Learning to Live with Ourselves

Why can’t we control our self-destructive behavior?

Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash

It’s an old problem, and it only seems to be getting worse. We humans have a propensity for violent conflict and for many other kinds of self-destructive behavior, both individually and in groups.

Individually we each have to cope with our own self-destructive behavior, which is usually caused by short-sighted thinking and indirectly by awareness of our own mortality. Paradoxically, our background awareness of our deaths often seems to hasten us toward them while we deny or ignore their inevitability.

In groups we often deny individual responsibility for the self-destructive behaviors of the groups that we participate in, failing to acknowledge how our own behavior contributes to group behavior, and blaming others for those self-destructive behaviors instead.

Previously in our human history and prehistory our self-destructive group behaviors were fairly localized, but now many are global, and they threaten our very existence as a species. What, if anything, can we do about that?

Religious teachings of tolerance, peace, harmony and love have been partly effective for centuries, but they haven’t stopped our dysfunction from getting worse. We seem to be approaching global catastrophes caused by our own collective behaviors, including…