[Warning: this blog – more an essay – is longer than usual. Make time for it!]

If you were granted authority and power to fix humanity, what would you target?

Nobody would say we’re okay, the world don’t need fixing.  The world is in difficult straits: people the world over are fearful, confused, insecure, even despairing.  Not just from climate change or plastics in the ocean.  It’s man’s inhumanity to man that hurts most.  How can we justify – how can we fix – ram raids and gas station robberies, poverty, cross-border invasions, political corruption (especially in the third world), bullying and infidelity?  Gang violence, mass shootings, terrorism, hatred, …?
The question has been exercising my mental landscape, ethically and practically.  What areas would I address, had I the opportunity?

I’ve come up with many areas, and two stand out to me.

In humanity, it seems to me, there is a surplus of certain undesirable dispositions and a deficit of more desirable ones.  I could list them.  Maybe I will.  A list of virtues and vices, perhaps – things we need more of and things we need none of.  There are such lists – you can find them online easily enough.
Plato (fifth century BCE), Aristotle (fourth BCE) and Cicero (first BCE), interestingly, way back then, offered their own fascinating lists.  (See here, for example.)  And most of us are aware of the ‘seven deadly sins’ or the ‘ten commandments’.  People have always grappled with ‘the human condition’.

But lists are just lists.  What does Aristotle know?  I’ve brainstormed my own.

First, some heads-up:  Some expected qualities aren’t on my two lists because they can’t really be practically acted upon.  For example, you’d think ‘love’ would be right up there.  (On the virtuous side.)  Or ‘mental health’ (as a damaging factor).  But, no, because they are things we can’t do much about.  Love is something everybody develops or destroys in spite of themselves – we don’t have much control over love’s rise and fall, so it can’t really be one of my fixes; mental health is something everybody grapples with and is often ‘outside of’ ourselves, to act upon.  No, such things, and many more you’ll think of, belong in a maybe different list of ills without resolution!  Also, you won’t find something like altruism, because that arises out of something else that is on one of the lists; or racism, likewise.  No, I’m saying, deal with the things below, and other things (like altruism or racism) will fall into place consequentially.

Oh, and … the two at the top of my lists are, well, the two at the top of my list.  The two things I would most fervently tackle, were I granted sufficient authority and power to do so, to fix humanity.

Here we go:
In our sad and sorry world …

… there’s a deficit of …	… and there’s a surplus of
wonder	tribalism
respect	selfishness
consideration of the other	greed
empathy/compassion	envy
character (good)	entitlement
gratitude	hedonism
pride (good)	pride (bad)
meta-cognition	gullibility
sense of responsibility	unforgiveness
interest in the other
serving
self-control
compromise

My proposal is this:  if we could inculcate the left list items and turn off the right list items, we’d enjoy a much more humane world.

Actually, let’s label them the strive list and the squash list.

The squash list contains things that come readily, naturally, to the heart of man and woman.  Greed and self and entitlement and hedonism (the idea that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life) seem to be essential drives or appetites in the human condition.  Whereas, the strive list contains human qualities that aren’t natural, have to be learned, worked at, cultivated … which is why meta-cognition (being conscious of our own thoughts and motives) is so important.  If we could all become meta-cognitive in how we live and operate, we might be more successful at achieving those other things – considerate and compassionate, etc, and … other things not in the list (like kind and caring and charitable).  Note also that the squash things are all me, me, me … while the strive side is you, you, others …

