I'd wager what is needed more is kindness - to ourselves, to one another, to animals, to environment etc, more than intelligence.
The actual conflict is individualism vs collectivism.
Can humans act in collective interest? Maybe.
Smaller homogenous communities have an easier time than large diverse communities. And the problems you mention involve the latter.
There's an oil spill in the ocean? Man, that sounds bad. But what can you do, it's in the ocean, someone will take care of it eventually.
I know it's a defeatist way of thinking but you can't build a running society (meaning with, literally, people running all the time) and expect to conserve energy for non-primary, non-immediate, non-localized causes.
To put it even more bluntly: I would be very happy to change my whole way of life if I didn't have to run after money. But I have to, and I'm exhausted, and that's the problem.
Merely bringing everyone along doesn't ensure "smart"; look at Japan in ww2. They had an admirable unity of purpose, or at least a lack of vocal internal disagreement... Did that improve the characters of their actions?
I disagree that any individual human has much need to consider "humanity as a whole" in their decision making; i don't think we are smart enough, or can see enough, to hope to think logically about such scales. The best we can do is be the best we can be in our scope, and let the things out of our scope happen as they will.
Do we? I don't see it. Their lifestyle isn't sustainable with modern population levels, billions would die. Of course killing off billions of people would fix climate change problems, but people wouldn't say that is a good solution.
I agree, killing billions to fix climate change would be distasteful.
Exactly.
Their culture not only looks more sustainable, it proved itself sustainable over thousands of years without leading to the devastating growth & overpopulation of the 21st century, which is the primary reason that for so many (aboriginal & global) it will not end well.
The media and news also love to promote fear. For those of us who are older we can see every generation has it's fears. I have lived through the fear of nuclear armageddon. Now every new movie I watch seems to have a climate change plot.
I love our planet and act responsibly towards it. I hate wind turbines destroying the landscape but I appreciate others probably felt the same way when electricity pylons where strewn across the landscape. I will continue to be responsible but I will not be lectured by a child, a Prince or even the venerable David Attenborough.
My comments should give you some insight to the unintelligent you want to fix :-)
On a final note, I think its wrong to hold the global population accountable. Why should small countries gimp themselves when china cant stop pumping toxins into the air and india cant stop throwing trash into the ocean?
First of all you've got to make it so things can at least stay the same without getting worse.
As we have seen for decades the momentum continues to build in the direction of humanity as a whole getting stupider, especially in leadership positions where it is more devastating than ever.
If you want intelligent decision-making or even rare brilliance to prevail over stupidity, you've got a lot of stupid obstacles to eliminate beforehand.
Without all the stupid shit to work around, there's already enough brilliance to challenge the world if left to its own devices.
What do you do if it comes from the top?
Regarding your bridge to climate change: You need exactly zero social cohesion to fix climate change. Just set the correct monetary incentives. Implement global CO2 emission rights, to align the most eco-friendly solution with the most cost-effective.
I don't know about that. Beauty varies greatly based on the the preferences of individuals. Sure there are general trends at a societal level, but even that changes over time (short term: dad bod, longterm: fat vs skinny). The reduction in variation can even lead people to seek mates with traits that do vary from the average (ie peacocking).
Look at that condo that collapsed in Florida. The residents would have had to tax themselves $15 million to fix it, but who wants to do that? It might be more prudent to have started saving it 10 or 20 years ago, but a pot of money is just asking to get stolen, wasted, diverted or otherwise cause mischief. People are right to be afraid of carbon credits or anything that concentrates a lot of money in a few hands. Now the only people left to sue (who have assets) are the survivors.
Realistically we are going to have mass casualty events from climate change in the next decade and people’s attitudes will change pretty rapidly; somebody is going to panic and start seeding sulfate aerosols, and that is going to take the conflict to another level. (I was thinking of doing a Kickstarter to rent a boat and seed iron in the ocean and got talked out of it by one of the experts — nobody can stop you from doing it out of the US thanks to Don Rumsfeld keeping us out of the Law of the Sea treaty)
Some reading on the political science front:
Legitimation crisis by j Habermas
Logic of collective action by m Olson
End of liberalism by T Lowi.
This sounds to me like short sightedness is the ultimate problem at hand.
It's not so predictable what financial markets will do.
Retrospectively, financial markets performed very well from 1980-2020; had they set aside $X a month per unit and invested it in stocks and bonds it would have been easy to accumulate $20M, so long as they didn't draw down during 2000 and 2008.
Had they actually tried they might have asked for $2X or $3X a month and wound up with too much money and the question of what to do with it (build a bowling alley, pay themselves a dividend, ...) -- which could put them right into "too little money" territory.
Condominiums themselves were an answer to financial instabilities at the time. In a conventional apartment the developer is going to raise money to build the building and get one or several bank loans for 20 years or so. That kind of person easily gets overleveraged, goes bankrupt, etc.
For the condominium the developer gets construction finance for a year or two and then gets a huge chunk of cash and the bank is made whole. The owners of the units have mortgages with many different banks so the risk is spread out.
It might be good "long term thinking" for some of the parties to structure the deal so that they don't need to think about how the economy is going to go over the next 40 years. It's not good in the long term for the owners because the governance structure isn't adequate to what it governs.
The apartment building would concentrate risk in some respects but also concentrates responsibility. A real estate developer who owns 20 apartment buildings will have some that need more repairs and some that need less; that developer can go to the banks or government for funding to make repairs and raise the rent to pay back the loan. If the developer gets over their head the bankruptcy courts can keep the business a "going concern."
Global warming will be solved by better technology, or not at all.
Alan Kay has many talks and papers explaining the ideas.
Do you want intelligence (critical reasoning) or group conformance? It sounds like you want both when those are actually opposing forces.
A lot of psychopaths, racists, sociopaths, Dogecoin promoting tech entrepreneurs, gang members, etc are very intelligent according to their own values and their immediate perceived interests irrespective of how dumb they may seem to people like myself that simply don't share their values. To answer your question, in the same way media literacy and sex education have edged their way closer to being first class forms of education, we need to do the same with the concept of social engineering. Everything humans do is social engineering - everything. Ingratiating an awareness of social engineering into the culture as a responsible and useful tool and do so in a way that is crystallized and direct should be a first class citizen. As it stands this is taught indirectly through a hodgepodge of scattered concepts like "leadership skills", "media literacy","customer service" , .... whatever.
Fuck all this - it's all just social engineering and that is what should be taught. Full stop.
Awareness is needed to help inoculate people against under-challenged ideological assumptions, cults, corporate cults, tech cults, social media cults,nationalist cults,nation-state cults, military cults, business cults, gang cults, and charismatic sociopaths trying to build their own cults. But of course, my view reflects my values and not my "intelligence". :)