, but of course there is a limit to the Earth’s resources at some point in the future even though that limit might not be reached for at least another century.
However, there is considerable evidence now that our own inclinations and reproductive choices as human beings are reducing the rate of population growth and even the population itself—apparently even in Africa! A number of countries including EU members and Japan are not producing enough children to maintain their current population numbers, and the U.S. is approaching that status also. One of the factors in this shift is education for women, for wherever women become more educated and correlatively have more choices in life, they have opted for having fewer children. Another factor seems to be the feeling that there are too many people in general, that cities are too crowded, and that our population size makes life unpleasant and not good for many people.
In the coming decades climate change will put more pressure on our ingenuity to feed more people and will cause millions of people to try to relocate around the world, which established nations will have to adapt to (unless killing millions of people at their borders becomes morally acceptable!). (Our southern border situation is giving us a foretaste of the deluge to come, with predictable self-protective reactions by many citizens.)
While falling population numbers reduce the drag on resources, they produce problems, too, since such countries will not have enough workers to keep their economies chugging along at the same level of wealth, unless they utilize immigration to supplement their numbers. On the other hand, falling numbers may fit better with our situation as automation makes more and more workers unnecessary. If at some point there are truly not enough jobs for workers, then we will have to cope with paying/supporting people who are not working through no fault of their own or creating “unnecessary” activities for which to pay people so that they can continue to exist.
Another result of population losses may be a need (and opportunity) for us to reexamine our goals. Capitalism has made it easy to indulge our human desire for more and more, as if physical comfort and distractions were the goal of living. Perhaps we could rediscover that setting our own limits on ourselves for consumption and distraction could make us different human beings who can be satisfied with ourselves as we are (and with those around us) and happy enough with our situations as they are. Was life really intolerable fifty or a hundred years ago, or were people overall just as happy?
CONSEQUENCES OF THESE HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS
Wars and the deaths of vast numbers of people from bacteria and viruses would seem to be the greatest threats to our species, and these threats are largely the result of our own characteristics. Our inborn responses to any feeling of discontent may prevent us from being satisfied and content, which may result in unabated efforts at growth and accumulating more wealth and therefore unabated using up of the earth’s resources that cannot be replaced. In our fears of being left behind, we may compete even harder, and this together with our increasing resource needs will lead to more conflicts and wars. Our wish to avoid pain will lead to loss of genetic and physical capacities, as we weaken our gene pool and perhaps lose some of our willingness to struggle. Our growing capacity to avoid death through disease, our intention to keep everyone alive, no matter how genetically or physically dysfunctional, and our overuse of antibiotics will eventually lead to greater vulnerability to various bacteria and viruses and the possibility of whole populations being wiped out.
Our cognitive limitations will prevent us from accurately foreseeing the consequences of our actions, which will lead to one disaster after another. We may try to utilize artificial intelligence to make these predictions better, but there is every likelihood that in trusting AI without being able to evaluate its accuracy we will be led to make just as many or even more mistakes. This will probably lead to a stronger emotional rush to find strong leaders to save us, which will eventuate in more wars. As we use up the world’s resources, eventually our standard of living will fall, and there will be widespread wars for the remaining resources.
Bringing resources to earth from the moon or other planets will not be possible, due to the insuperable cost of doing so.
Climate change will not be a major killer. There will be deaths from the more severe weather impacts, but it is likely that agricultural research will keep us supplied with grains and other plants that do well with the temperature increase, and humans will rebuild seaside cities on higher ground despite the enormous cost
Famine could be another major destroyer, but current world-wide relief efforts together with the growing tendency for people to emigrate rather than stay put and die may keep famine from being a major factor.
As a result of our growing ability as individuals to break the law without being caught (internet crime, faster transportation), society will impose more control methodology (surveillance, losses of privacy), which will feel like loss of freedoms.
If population figures were to rise significantly, governments will eventually control one’s freedom to have children.
COPING POSSIBILITIES
Without some attitude changes, the human species may well disappear from the earth in the next two hundred years. We must make satisfaction and contentment acceptable adaptations in all societies (to make slowing down our economies palatable to citizens) and we must teach ourselves to tolerate the emotional pain of seeing ourselves and reality more realistically, particularly our restlessness, our discontent, and our efforts to stamp out pain. Our survival will depend on valuing restraint and contentment as opposed to our full-speed-ahead-no-matter-what frontier attitude.
Our attitude of seeking happiness through consumption has been a major factor in the astounding increase in wealth around the world in the last hundred years, but it may be wise to slow down our resource use and thereby extend the life of our species. This slow down will depend on slowing economic growth and becoming more satisfied with what we have. (Poorer nations will need to be brought up to speed economically so that their citizens, too, can accept an ethos of satisfaction and contentment.)
In order to be willing to be more satisfied and content, people will have to tolerate the emotional pain of the shift from all-out consumption to greater contentment, but major motivators will be extending the life of our species on the planet and making life more possible and easier for our progeny. Governments can explain the need for this change and encourage the shift.
In the cognitive area, we must teach better assessment of future consequences to combat the inbred tendency to choose current gratifications over future ones (partly to avoid the emotional pain of effort needed to get a larger payoff in the future, like saving for a house, and partly due to our discounting of future pleasures).
We must also be able to see ourselves and our circumstances more realistically, rather than employing denial, suppression, and repression to avoid the emotional pain of seeing the truth (that our own actions—our restlessness, discontent, and selfishness—are the very things that will destroy us if we do not moderate some of our consumer behavior). We will need additional equanimity to tolerate the emotional pain of giving up some of the benefits of our vast collection of consumer products. People can learn to view reality with more equanimity, using techniques that we already employ in psychotherapy. We will need to see with some equanimity that we humans are quite limited in our powers to control the physical world, and we will have to give up our naïve assumption that science will solve every problem so that we can have our way of life continue with no adjustments (and also the belief that some Divine force will step in and rescue us).
We may need to have a more global approach to resource apportionment, in which sufficient resources are channeled to all countries, rather than the richer countries keeping all the resources that they want for themselves. This will be needed to avoid rebellions by the poorer countries. Our selfishness and efforts to keep all we want for ourselves may result in wars as third-world countries attempt to withhold resources from the richer countries.
We would be more willing to share resources and climate change help around the world if we were more comfortable with and had more positive feelings about people who are different from ourselves. This can come with better education for all of us about those peoples who are different and with more person-to-person contact between individuals from groups who are different (finding out that we are not so different).
In order to tolerate the drawbacks of our necessary transition, it would help if we could raise more children to be happy and loving. Children are definitely second-class citizens in most families, and more supportive and democratic childrearing approaches could improve the self-esteem and hopefulness of our children as they assume adult responsibilities.
Essays\futureofhumanbeings3