I don’t know why I think about this stuff. I could probably spare myself the trouble, and read a book by someone who has done the work. But here I am, amateur philosopher, doing a terrible job.

I can’t solve global warming, or similar problems. I doubt that any individual can. They would have to be the leader of a global cult, with billions of followers, and an ethical paragon. Though if they were the latter, it would make it almost impossible for them to be the former. The only way you get followers is by indulging people’s self-interest and other emotional drives. Which isn’t ethical. It would take some real bait-and-switch to pull it off. Even then, your followers would abandon you before they followed any guidance to act selflessly.

Human instinct, intuition, emotions—these determine human behaviour. Not logic or reason. Logic and reason get delegated the task of justification, but almost never the work of coming to a decision. Except in abstract realms like mathematics.

Our emotions are the guide that we turn to, even when they have no clue where they are, or where we’re going. This spells a certain doom for humanity. Even if this crisis isn’t the end of us, eventually we will conjure a crisis that is existential, and we won’t be able to overcome it, because it will be too abstract, or too distant, or too complex, for us to understand it intuitively and emotionally. So we will ignore it, just like we’re doing with global warming right now.

Sure, if we were logical and reaonable, if we could suppress our bad intuitions, then we could analyze the situation dispassionately, at least enough to see and recognize the risk, and then take steps to mitigate or even avoid it. But we are not logical and reasonable. We cannot resist our misleading intuitions. We will not analyze the situation, or take necessary steps to prevent catastrophe. We will go on with business as usual, following our habits and prejudices, and things will get ugly.

I’m talking, of course, about the average person, the lowest-common denominator response, which determines the collective response.

Maybe young people will be different. Maybe enough of them will learn to despise burning things to make energy. Maybe they will learn to fear the production of carbon dioxide, and all the other waste products and pollution that we generate at industrial scales, which threaten the stability of the climate, and the health of the biosphere. I hope so!

The response to our destructive behaviour needs to be emotional and automatic. Because it takes a strong emotional response to produce the necessary counter-behaviour: creating and enforcing laws against pollution and atmospheric contamination; shutting down factories and companies that violate those laws; imprisoning executives and owners who flout those laws and put human civilization and Earth’s precious biodiversity at risk.

I guess we’ll see.