The biggest question facing humanity

Zsolt Hermann
2 min readJan 12, 2023

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Question from the Internet:

“What do you think is the biggest problem facing humanity today and why?”

If we want to make it more dramatic, we could say that the biggest question facing humanity is: how will we survive?

After all, it seems that we are facing a seemingly inevitable global meltdown, a catastrophic event — initiated by multiple, seemingly unconnected sources — that can wipe most of humanity out.

We will either directly self-destruct through wars, socioeconomic collapse, and destroying the plant that gives us life, or we will destroy ourselves indirectly as we can’t even comprehend, let alone solve the many different global problems that are threatening our lives.

And all of these seemingly disconnected problems and sources come down to a single root cause: our own inherently self-serving, self-justifying, subjective, and individualistic nature.

It is this inherent nature that makes us excessively accumulate and consume everything only for ourselves. It is this inherent nature that pitches people against each other, driving us towards ruthless and exclusive competition where we succeed and survive at each other’s expense.

And it is this inherent nature that prevents any meaningful discussion or agreements, that prevents any positive, constructive, mutually responsible, and mutually complementing cooperation and co-existence forming.

Thus if we want to survive — and then recognize some much higher and most important benefits — we need to learn and practice how to unite and cooperate with each other above and against our inherent nature. Only when we do so will we become “truly Human,” a being that can exist independent of one’s original instincts in similarity with Nature’s finely balanced and mutually integrated system.

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Zsolt Hermann
Zsolt Hermann

Written by Zsolt Hermann

I am a Hungarian-born Orthopedic surgeon presently living in New Zealand, with a profound interest in how mutually integrated living systems work.

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