Before I highlight Wonder and Tribalism, let me just nail my thesis to the door: if I, with authority and power, could magic into humanity plenty of (re-stating the strive list) respectfulness, consideration of the other, compassion, good character, gratitude, pride (of the good sort), meta-cognition, empathy, a sense of accepting responsibility for our actions, an interest in other people, a sense of service, self-control and compromise, while squashing out of humanity (through a process of reasoned, shared, turbo-charged meta-cognition) selfishness, greed, envy, a sense of entitlement (and my rights), hedonism, the bad kind of pride, gullibility (foolish people getting sucked in to making bad choices, etc) and unforgiveness, then I’d be some way advanced in fixing humanity!  There would be no racism, sexism, genderism, disablism, or any other -isms.  People would be people.  No negative depiction of race or culture or age or being uneducated or mentally challenged.  Hence, no negative judgement or discrimination or land-grabs or retaliations or – even no more war.  We would interact as fellow humans with common interests and a common interest in getting along.  Not clones.  We’d still enjoy and celebrate difference.  Culture and personalities and preferences and talents and strengths would remain intact, and we would respect them in others even if we didn’t agree with them.  Simply because they’re all people, like us, desiring peace and safety and justice.

Well, this is all very naïve, isn’t it.  What do you think, you can wave a wand and everything could be suddenly delightful and Disney-like?  What a dreamer.

Fair call.  You simply can’t get past that ole human condition, the inherent stain of sin – of self and covetousness – and there is no mortal mechanism to bring home the fix.  No government. The United Nations is impotent – they can’t do anything.  It’s no good just addressing symptoms either, like war and racism and trafficking and poverty; we need to get at their underlying precursors.  The cancers of, well, the squash list.  But, roll not your eyes: the above exchanges are possible, were there the will.  People can exit greed and hedonism; don consideration and self-control like a new outfit.  It is possible, even for your Stalins and Putins, your Charles Mansons and your Bonnys and Clydes.  You’d start with people’s wills.  Persuade them that it’d be worth doing.  Okay.  That’s still naïve.  But that’s where you’d start.  Then you’d be away!

I’ll finish with tribalism and wonder.  Tribalism is the notion that I and my kind are better than you and yours.  We’re more sophisticated, we’re more intelligent, we’re more favoured, we’re better players, we’re more beautiful, we’re more pure, our language is better than yours …  We even get: we’re better than you because we live in the next county, go to the rival college, we’re Aryan.  My tribe, my region, my nation, my ideology, my football team, my family … is better than yours. Therefore we’re more deserving and entitled than you, so step aside; give it here; make way; give me your seat.  That’s tribalism, folks, and by my calculation it accounts for 83.7 per cent of all the conflict, minor and major, in the world.

Wonder, on the other hand, is very much in deficit.  Yet it could be our salvation.  Wonder will get our eyes and our volition out there, away from ourselves in here …  Wonder is a feeling caused by seeing something that is very surprising, beautiful, amazing, etc.  We stand in awe and we gasp, we are moved to tears.  [It may come easily enough to us as we stand in awe at the edge of the Grand Canyon, but are we in awe at things we are more familiar with?  Like family or breathing or the atmosphere that makes life possible.]  We need to open our eyes to the manifold wonders of our world and our cosmos; and our fellow human beings, who are “fearfully and wonderfully made”.

“If the starry constellations appeared only once in a thousand years and we caught sight of them, imagine the wonder of such an event.  But because they’re up there every night, we barely give them a look.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“One of the tragedies of life is that we get used to things.  Those who live among flowers rarely appreciate their fragrance.” (FW Boreham)

The story is told of a thunderstorm forming just as school was finishing.  A mother was worried about her eight-year-old daughter walking home from school, and hurried to meet her.  She found her strolling nonchalantly along the footpath, stopping and smiling as the lightning flashed.  Seeing her mother, the little girl ran excitedly to her, exclaiming, “All the way home, God’s been taking my picture.”  Childlike wonder.

Wonder – and gratitude and those other strive-fors – transcend and render irrelevant tribes, selfishness, all envy or entitlement, rendering us childlike in a wonderful world.

It is not naïve to aim for this in yourself, reader, or to fix your local humanity pool.  Do what you can to move those within your own radius of reach towards the strives and away from the squashes. 
Let’s suspend our tribalism and elevate our sense of wonder.  Perhaps we the naïve can infect our fellows, our neighbours – and the other eight billion might catch it.

[I welcome constructive discussion, below]