Human Nature

[Alan V]

Perhaps we live in a world full of exclusively suboptimal decision fields.  Where every available choice is bad somehow, for someone or something.  In that case, our attempts to navigate such a world and often manifesting surprisingly poor outcomes isn't because we're degenerates.

This seems to be the case. There are tradeoffs in everything, and of course people prefer the tradeoffs that hurt other people or the environment instead of themselves. The wealthy and powerful especially often find ways to escape the consequences of their own bad decisions.

Our failure to navigate such a world was likely caused by religious ideas as much as anything. Those ideas told us that a perfectly good God created the world, so of course the tradeoffs of such a world must be cast in good-versus-evil terms. Are such religious ideas degenerate or simply based on human nature and our wishful thinking?

From this point of view, all of the good we are doing in the present must necessarily be offset by all the damage we are doing to the environment and to future people. In the case of climate change, we are the wealthy and powerful people who are pushing our own tradeoffs elsewhere.