For several years now I have believed that there is a more general threat that is far scarier as it has no ethical solution. Basically, the very idea of civili

For several years now I have believed that there is a more general threat that is far scarier as it has no ethical solution. Basically, the very idea of civilization contains the seed of its own self-destruction. Danger and suffering provides the motivation for humanity to turn away from its destructive and unreliable intuition and to exert the energy necessary to reason. Using reason, we build civilization - which removes danger and suffering by definition. This means that it also removes all substantive visceral motivation to distrust intuition and invest in reason. As reason is used to construct more infrastructure and more danger and suffering is removed from peoples lives, this necessarily removes the negative consequences from trusting intuition. It becomes safe to trust intuition despite its horrendous inaccuracy. And as intuition is sort of the 'default mode' of the brain, requiring the absolute least amount of energy investment, it becomes very popular to rely upon it and distrust reason. It then becomes more and more difficult to get social support for expanding or maintaining the infrastructure necessary to sustain the civilization. Eventually, there will be a movement to actively destroy that infrastructure. One might think that once some of the danger reasserted itself that people would immediately turn back to reason, but that is not supported by any sort of history. Instead, the most likely response is to double, triple, and quadruple down on intuition and superstition. They will conclude that whatever danger presents itself is an artifact of the remaining infrastructure and that they simply haven't gone far enough. They will accelerate, not reverse course. If a person or group of people do not agree that reason is the way in which life should be dealt with, you can not convince them with reason, obviously. You could persuade them emotionally... but assuming you are successful, one of their first realizations will be that you have manipulated them unethically and are a hypocrite. They would not side with reason for long. So the destiny of civilization seems to be to destroy itself, to revert to humanitys 'base state' of slogging through muck, racked with disease, killing one another over whose god is stronger. That, I think, is the biggest threat to humanity.