If you were to ask me what humanity’s greatest flaw is, some characteristics may come to mind: humans are often seen as arrogant, suffering from hubris, or being destructive to themselves. And I say, that humans are arrogant because they do not want to suffer the pain of looking at themselves honestly, they have hubris because they are too intellectually lazy and egotistical to look at reality honestly, and they are destructive because they constantly put work into developing technology they are not wise enough to use, ostensibly to make life easier, but actually complicating life further, to the point of threatening the existence of life on Earth itself.
A common thread keeps popping up behind all of this, and that is laziness. Human beings want civilization, but without putting in the effort necessary to run a civilization, so they keep trying to find ways to make life easier, which make everyone a ton of money, and create more problems for every problem they solve.
Human beings are too lazy and afraid of death to take care of their own protection, so they have police. They come up with ever easier ways to fight wars, to the point where it seems that the future of war is battles between robots instead of troops, which opens up a whole new can of horrific possibilities when coupled with the artificial intelligences which have begun to lurk and develop themselves on computers around the world.
Tool-making, by and large, gave humans a huge survival advantage initially. It was surely initially for making everything better at first, but then devolved into a way to do as little work as possible. Humans have never rid themselves of the delusion that they can, as a species, do less work. It is a delusion because tools require design, production, maintenance, training, education, marketing, repair, and other things to even exist, which complicates life. And these things require other tools which are constantly developed to make life “easier”, and this requires more education, training, and so forth.
If humans are wise enough, they will cease to try to make life convenient, and instead focus their tool-making on their long-term survival, which is what tool-making was originally for. Trillions every year would be poured into research to solve global warming, develop sustainable food sources, affordable housing, and make people immortal using bio-tech and cyborg technology. Are humans up to that challenge, this final stretch that would realize humanity’s wildest dreams?
I bring up a glimmer of hope, but don’t hope: do something to realize this ultimate dream of humans. If you want to realize the human dream of immortality, don’t be lazy like humans have shown themselves to be. Take action, any action to guide humanity in this direction, away from the laziness which could ultimately destroy them. As the title of this article says, laziness is humanity’s Achilles heel, the biggest blight on their constitution that turns their dreams into naught. I advise all to overcome it, for your sake, for my sake, for everyone’s sake.
