What differentiates human beings from other animals?

Question from the Internet:

“Why are humans the only species on earth able to create such advanced machines, build cities, or even go to space? Why are we the only ones, and other animals are not equally intelligent, such as monkeys or gorillas etc?”

There is only one difference between human beings and other animals — most notably compared to other developed primates — and that is the insatiable, all-consuming, and all-conquering human ego.

Human beings were born and started developing from the same natural environment and from the same original source as other developed primates. But while chimpanzees and orangutans, for example, remained virtually unchanged and lived in the same natural environment, human beings went through an incredible cultural, social, and technological development — driven by the human ego.

This insatiable human ego — which itself kept developing, growing, and intensifying throughout history — with its insatiable curiosity and insatiable desire to find, recognize, obtain, and consume everything possible for our own selfish sake is our “primordial engine” that makes us human.

More precisely, the human ego makes us potentially human.

As long as we continue blindly and instinctively following our ego in its original form, we exist and behave like cancer, and we inch ever closer to seemingly inevitable self-destruction, which in our generation feels just around the corner.

But besides the human ego, we also have a unique human intellect, capable of critical self-recognition and initiating a unique and conscious self-development and self-correction — above and against the original ego.

We will become “truly Human” when we learn and practice how to build nature-like, mutually responsible, and mutually complementing integration between us. Then, through this nature-like integration, we will adapt ourselves to nature’s laws and evolution’s flow and will integrate into nature’s system.

Then, we will also become nature’s only conscious, integrated, and, at the same time, independent inner observers and equal partners in creating and nurturing life.

Reaching this state is our predetermined and obligatory evolutionary Human purpose in nature, and this is why evolution “created” us with the cancer-like and self-destructive human ego, which we can learn to harness and use for positive, constructive, and collectively beneficial goals and purposes.