To be fair, when I’m my most cynical, I see human beings as intrinsically flawed, in that we’re trying to develop into a space-faring global society, but still have instincts that only function for tiny bands of hunter-gatherers.

And that would be fine if we were all on the same page, pursuing an all-inclusive pluralistic liberal democracy. (Or, really, any social system that allowsus to massively organize. Those tend to be pretty egalitarian.) But there’s a small faction of us who got lucky and got the sweet drops early or hacked themselves into wealth and power, and they want to keep their (ill-gotten) gains. And they hate the rest of us. (They might hate each other. J.P. Morgan did.)

And they are willing to exploit human instincts in the rest of us to keep us from seizing their sweet drops and wealth and power. And in the meantime, they don’t listen to experts who can advise them how to not ruin the world for human life, while trying to accumulate everything at the expense of what’s necessary to sustain them.

So we’re likely going to die out soon, or go through a millennia-long low population phase where we try desperately not to get eaten by new-world screwworm.

I can’t say we don’t deserve better, but our history teems with atrocity done to gain power or keep power or stay adjacent to power. We are a writhing knot of violence who can’t seem to break free of our madness, even to save our lives. We a seem unable to create better for ourselves.

I don’t think it’s sin because there’s nothing else that really cares what we do, or how we conduct ourselves. We do what we are going to do, and reap the consequences.