Prompted by a post from @krishnanrohit: “I’m once again registering my annoyance at the fact that EVERY SINGLE NATURE DOCUMENTARY talks about how humans suck. Literally every single one. I am so tired of explaining to my 7yo son that no humans are not destroying everything. That he can be optimistic. It’s obscene.”
I’m with that the question of scale is very, very important. [edit: LOL, forgot I’d already mentioned it!] Graeber & Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) pulled together a bunch of research on there being plenty of past, larger societies which did not yield self-/other-destructive habits. But we certainly have a lot to learn about living together, especially in the large groups/networks/etc. we now have. Participedia is a good source for things in that direction. Mini-publics, citizen assemblies, sortition, a variety of good facilitation methods, online tools such as Pol.is, are all ideas/areas that explore how to do better at this. Healthy Democracy is one of the larger organizations working on related stuff in the USA, a smaller one I’m involved with is https://www.co-intelligence.institute/
Their Wise Democracy deck: https://www.wd-pl.com/
Deck about group patterns: https://groupworksdeck.org/