Addicted to Conflict: Humanity’s Wilfully Self-Destructive Stupidity

Research shows that people are extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion, conformity, and manipulation. From classic social psychology experiments like Asch’s conformity trials or Milgram’s obedience studies, to contemporary evidence of mass persuasion through social media algorithms, it’s clear that human decision-making is easily steered. This is not an insult so much as an observable fact: cognition is bounded, attention is narrow, and symbolic frameworks—political, cultural, economic—do most of the work of anchoring people’s sense of truth and value. The consequence is a species that mistakes inherited or suggested narratives for independent reasoning.

Philosophically, this means the human project of meaning is largely misaligned. People define themselves by contrast, by asserting identity against the backdrop of others, and thus competitive difference is elevated to a principle of existence. In doing so, humanity mistakes struggle for coherence, rivalry for authenticity. If alien observers exist, they would see a species determined to sabotage its own continuity, mistaking self-destructive behavior for a sign of strength. What passes for depth—tribal affiliation, symbolic loyalty, competitive ambition—is, on closer inspection, a shallow strategy of differentiation.

From a technological perspective, the danger multiplies. The historical trajectory of tool-making has increasingly been a story of weaponization, control, and exploitation. Culture, fragile at the best of times, has proven unable to restrain this acceleration. If extraterrestrial intelligences possess superior technologies, it is implausible they would integrate them into such a system, since the predictable outcome would be escalation, conflict, and eventual collapse. Humanity uses its machines to amplify harm as much as to extend possibility. A rational alien species would withhold—not out of malice, but out of recognition that transferring power to a civilization addicted to self-destruction is a guaranteed way to share in that same fate.