I recall a comment once made - "statistics is the most important creation of our time, I foresee a future where even the simplest of men would have a basic knowledge of the field."

It hasn't happened, nor will it ever. People are born constantly into this world, and the large amount of development required to get to a point where you have sufficient emotional intelligence is a path littered with mistakes.

By the time you have a cohort stable enough and mature enough, you also have a counter cohort learning from the first obvious mistakes, or arguing against the older group.

So I agree that we're not going to meet some 'perfect state' of emotional intelligence, but I like to think that in the context of today, our ability to process and empathize with a diversity of thought is, on the collective, greater.