Even if some or even most of us understand it we are dealing with multiple orders of magnitude more filthy, infectious, greedy, sanctimonious, nostalgic apes who we have to convince not to kill ourselves, our planet, or both.

I mean, if most of us end up understanding it, the number of people who don’t literally can’t be orders of magnitude more.

If our Paleolithic brains can’t fathom the billions of miles between here and Jupiter, how are we supposed to fathom trillions of dollars or billions of people?

Same way we managed to understand agricultural processes before we actually understood biology - shorthand.

And for that matter, shit, man, I can’t fathom how a refrigerator works, yet that doesn’t mean that I can’t participate in a fridge-having society. It just means that, as one of the people who doesn’t get it, I need to be socially conditioned to understand that my ignorant opinion doesn’t mean jack when the fridge breaks and knowledgeable folk are trying to repair or jury-rig it.

We aren’t going to get better as a species without selective pressure which is not happening.

I mean, the fact that any significant number of us understand the problems and necessary solutions points towards that the essential problem is not genetic, but societal. It is not our nature that is killing us, though that is certainly not without its flaws; it is nurture - the way human society has developed and taught generations upon generations how to think. Broken thinking in families and social circles that perpetuates itself and is eradicated only with social pressure and the passing of generations.

And, to be fair to human society, growing up in a totally natural milieu would also end up developing extremely flawed thought processes simply because of how much that happens that is not readily observable without specialized tools. And again, to be fair to human society, many of the things we struggle with now are maladaptive traits, things which once helped us simply because they were less bad than the alternative. Like sickle-cell genes helping prevent malaria, or growing up poor and becoming fond of nutritionless ketchup sandwiches out of necessity. Tribes developing distrust and tribalist thinking because of a low ability to gather information about distant tribes and the people who inhabit them helps preserve the tribe - it starts as an advantage, even if a flawed one, to prevent bad actors from destroying the tribe. But as other tribes develop tools to gather information about distant tribes and people, that same tribalism becomes a disadvantage in comparison with tribes that move towards a greater openness to others.

Human society can change. Human society has changed, radically, even just in the past few centuries. And as human society changes, so too do human beings. We’re on the cutting edge here in understanding these problems because we had the right environment - whether pulled towards understanding by positive influences, or simply pushed away from idiocy by negative influences - to develop in such a way, not because we have fantastic genes that the rest of humanity lacks. Certainly not me, at least; I’m a genetic mess, much like a pug (only handsome instead of ugly-cute). Our environments can be extended to a broader swathe of people - and are being extended so, even just as prior generations die off along with their stubborn ideas of magic salt circles and devil-marked cats.

We will never be rid of idiocy in its entirety - shit, you and I both probably have at least a few idiotic ideas ourselves, despite lacking many of the more severe ones which damage modern society - but a world of people who, by and large, have the same thinking on sustainability, pluralism, expertise, and observable reality that we do is not a pipe dream. It is a real - if fragile - hope that we have only just, as a civilization, acquired the tools to nurture.

The sapling is there. We must help it grow. The ember is there. We must help it catch.