Do you recognize any common root to the problems that plague society, such as extreme wealth inequality, wars, extremist politics, climate change/pollution, consumerism, etc?

What do you think is our best best at solving these problems?


I personally have a hypothesis I feel strongly about but I'd rather read some answers first before posting my opinion

A typical answer from the spiritual perspective is "the ego".

I don't think any of what you listed is a "problem" in the absolute sense. We are simply conditioned to be more sensitive to these things and to call them problems, meaning we are conditioned to believe these things shouldn't be the way they are, and that they should be different.

But from a more practical perspective, lessening people's addiction to pain and feeling bad about themselves would be a good start in lifting society to a more peaceful, contented place.

I was writing something very similar to this and then for some reason felt compelled to cancel and then saw this lol.

Ego is the Alpha and Omega of double edged swords. This being the case, I wouldn't say ego is the cause. Greed is certainly a generous contributor.

A way of being based on infinite growth and empire. Seeing yourself separate from and above the rest of creation. Materialism.

No, i don't think there is one single answer.

Buddhism is a very interesting and sophisticated philosophy, and it probably comes as close to answering your question as anyone could get, by stating that the ego, the way we like to see ourselves, and our attachement to it, is the root cause of our suffering.

But though it arguably is a major cause of suffering, it certainly isn't the only one.

This may be a little off-topic, but i think we are entering an era where we slowly are beginning to realise that the world is much more complex than we like to think it is.

Simple answers no longer suffice.
We are beginning to see complexity is part of the world we live in. It is part of all our problems, and part of all the answers to them.

We can never fully understand something, if we don't take the natural complexity of it into account.

So our attachement to ego is one part of it, but another part, just one of the many, is that we are social beings and we need eachother. So we need to share, we need to give and we need to take, but it is crucial for our survival (and our offspring) that there is a healthy balance between giving and taking. So if we believe that balance is being threatened, we need to be somewhat agressive. But if we get too agressive, we get sucked into a potentially bloody conflict.

The nature of this situation is innevitably going to cause social unrest every now and then.
All social animals have these conflicts.

And there is the issue of weakness and strength, wich potentially can affect the balance between giving and taking. So the strength of others always has the potential to become a threat to us. Wich is why there is always a need to be powerfull, and competition over power can thus become a conflict itself (iranian nukes and missiles, chinese technology, changing demographics, etc.)

I think this is an inescapable part of the human condition as well.

Then there are the inevitable natural disasters. But natural disasters also threaten the balance between giving and taking. And between the weak and the strong.

And we need rules (if you would disagree on this one, could you still object to people forcing their rules upon you?) but not too many or too rigid rules, or unjust ones.

Etc.

Oh that must be why I wrote it, almost cancelled it, then decided just to go ahead and post it.


We can call greed a facet or a somewhat harmful expression of ego.

Do you mean material growth only, or growth in general?

I think the different types of growth are interlinked; in particular, the growth of consciousness is also linked to material growth. For example, technology connects us in novel ways, which allows us to learn, share and expand like never before.

We could still be hunters-gatherers living in caves, but then we wouldn't have the problems we do in the complex world we live in, and the opportunity to grow that it gives us.

Arguably, growth is the only justification for our existence.

craving/ignorance. This understanding opens the eye, leads the sage to cessation/wisdom. The world ends. The holy life has been completed. There is no more becoming. All conditions leading to suffering have been cut off at the root. This is the teaching of the Tathagata, the One Well Gone, teacher of gods and humans. The teaching has led countless arahants out of samsara and into nirvana.

If I had to point to two things it'd be laziness and or jealousy and envy. Typically lazy people look at what others have and get jealous. It's easy to say someone didn't earn what they've accumulated. But we're not living those other people's lives. We don't for the most part know where they're coming from or how hard it is they actually work. For most problems the starting point is usually the person with them.

In debt, don't spend money you don't have. Don't buy things you can't afford.
Struggling financially with kids, don't have kids you can't afford. Sounds cold blooded, but if you're barley able to feed yourself a kid isn't going to make things easier.

Bottomline is it's much easier to work on ones own problems than go out and try to take on the problems of the world. People have to begin helping themselves and not waiting around for someone else to come make things better. That's why I never jived with church (no offense to church folks), but I never got behind putting my problems into or onto something/someone else. It always seemed like the ultimate cop out "BLANK will take care of it." My first stop when looking at individual. Even in groups, if the individuals that make up a group start making positive changes in their personal lives, then from the outside we'd see the group do well. Plenty of examples of people society loves to highlight who've overcome their obstacles. Usually they all give the same advice and it always boils down to people taking control of their own fates.

