Our selfish Ego is our engine, but we have to learn how to harness it

An opinion from the Internet about the human ego:

“While you talk about our cancer-like software as a drawback, I would say it is not, as it has always been a driving force in us and it is what has driven us to rise to where we are today. And it will be the driving force to carry us beyond the stars. Wisdom will temper us but that software is what drives us.”

I fully agree with you, it is this selfish, egotistic, cancer-like software that differentiates us from other developed primates that remained unchanged for millions of years, while we want to colonize other planets.

The problem is that there are different phases in natural development in living systems and we are no different from any other living system, organism.

There is a time of fast, exponential growth — like childhood — and then there is the slowdown of exponential quantitative growth, switching to more mature, qualitative growth.

We are right at the threshold of this switch.

This means that we have to temper our reckless, cancer-like quantitative growth and learn a very different form of development, growth.

We don’t need to expand, grow, consume more, invent excessive, non-essential things anymore, we already have everything we ever need.

Instead, we have to turn to internal development, qualitatively improving how the cells of the single, Human super-organism interconnect, communicate, work in a mutually responsible, mutually complementing manner.

We don’t have to throw anything away, we just have to learn how to use what we have within the optimal parameters of available resources, modern, natural, Human necessities.

We have to take into consideration and adapt to Nature’s integral, interdependent system by learning and keeping its laws that sustain the balance and homeostasis life depends on. And then those laws allow us to colonize other planets we will, as long as we don’t break the general balance.

If we stubbornly, ignorantly try continuing this reckless quantitative growth against Nature’s laws, we will suffer as Nature will reflect us like a foreign body. We can’t be foolish to think that we can conquer, overcome the Universe, not even the forces of this planet. We didn’t even start to comprehend the forces that surround us, within which we exist, we only get “small tastes” when natural catastrophes make us run and hide like other animals.

Instead, we could learn how to partner, harness, use these forces benevolently — in accordance with Nature’s laws.