While your comment may seem simplistic, as years pass and as I study human history in more depth, I'm afraid that I'm beginning to nurture that exact sentiment as of late. It seems that Western civilization was not an inevitability, but a lucky roll of dice (or unlucky, depending on who you ask).

On average, we are not as intellectually capable as our civilizational accomplishments may indicate, quite the contrary. Seeing the missteps that we keep making, looking at our shortsightedness and our inability to act collectively towards long-term prosperity.. It's just depressing.

What bothers me the most is the degree of such incompetence. It should't be so widespread.

I know we don't on usually quote poetry on HN but there's some apropos Bad Religion - "I've got this one problem where I live forever // I've got just a short time to see."

The human mind is not apparently built for thinking at the scales (sizes, time frames) at which humanity operates. The limited distribution of competence is an amoral phenomenon - as a first approximation, I like to think about it as a natural consequence of limited information transfer between generations. Should or shouldn't is beside the point.

I liked this piece which touches on many of these issues: http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-basic-psychological-structure-of...