Hence the root cause of all human-caused problems: what is locally, short-term beneficial for an individual is often long-term detrimental to the group, and long-term success of an individual depends on long-term success of the group.
I.e. we're too competitive, not cooperative enough, and can hardly coordinate at scale. Our best coordination mechanism we've ever came up with is the market economy, which is essentially taking the survival instinct of individuals and building a distributed coercion system with it. Sure, it works, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could just talk our way into working together on shared goals, instead of using money and threats of starvation?
I.e. we're too competitive, not cooperative enough, and can hardly coordinate at scale. Our best coordination mechanism we've ever came up with is the market economy, which is essentially taking the survival instinct of individuals and building a distributed coercion system with it. Sure, it works, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could just talk our way into working together on shared goals, instead of using money and threats of starvation?