Humanity’s View on Efforts to Serve It

Mid-20th Century sci-fi author Robert Heinlein was a counter-culture hero with his novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which spoke to a generation that was already in the midst of challenging our most stupid and harmful social conventions.

As much as I loved the book, and to the degree that I revered Heinlein himself, what he said here doesn’t ring true.

I would say that humanity is indifferent, rather than resentful, to efforts to serve it.  In general, we, as a species, don’t have the intelligence to understand what’s helpful or harmful.

Our capacity to grok what we’re doing to our environment stands out here.  The common American believes that efforts to prevent the collapse of our ecosystems come at the cost of a robust economy, where the precise opposite is correct.