Now all that is not to discount issues actually caused by other people. But I think the biggest challenges start with people getting themselves in trouble and their mindset says it must be someone else's fault. Mathematically if the individual is the common theme in all the problems then at some point I have to look at them as a the cause as well. I know it sounds mean, but we can't be afraid to tell people to act in their own interest. That's the wall I usually run into. It's interesting how many people get angry when they go on about whatever is going on. It's the ego defending itself, because no one wants to accept blame. Doing that means they'd have to take responsibility for some of their short comings. I've gotten into heated arguments telling people that no one has more influence over their lives than they do. That's usually where things go downhill. I literally get into arguments because I suggested that they have control over their own lives.

That's how I look at things sometimes. It depends on the topic obviously because there are things genuinely out of people's control.

To break all that text down to its simplest. People need to get out of their own way a lot of the time. Self sabotage is real, there are times when people are their own worst enemy. I think a possible solution would be to help more people realize that they themselves contribute to their own misfortune.

Get their ego in check is what I assume a lot of you would sum it up as. The easiest thing to change or get under control in any problem is yourself. That's why in any stressful situation the first thing someone says is to calm down or remain calm. The first obstacle is the individual because under stress or just being reactionary makes everything worse. So you have to get right if you aren't.

Lack of empathy.

I think on an individual level much suffering comes from trying to find shortcuts and solve complex problems with simplified philosophies. If you can take the world as it is even though it feels broken at times, it frees so much energy to make decisions about your own life.

I'd chalk that up to laziness too. Not entirely in the same way though, but in a sense that people are so caught up in their own thing, whatever it may be. These days though I feel like empathy is decaying into something else. People look see something happen somewhere and instead of empathizing, they literally put themselves in that person's shoes as if whatever is going on, happened to them personally and then things devolve into madness.

That is exactly how I feel and understand things. When I look at the world it's easy to say it's broken. Who's been around when it was "fixed" though? What does or did that look like? We all have this idea of what fixed is, but then if there's even a slight difference between our understanding of that then you're still eventually going to be back in that broken place. So maybe things are as they should be. Could all end at any moment, but so far it looks like we'll keep on keeping on. So at best for now it's just a journey. We're nowhere near the "destination." It's no different than practicing law or medicine. If we can keep going and keep doing this thing we'll learn more and refine. But you have to have time to practice. Realistically speaking humanity as a whole, given our history has been pretty peaceful in the scheme of things.

İnfinite growth spiritually/in consciousness definitely seems to be a defining feature of being human.

But that does not translate to infinite growth physically/materially. A paradigm of infinite material growth requires a total blindness and disregard to non human existence. From the perspective of rights, it means only humans have a right to exist, and nothing else does (this is now actually shifting to only technology and a.i. has a right to exist and humans are on their way to be considered unworthy of existence). This is ignorance because there is no human being separate from the earth, water, air, plants, animals, microbes etc. A basic insight of psychedelics...

There is the popular physicist Michio Kaku that believes the development of a civilization is measured by the amount of energy it consumes. Depleting the planet is inevitable and necessary, then going on to directly harness the Sun, and when the Sun is depleted, going on to deplete other stars is the necessary progression of humanity. He also believes that there should be a global culture that consists of blue jeans, Madonna, and Arnold schwarzenegger. And he says anybody who opposes this vision is a "terrorist."

https://youtu.be/6GooNhOIMY0

The nature of our conscious experience and thought processes.

We human have a reflexion hability that allows us to see new pathways and possibilities at a given moment. These are inheritance from the dream states where resorbed in our own psyche we experience different lives. By weakening the link between the conscious and the unconscious, we have allowed these states to merge in some sense, and for our daylight awarness to be invaded by realms of representation. That the image of the body could be forgotten and fantasm could happen. And this has opened many things for us, but also innevitabely disconnected us from our present experience and the vast complexity of the organic world in the favor of the images we generate within our minds, and eventually outside of our minds, not in vivid hallucinations raging within the fabric of everything we perceive but in a more concrete way.

And it is the ability of the mind to put things on a similar plane as to see the pattern, analyze and understand. But this flat picture is also a simplification of an experience that is more all encompassing. This minimalist worldview geared toward us became very precious to us and we eventually externalized all of these processes to great extent. As of today we try to reach ever more complexity in what we creates but as it also seeks to replace the experience we already have, it is unecesseray complexity in a sense and the creation of a world of desires.

