I think the horrifying thing about humans is we do understand what we’re doing and choose to do it anyways. Spiders kill things to eat them to survive. Humans do it for much more complicated or arbitrary reasons.
At the very least, mammals will kill for sport and for status. The biggest difference with humans is scale.
Seems like you glossed right over the most important part of their comment.
And the flipside of focus is blindness. Ignorance.
One thing is focused upon, seen and controlled with vast depth and clarity. While 1000 other things are obliviated away.
That obliviated part. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there. (And a lot of good stuff too, no doubt)
Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can start to assume that’s just how things are.