What should be humanity's primary goal in the long term?

Thank you for the question. For our overarching goal, I think we should aim to embody skillful compassion at all levels of human organization — as a species, as cultures and nations, as communities, as individuals. In other words, to have compassion for ourselves, for one another, for the Earth and all its wonderful forms of life, and in our interactions with species and places beyond the Earth’s sphere…and to exercise that compassion with increasing predictive efficacy. This latter aspect of the imperative — the skillfulness and effectiveness part — is what knowledge, technology, artistic expression, wisdom, discernment and so on can aid us with. But the primary imperative itself — to love — can only be achieved through individual and collective emotional commitment to nourishing and amplifying our existing prosocial traits; this must become the focus of human beings that subjugates all others. And right now, mainly because of our dominant forms of political economy and the prevailing cultural zeitgeist, we are failing at this imperative. We are not quieting our most corrosive and repulsive antisocial traits, but instead glorifying them. This choice — which is essentially a moral one — has been with us from the beginning of recorded history and likely (considering what modern primate research has revealed) long before. I suspect it will persist until the human species is extinct — which is likely to occur much sooner if we don’t change our course.

My 2 cents.

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