The defyning characteristic of the world we create is that it exists only for us. We are the center of this world. It does not evolve by itself.

Now, as our lives are defined by the alternance between night and day, dream and conscious states. Life is delimited between the time of the womb and that after birth. The greater night and the great day. In the womb, we are the center of the world, everything is simple and placid. We experience life through the body of someone else and exist separated from the rest of creation, floating aboat above gravity. Then pains comes by and you are exposed to the light, a light that shines for everyone and not specifically for you.

The former is evidentely something we seek extensively to recreate and the persistance of this idea that we are separated from others causes a lot of pain because we seek to imprint on reality our vision of it. Something we definitly can do and have great talent at applying. But is it not rooted in looking at life as fake and superficial, as not having existence of its own ? All we can create will always be dependant of us and this further the issue that we have of letting go.

But we don't know how things will go. Maybe machines will become self dribbling autonomous entities. Birthed by us into the world and ready to stand up for themselves - maybe we shoud stop exploiting them ...

Personnaly i can't help but see it as somehow dystopian and very control oriented. As for more general answers i might not have any but it seems to me that the awarness of breath should become the focus of a species that has been so good at segmenting it, while talking, giving it meaning and so forth. Somehow it is a reminder we were born, isn't it.

SELECTED VERSES FROM BHAGAVAD-GITA FROM CHAPTER 16

Those possessing a demoniac nature do not comprehend what actions are proper and what are improper. Hence, they possess neither purity, nor good conduct, nor even truthfulness.

Harboring insatiable lust, full of hypocrisy, pride and arrogance, the demoniac cling to their false tenets. Thus illusioned, they are attracted to the impermanent and work with impure resolve.

They are obsessed with endless anxieties that end only with death. Still, they maintain with complete assurance that gratification of desires and accumulation of wealth is the highest purpose of life.

Held in bondage by hundreds of desires, and driven by lust and anger, they strive to accumulate wealth by unjust means, all for the gratification of their senses.

The demoniac persons think, “I have gained so much wealth today, and I shall now fulfill this desire of mine. This is mine, and tomorrow I shall have even more. That enemy has been destroyed by me, and I shall destroy the others too! I am like God himself, I am the enjoyer, I am powerful, and I am happy. I am wealthy and I have highly placed relatives. Who else is equal to me? I shall perform sacrifices (to the celestial gods); I shall give alms; I shall rejoice.” In this way, they are deluded by ignorance.

Possessed and led astray by such imaginings, enveloped in a mesh of delusion, and addicted to the gratification of sensuous pleasures, they descend to the murkiest hell.

There are three gates leading to the hell of self-destruction for the soul—lust, anger, and greed. Therefore, all should abandon these three.

Yeah, i also think the world has always been broken.
We are no more violent than most other primates. Just more efficient. But that has also given us medicine, tapwater and agriculture, more than doubling our lifespan compared to what it used to be in medievel times.

Species wide "dementia"
https://childrenoftheforest.info/

"The reason we have gone completely mad"
https://youtu.be/Cp-9EkrnZgA

Thanks for all the answers, some interesting ideas there.

I agree to with those that mentioned there are certain characteristics of human beings that are at least partly responsible, such as lazyness, "ego", lack of empathy,excessive desires/greed, ignorance etc.

When thinking about this question I identified three main factors


tl : dr Humanity's biggest problems are a result of cognitive bias (evolutionary genetic traits) + lack of awareness (improper education/self-development) + perverted incentive structure (corrupted money)


I've expanded on this on a (hopefully entertaining) article here

Hey Endlessness, awesome question.

I will give a short response (a lot going on right now). I think, as your paper shows, that this issue is polyvalent, but one major component in my mind is lack of reciprocal understanding.

Within the competitive nature to survive, people have wants/needs that they want to fulfill, without understanding others' preference too do the same. It's too many one way streets in an environment that would best be traversed with more pathways. What's funny is I think broadly saying "lack of reciprocal understanding," is inclusive of bias (not understanding self or others), awareness (not understanding or obtaining relevant information within the scope and context of an issue), and incentive structure (limits to understanding what others need, while also limits on understanding how much is necessary for an individual).

I plan on reading your paper soon. As well as the many replies.

One love

On personal level I believe one problem is that we put too much effort on trying to solve the big things and neglect the small ones. It's very easy to get lost on contemplating the errors of humankind, but there might be some little things you'd need to fix in your own life to get forward.

I believe the power of example is the only way to change things for better.