Re: WC 150K Post Challenge - You Ready?!
Humans are the most dangerous animals on Planet Earth. While there are deadlier creatures in the wild, none have a wider effect on the planet than we do.
Humans are social creatures. All these issues we have are socially constructed. As we live in society, nothing will change fully until a wider group of humans believe in "different BUT equal". We are still hung up on the "different" part of the phrase.
https://youtu.be/XXxEilzNJcE
We have a very large ecological footprint. You can fit the population of the world in California state but our resource hunger is the problem.
Going by an evolution perspective (and I'm not saying this for justification) out closest relatives the chimps are highly xenophobic to other groups of chimps. That however is not an excuse for humans to be but could be an indication of where it stems from as part of our evolutionary history. With our more highly developed brains we should be able to overcome this nonsense.
I am aware that our brains (and our bodies) are a mishmash of ancient roots and modern development. Probably the main reason for our issues in the first place.
The thing that bothers me though it's proven that:
1) education is by far the greatest thing we have to reduce this kind of thinking.
2) being around others who are not like us is the second way of reducing it.
For some reason 1 is being highjacked by those with an agenda and 2 is an issue the more rural you get in most places. Hence the continuous problems.
Then there's the whole question of cultural identity. Something that I never thought much about growing up. However in Europe it's a big thing and something that's difficult to get used to. I know the USA has this going on now too.
As long as we believe that in our special groups (countries, cultures, etc) we're somehow better than those other special groups we'll never get anywhere. It will always be a struggle.
I wrongly thought at one point we as humans were getting better but these last few years has shown we simply haven't changed and to revert backwards appears easier than moving forward.
I can only assume that part of this has to do with the age of our population (there never been a time in history with this many people over the age of 40 on the planet) and the shift in the economy. I think the two together are part of the issues not the whole.