Our most dangerous human habit

1299: 

Everything the human race has so far achieved has grown out of ‘ideas’.  They've fallen into the heads of a few inventors, exploded into their imaginations and then been implemented, to see if they work.  Sometimes they really do work and it's all benefit to us. Sometimes ideas work for a while but end up doing more harm than good.  Then, in theory, we can see the error of our ways and then we can fix things.

But who is this ‘we’?  I might be able to fix some of the worst faults on my own account but if we're talking about the collective, then it’s far more difficult to bring about repair to bring about a global trend.  If I think cars are damaging I can refuse to own one, but that doesn't solve the runaway problem of cars.  Humans are now so familiar with certain dangerous habits that we hardly notice the danger of them.  If I scream about them it won’t help restore things.  I will still have to live with the damage cars do even if I don't own one.  Whatever we, as individuals do, we can't bring anyone else, let alone everyone else, to a state of sanity and health.

How then can any one of us be useful by effectively helping change things for the better?  This is perhaps one of the most leading questions any one of us asks ourselves.  We see damage and want to help put things right.  We come up with ideas to add this or subtract that, but if we have a good idea it has a long way to go, to be taken up by the majority of people.  It's easier for an attractive technology to gain traction, far less easy for a philosophical idea to bite.

The inventors of the motor car could never have envisaged the negative effects their cars would have on the world.  A hundred years ago, the internal combustion engine was such an asset but, a century down the track, it could be described as a malevolent force, a major contributor to the death of our planet.  But the bigger problem concerns another more worrying reality.  None of us, individually, is going to give up our car.  And there are plenty of other equally deadly problems to choose from, each one contesting for first place on the planet-killing list.

With a combination of these ‘out-of-control’ problems making our future looks grim, it’s all the more depressing to know that most of us, individually, are still cranking up the machine by our own daily habits.  As individuals, we are still too obstinate or too impotent or too selfish to change.  "I'm reluctant to take the lead when you won’t join me".

We don’t act together.  We don't respond collectively to some very clear warnings being issued.  We listen, yes, and we worry.  But we don’t see how acting alone will be anything other than self-sacrificing.  Sell the car, give up meat, reduce our electricity needs - very brave, very noble, but will what I do make any difference?  If I act alone, will it eventually make me feel resentful?  And I don’t want to make my life any more uncomfortable than it already is.  I know it sounds selfish, but I'm waiting for you to change first, and preferably lots of others to change too.  After that, I intend to follow suit! I follow fashions, I don’t lead them.

Perhaps this sort of waiting-game has become our most dangerous habit?