Societies' Disastrous Decisions

Diamond addressed the topic of how societies seem to make terrible self inflicted unnecessary injuries. My thought on this piece, other than the fact that it was very interesting, is that I noticed a lot of psychology in play. Even bringing up the question of how a society could act so stupidly is called hindsight bias. Everything seems so obvious when you're looking at it in the past. Diamond brought up how problems exist and how they are tackled. First a society must recognize the problem, which was some times impossible even, due to a lack of technology. The creeping normalcy was also brought up, which was another explanation for how we might not perceive change that's happening right before our eyes, change that will ultimately lead to disaster. Then even if we recognize a problem, we might not know how to solve it. If we think we know how to solve it, sometimes our hypotheses are still wrong, and if we as a society fail to break from this perspective, this is called fixation. Finally, even if societies every now and then recognize a problem and know how to solve it, the solution may be impractical, essentially rendering it unresolvable. And of course, we cannot forget people just being selfish. Humans tend to think for themselves before they'll think or act for some one else, let alone a society or government. All of these issues combined, it's no wonder societies make the seemingly idiotic decisions that caused so many problems. The only real solution for nationwide-like problems, is a united effort, which is a theory filled with a lot of holes. Again, interesting read, but I am unsure if it is an issue that could ever be settled.