Too Smart for Our Own Good

We have backed ourselves into a corner. Our weapons have evolved spectacularly; our emotional maturity has not. We are roughly the same animal we were ten thousand years ago — the same easy slide into fear, the same hunger for in-group versus out-group, the same susceptibility to a persuasive voice telling us who to blame. That gap is the central problem of our age.

Two of the greatest minds in modern history have already told us what to do, and we have not listened. In 1932, Einstein wrote to Freud with a single question: is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? Freud answered him at length, and the heart of their proposal was direct. The world needed an international body, composed of all the nations, with the power to make laws and to enforce them — laws binding on every nation, including the ones that did not want them. Just as domestic law restrains the violence of individual citizens, this body would restrain the violence of nation states. We built a partial gesture in the United Nations, but it has neither the enforcement power Einstein and Freud called for nor the legal authority above its member states that would have made it real. What they actually proposed has never been tried.

And it makes obvious sense, because it simply extends what we already do at every other level of human life to bring order to chaos and keep people safe. Parents set and enforce boundaries with their children. Teachers do the same with their students. Cities govern their citizens, states govern their cities, and the federal government sits above that. We do not let neighbors settle disputes by burning each other's houses; we have police, laws, and courts. The Einstein-Freud proposal asks us to apply that same logic one level higher — to the nations themselves, the only level at which we have not yet built it. There is nothing radical about this. It is the ordinary architecture of civilization, finally completed at the top.

The same logic, by the way, applies inward. The mature human being is the one who has installed an internal court that hears the case made by her emotions before the body strikes. We call this growing up. The species has to do the same thing at a larger scale. We are still, in this sense, in late adolescence — capable of enormous things, periodically devastating, occasionally brilliant, not yet able to consistently tolerate frustration without exploding. It's time for all of us, as global citizens, to be the adults in the room.

— Scott