Killed by Our Own Wits: Our Brain Is Too Evolved to Let Us Save the Planet

Too smart for our own good again…

The final climate warning is here: adapt or die!

The UN just released a report with a grim message: as climate change is speeding up toward catastrophe, the changes we make in the next decade are critical to our survival.

So we either do what we have to do or we’re doomed. Well, not just us, of course, but I’m only mentioning humans because we seem to be the only thing we care about.

If that.

Is this the point of no return? No, not just yet. There are things we can do and drastic measures we can take to avoid dying of thirst, starvation, heat, or natural catastrophe on this mega ball of hot spicy dust that Earth is becoming.

Plenty of things we can do, even on an individual level: turn off the water when we’re doing dishes, recycle, bike to work, eat more veggies, throw away less food, install solar panels, etc.

Are we going to do them though? Nah. We’re not doing them. We’re prepared to die with our foot on the gas rather than put our ass in a bike seat.

And why is that? Are we that stupid? Nope, quite the opposite. We are that smart!

Our brains are so evolved that they’re conveniently preventing us from seeing the precipice right in front of us. We’re too evolved to save ourselves.

Too evolved to see the truth right in front of us and that’s all because of our confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to search for, favor, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs.

When we want a certain idea to be true, our brain does everything in its power to make it so: our wishful thinking gets us to search for info until we find the one that confirms our beliefs and desires.

Then we stop searching.

Even if the info we find is strongly against what we want to believe, we’ll find pieces that we can counteract with seemingly logical arguments.

Confirmation bias is a direct result of evolution: we use it to influence societal structures and individuals so that they begin to match our idea about them.

It also helps us be part of a group (formerly known as tribe) that we feel safer with. The tribe that we believe would protect us most against the damage that a potentially harmful world might cause.

And we do everything in our power to prove to ourselves that we’re right. or at least that we aren’t wrong.

Here’s an example:

Yesterday I had a conversation with my Floridian friend. We both have a dream of living together somewhere under the sweet Californian sun.

I’m not doing it because the US doesn’t allow me in the country for more than 3 months at a time and she’s not doing it because she’s poor.

Well, I wouldn’t be able to afford it either, but I think that’s something solvable.

Either way, when we talk we like to imagine our life together in Cali, enjoying a sunset over the Pacific, smoking weed (her), and eating too many Pink’s hotdogs (me).

It’s this little trip to Imagination Land that we both love so much.

Except for this time she said she’s reconsidering it. I felt betrayed. I need her for my Californian fantasy.

She doesn’t want to do it anymore because California is imposing new restrictions on the use of gas fuel for cookers and she just loves a gas stove.

I love gas stoves too. I have an electric one now and it doesn’t even come close to gas. It looks pretty and it’s easy to clean, but it doesn’t have the raw intensity of the gas flame.

Pretty much like one of those big old American muscle cars. They’re so intensely raw that they just make you feel alive when you look at them. I love those too.

I don’t drive one because I consider it morally wrong, but if it weren’t, I would drive every gas guzzler available, from that huge stupid-looking Hummer to the low and mean Mustang.

I love animal fur, but I would never wear it, for ethical reasons.

The same goes for steak.

And I’m not saying this to convince you how much better I am than my friend. But to explain that I am much worse. My brain is underperforming.

She managed to convince herself that all this climate change is bs and she’s living a relaxed stress-free life, washing one T-shirt at a time.

My brain didn’t have that capacity.

And although confirmation bias is part of all of our lives, mine is just not strong enough to convince me.

I heard it from my father as well.

‘What’s all this climate change nonsense? They tried to trick us that the world is coming to an end back in the 70s too’, he used to say.

Turns out they were right. They weren’t trying to trick us, they were trying to warn us and we didn’t listen.

We aren’t going to listen now either and I thought we weren’t doing it because we’re mean, stupid, or both.

But we’re neither. That’s just how we function.

Our brain is so evolved that it only allows us to see what we want to see, protecting us from the harm of stressful thoughts, but also leading us to disaster: a natural consequence of evolution.

Just like cancer, which is also a consequence of evolution. The body is so performant that some cells get so good at evolving that they continue to grow and grow until they destroy their host.

The endless expansion part is a consequence of how performant evolution has become. The killing the host part… well, we’re not evolved enough to have figured that one out yet.

We’re close, but still not there.

The same goes for killing our host planet. We figured out the incredibly performant at evolution part. Now we need to figure out how to not let our progress destroy the host.

We know how to do it, but we don’t want to.

And that’s because:

1. Confirmation bias:

Just like we know our lifestyle is killing us, we refuse to improve it. And our over-performant brain finds various ways to not do that.

‘My uncle Murray smoked since he was 15 years old and he lived to be 93’, we’d say. ‘I don’t think smoking is really as bad as they say it is.’

‘OK, how about the millions of other people that smoking killed?’

‘Well, I just don’t know anybody who was killed by cigarettes, who’s to say they’re even real?’

Article title: ‘Young Woman Gets Popcorn Lung Disease from Vaping Too Much’

Commenter(s): ‘Tabaco companies paid you to write that article!’

I wish…

‘The Bible says that God put animals on this Earth for us to eat. Do you think you know better than God?!’

‘I guess God’s plan is to end life on Earth then?’

‘Blasphemy! Satan is vegan!’

2. Implementation is no fun.

Humans hate difficulties.

Just like those first six months at the gym, or when you start a new healthy diet.

You have to give up a lot of the things you love: the fries, the milkshakes, the endless hours getting your brain drunk on Netflix.

The same goes for climate change.

You have to give up cooking on a gas stove and pretending that we’re not headed for disaster.

No fun at all.

Of course, governments will have to pass the laws, we’ll just be at the receiving end of them.

And we want none of that receiving.

‘Why should I do it? I’m sure Governor Jones is not even paying his taxes — how dare he tell me what to do?’

How is that even the point? Just because Gov. X is a crook it means you have to be one too? We need to do the right thing whether others are doing it or not. And whether we like it or not.

‘They’re all liars! They said at the beginning of the year that California is going to have severe water shortages and we’ll have to cut down on our water consumption. And then there was a flood! They’re just trying to impose measures that only benefit themselves and their fat wallets!’

I can’t argue with that last one. People no longer trust the authorities for good reasons. It’s reached a point when whatever they say seems like they’re trying to do something that would only give them more power, money, or influence.

But if it’s come to the point when we can no longer trust scientists, it seems like it’s really reached the point of no return.

It’s too late to joke around.

Not everybody is out to get us. We are out to get ourselves more than anybody else ever has.

How about instead of believing what we’d like to be true, we give scientists some credit and children a chance at a future?

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