Humanities Contradiction

How is it that humanity is simultaneously making great progress and plunging toward destruction.  We have made amazing strides in areas like extreme hunger, farming efficiency, literacy, civil rights, communications, and medicine.  As the same time, we are knowingly destroying ecosystems, causing the extinction of thousands of species, building more deadly weapons, adding to global climate change, poisoning our bodies with chemicals, and seeing an increase in authoritarian rulers.  We also just allow some terrible things to continue to exist (income inequality, racial and gender discrimination, maintaining power in the hands of few), while also wonderful and noble features of humanity remain strong (charity, friendship, empathy, family).  

Is it a race? Can both these aspects continue, balancing each other. For example, we can make food that lasts longer (feeding more people and lower costs), but we have to add chemicals (which make us fat or gives us cancer) so science develops medicines to make us healthy, but the chemicals also get in our ecosystem and poison our neighboring counties, so we use international unions (like the UN) to work out the problems in peace, only to have an authoritarian ruler come to power by blaming that same international organization for the unrelated problem of not enough jobs, but entrepreneurs create new jobs by trading with another neighboring country, only to have technology automate those jobs causing poverty, leading to countries that import huge amounts of garbage from richer countries just to have some money, which leads to the burning of garbage or just dumping it in the oceans, leading to global instability and at-risk ecosystems, leading to...what is next? Can this go on forever or is there a tipping point? What would that look like?

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