[Freewrite] Will the Human Race Ever Outsmart Itself?

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If someone were to try and convince me that the modern Human is the smartest animal on the planet, I would have to strongly disagree and reply that the Human race is not smart, but we are clever and (relatively) intelligent.

I say relatively intelligent because the human brain has (as Elon Musk puts it) a bandwidth problem. On average, we can juggle one, two or even three different ideas around in our head at once. That's it. If our conscious mind was a web browser, we would be limited to having a maximum of three browser Tabs open at once. Consume a little sativa cannabis, and maybe you can squeeze an extra browser tab in there, but that has its own problems - i.e. forgetting what you're thinking and saying mid-sentence.

I say that we're clever, because we really are clever. In fact, we give great value to other animals that display cleverness, Like a talking parrot or an industrious beaver. The kind of clever that we are is in how we shape and use (or abuse) our environment. Our technology is undeniable proof of our cleverness. When we face a problem, we set about finding a solution. But we don't stop there, once we find a solution to a problem we then refine that solution to save on resources and energy.

We encapsulate our cleverness into a concept called Progress. The human consciousness seeks out ways to improve and hone solutions. Our weapons must be deadlier than our enemy's weapons. Our culture must be more pervasive than other cultures. Our language must dominate other languages. We compete because competition is the mechanism that we use to improve and hone our solutions to life problems. We never have the best strategy, because there must be a better one.

But, with all our ingenuity and industriousness, we're not that smart. When I think of smart, it's more than just quick thinking and problem solving. To be smart, there has to be consideration given to all aspects. But we have a bandwidth problem, and its a little tough for us to be aware of every perspective. A computer that controls every aspect of a large smart building can be aware of every camera, sensor and alarm in a building, and act swiftly and appropriately in an emergency. Put a human being in a role where they're juggling a thousand tasks at once, and we'd fail to complete even one task because we'd be panicking and freaking out.

We have smart homes, smart phones, smart cars and smart systems, but good luck finding a smart person. We're just not smart when it comes down to it, because we're accident prone, unstable, barely aware of our surroundings beyond the narrow bandwidth of our perceptions, and if our weaknesses weren't apparent, our strength lies in our own self-destructive behavior in the face of impending doom. Face it, we're just not that smart, and all of history's great failures are undeniable proof that we are anything but smart.

To be fair, I shouldn't paint the entire human race as ignorant. There have been cultures throughout history that were smart, from top to bottom. The indigenous Africans and the native people of north and south America, and natives from Australia, and native people from other continents as well are examples (among many) of smart people, where they considered it a sacred practice to maintain balance with nature above everything else, except for survival.

We (in the West) have been programmed by our culture from birth to believe that tribal life was savage and disgusting and barbaric, but history tells us that invaders are always the disgusting and barbaric ones, not the natives who have found balance with the land. Maybe that sounds a little hippy-ish, but we are living in a time where the evidence is all around us that we are not in balance with our world, and a new generation of young people who comprehend the danger are pushing back against the machine of imbalance called capitalism. Capitalism, simply put is a mechanism to borrow from the future to pay for today. It works incredibly well, but it is also destructive, like the dark side of the Force (to strangle a phrase).

Some don't care, while others are misinformed, but most people are starting to smarten up and see the need for a greener (and smarter) approach to solving our problems. This is really what it all comes down to, our technology is one attempt after another to solve our problems. Sitting on the floor sucks, so we make chairs and couches and beds. It takes too long to walk somewhere so we ride on horses, and then cars, and then airplanes.

Every time we go about refining our solutions, these solutions become more and more out of balance with our environment because of competition instead of cooperation. We've poisoned more lakes and streams and rivers and ponds with toxins than we can fathom, and polluted our oceans to such a degree that beaches everywhere have garbage filling the water and washing up on shore. We are single-handedly causing and witnessing the latest extinction event with millions of species being wiped out.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

It's better to just face it, we're not that smart. If we were collectively as smart as we think we are, we would progress our technology in a way that maintained balance with the environment. But it costs more to make solar farms than it does to burn coal, and we have elected leaders who are so dumb that they would convince the public that a wind turbine somehow causes cancer. That isn't too smart, is it? I'd say its reckless and ignorant.

The world of humankind for 5000 years has been ruled by those who do not care about balance. Empire after empire rising up to conquer the environment and any wild beast that would wander into a human settlement. Luckily, for most of the past 5000 years we've been destroying each other in horrible wars and territory disputes. But at some point we discovered that we could stop killing each other and start competing instead, and that competition has led to technology that is not in balance with nature because competition leads to cutting corners somewhere. It always does.

There is nothing wrong with roads, cars, trains, airplanes and any other machine that we use to travel faster, but if it's making the choice of burning fossil fuels or coal because they are cheaper, we're setting ourselves up to pay for it later, and that later is the here and now for some parts of the world that are already paying the price of pollution and toxic waste, let alone rising ocean temperatures that will lead to horrifyingly large hurricanes/Typhoons, as well as flooded coast lines.

I dunno, will we ever outsmart ourselves again, and relearn the lessons that our ancestors from before recorded history likely knew by heart? Time will tell, but for now the earth itself is in the clutch of the proverbial Dark Side of the Force, and until this credit cycle is complete and reset, that iron grip on the earth is going to keep squeezing until we are rationing fresh water and eating food that is grown underground, away from the toxic environment on the surface. We're all to blame though, as collectively we all played our part in destroying our environment.

Thanks for reading. Don't take what I've written here too seriously, it is free writing and completely organic thought put to paper, or screen in this case.

Take care and keep your head up.