A perfect world...

The problem is the lag between civilization and evolution.

The truth is midway between your two extremes and it can be found by examining our history. Remember that humans are apes and look at our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees. They are social animals, but there are different kinds of social animals. Most species of macaws, for example, happily live together in flocks of thousands. Chimps, on the other hand, live in tribes of a few dozen, maybe even a hundred. For almost the entire history of Homo sapiens, we were just like them. We lived in tribal groups of no more than a couple of hundred. Every member of the tribe knew every other member. It was one big extended family. People would get into squabbles and fight the way chimpanzees still do and the way even human siblings still sometimes do. But most of the time most of the people put the good of the tribe first.

This worked out OK until we became victims of our own success. Better weapons, more food. Better lodgings, more protection from the elements, lower infant mortality, longer life expectancy. Tribes got bigger. Members didn’t feel quite the same degree of kinship with a thousand people as they did with one or two hundred. Some of them really didn’t even know each other well enough to care about each other’s welfare. If resources became scarce in a bad hunting season, jealousy, greed and competition might come into play. In our most faintly remembered histories, the echoes of the last hunter-gatherers that became the legends of the first village-dwellers, we learn that formal rules had to be established to keep the peace within tribes that got too big to maintain a sense of family.

Once we developed farming and cities and began living in groups of thousands, the sense of family was lost. Our instincts to take care of “our own” still only extended as far as they did for our Stone Age ancestors: a large family group. We do not have the instinct to equitably share resources among the 5,000 residents of a Bronze Age city, much less the hundreds of thousands that make up almost every population center of today’s world.

Couldn’t we overcome our instincts? Couldn’t we just evolve to keep pace with the change? No. Evolution proceeds at a glacial pace compared to the changes we have made in our own environment. Just look at our oldest companions, our dogs. They have been domesticated and captive-bred for 12 thousand years, which is about 4,000 years longer than we ourselves have been “domesticated” into city-dwellers. We accelerated their evolution mercilessly. Any dog that didn’t conform to our standards of “civilized” behavior was killed and probably eaten. We played God with their gene pool and what have we achieved? The difference in instinctive behavior between today’s dogs and the original breed of dog, the grey wolf, is slight. When humans hit hard times and abandon their dogs, they go off into the wilderness and form packs maybe slightly larger than a wolf pack. Thirty or forty instead of fifteen or twenty.

Twelve thousand years of draconian selective breeding. A species that goes through fifty generations in a century instead of our three or four. And I didn’t mention that they have more chromosomes than humans so it is easier to bring out selected traits in dogs. Yet their ability to feel kinship has barely expanded to twice as large a pack as their ancestors. That doesn't bode well for us...

Our slow reproduction rate, the fact that nobody was pairing us off to selectively breed particular characteristics, our smaller number of chromosomes. And the fact that we gave dogs a four thousand year head start.

We are our ancestors. We can feel love and loyalty and compassion for a tribe of one or two hundred humans that we know personally. We won’t steal from them or hide the extra blankets or be jealous of the great hunter whose family lives under a more spacious mammoth hide tent

We can’t do that for the six billion inhabitants of the Earth or even the 300 million people in the USA or even the three million that commute alongside us on the freeway. It is not in our nature.

We created our own problems by changing our environment faster than we could evolve to adapt to it. People are born with levels of greed, competition and jealousy that served them well 20,000 years ago. They just don’t work today.

That is the problem. Any suggestions for solving it?