Why is that
reasonably rational individuals who are able to follow an argument
and who are unable to refute it are at the same time incapable of
making the transition from thought to action? What is stopping them?
Humans are clearly smarter than yeast, what does that matter if they
are incapable of acting any more intelligently?
As I promised, I will attempt to
address this question in this one, helped by all the comments I have
received. Ugo Bardi was quick to contribute this:
People just don't
care about understanding what's going on and what's going to happen.
If they are rich they care about how to make money on oil; if they
are poor they care about miracle devices that will save us from the
brink of the cliff. Then, as we start falling, interest in
understanding what's going to happen will fade even more.
Ugo also cited Too
Smart for Our Own Good by Craig Dilworth, summarizing it as
follows:
The gist of
Dilworth's book is that we are smart, individually, but that we
aren't collectively. So, we are very good at solving individual
problems, but that has the cost of creating larger collective
problems which, then, we can't solve.
Dilworth's own summary of his book
contains this:
We are destroying
our natural environment at a constantly increasing pace, and in so
doing undermining the preconditions of our own existence. Why is this
so? This book reveals that our ecologically disruptive behaviour is
in fact rooted in our very nature as a species. Drawing on evolution
theory, biology, anthropology, archaeology, economics, environmental
science and history, this book explains the ecological predicament of
humankind by placing it in the context of the first scientific theory
of our species' development, taking over where Darwin left off. The
theory presented is applied in detail to the whole of our
seven-million-year history.
This provides me with as good a jumping-off
point as any, so let me begin.
