Human Nature

[Alan V]

I think we're compulsively decent in general.  Might not be for an accurate reason or even a good reason...consider the effort and risk involved (or wrongly believed to be involved) in being evil, but I do think it would be difficult to explain why we're not consistently doing our worst if bad or even amoral acts were something like behavioral gravity.   

I think we intend to be decent and even try very hard to be decent, but I am not convinced that being polite and going along with our social groups is actually good for us or others, our us-versus-them tribalism being what it is.  What we seem to be doing, instead, is going along to get along.  That's one of the reasons I have found Trump so alarming.  He has demonstrated that people, in this particular case Republicans, will sacrifice many of their most closely-held principles for the sake of conformity when they are socially dominated by a pathological liar.

Since as a voter I am primarily concerned about climate change, I consider lying in the face of such a problem as evil, and those who go along with such lying as evil.  Humans are human-centric social creatures, which was good enough during our evolution.  However, that human nature now threatens to undermine our planet.  So it is not really human-centric in the long run.

Last year was the hottest on record, and CO2 emissions spiked.  We are already close to 1.5 C of warming over the pre-industrial average.  According to a CNN article, 84% of coral reefs have suffered another bleaching event, the highest percentage ever.  We humans are failing to react appropriately. I have lost my faith that people are honest enough to meet the challenges of our times, primarily because of our evolved nature. I no longer believe that we can transcend that nature.

Is such misanthropy justified, or am I missing something obvious?