Excerpt #126 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Be healthy.
Be kind.
Respect the environment.
That all sounds pretty simple.
These directives are clearly in our best interests.
If it is so simple, then why don’t we do it?
We don’t do it because we have competing sets of survival instincts that account for opposing worldviews and the epic struggle that goes on daily for the evolution and survival of humanity.
Curiously, both sets of these survival instincts are the products of evolution.
Our first set of survival instincts is perfectly normal, natural, organic, and . . . disastrous.
These are our short-term survival instincts.
Like all creatures, we are programmed, genetically predisposed, “hardwired”, to make it to tomorrow, i.e., to survive and reproduce.
These short-term survival instincts generate behavior that is characterized by fear, greed, power, control, immediate gratification, self-centeredness, authoritarianism, denial of inequalities, and the like.
For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring – even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. The long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal. – Edward O. Wilson
Our short-term survival instincts and associated behavior are destroying us.