I don't know if I would call it a flaw in the human species, or a flaw with the very concept of civilization... perhaps a combination of the two. For years I h

I don't know if I would call it a flaw in the human species, or a flaw with the very concept of civilization... perhaps a combination of the two. For years I have considered this to be the greatest problem facing the human species. Civilization destroys its own foundation. The act of civilizing entails removing danger from peoples lives. Danger provides the visceral motivation to abandon intuition and think critically. Reason can not convince an unreasonable person to expend the effort necessary to use reason. It's a Catch-22. You either forego civilization, at which point people will pursue critical thinking in order to save their lives and avoid suffering, or you build civilization, and guarantee that there is no tangible benefit to thinking critically. An infrastructure built for a civilization must be maintained, but once there is not enough support in the civilization to do that maintenance, it will fall. And humanity will return to what might be reasonably called its 'ground state' of killing each other over superstition. (Lest you think people might realize their error once danger re-asserts itself as a few pieces of the infrastructure fails, keep in mind the profound difficulty reason and science had being accepted by society even when it was actively saving lives. And for a preview, read anti-vaccine folks, they are the vanguard. When one of the children in their community dies of complications from the measles, is it because they have allowed their ignorance to kill their own child? Ah no, it's because the rest of that pesky infrastructure still stands. They just haven't gone far enough...)