In 1945, as the world emerged from the devastation of global war, representatives of 50 nations gathered in San Francisco with an ambition that bordered on the audacious: to prevent humanity from destroying itself again.
The Charter of the United Nations opens with a line that still carries weight today: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” It is both a promise and an admission – that something in human life had gone deeply wrong, and that it needed fixing.
But what, exactly, was broken?
The Hope That Structure Could Save Us
For many of the UN’s founding figures, the answer lay in systems. If nations could be brought into dialogue, if law could replace force, if cooperation could outpace competition – then perhaps peace could be engineered.
Eleanor Roosevelt, a key architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, later reflected that “where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.” The implication was clear: global change depended on both institutions and individuals aligning toward shared principles.
And yet, even at its inception, there was an undercurrent of uncertainty. The UN was not built because humanity had solved its problems – it was built because it hadn’t.
The 20th century would go on to test that hope repeatedly.
Jung and the Inner Fracture
While political leaders worked outwardly, thinkers like Carl Jung were looking inward.
Writing in the shadow of World War II, Jung warned that modern society had underestimated the darkness within the human psyche. “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”
For Jung, war was not simply a failure of diplomacy or governance – it was the projection of unresolved inner conflict onto the global stage.
This idea marked a subtle but profound shift. It suggested that no matter how sophisticated our systems became, they would remain vulnerable if the human beings operating within them were themselves divided.
It also raised a more unsettling possibility: that the effort to fix the world might be incomplete without first understanding the contradictions within ourselves.
Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Thoughtlessness
A generation later, political philosopher Hannah Arendt approached the problem from a different angle.
Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust, Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” What struck her was not monstrous intent, but something far more ordinary – an absence of critical thought.
“The sad truth,” she wrote in The New Yorker in 1963, “is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Arendt’s insight challenged the idea that the world’s problems could be solved simply by removing “bad actors” or building better institutions. Instead, she pointed to a more diffuse and pervasive issue: a failure of awareness, responsibility, and reflection.
In other words, the problem wasn’t just what people did – it was how they thought, or didn’t.
The Expanding Toolkit – and Its Limits
Over the decades, efforts to fix the world multiplied.
Development programs aimed to reduce poverty. Peacekeeping missions attempted to stabilise conflict zones. Psychological therapies sought to heal trauma. Education systems incorporated emotional intelligence. Entire industries emerged around wellbeing, mindfulness, and human potential.
Each of these represented progress. Each addressed real needs.
But none fully closed the gap.
The same patterns – conflict, division, dissatisfaction – continued to reappear, often in new forms. It became harder to argue that the issue was simply a lack of tools. Humanity had, by this point, an abundance of them.
What seemed less clear was whether we fully understood the user.
A New Kind of Conversation
In recent years, the question of how to “fix the world” has taken on a different tone – less bureaucratic, more exploratory – back into Jung’s territory: the human mind.
Online platforms like Reddit have become spaces where these questions are not just answered, but actively debated. Rather than a single narrative, there are countless threads – overlapping, diverging, and occasionally converging.
Within communities such as r/JeremyGriffith – centred on the work of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith – participants engage with a framework that explicitly sets out to resolve the underlying cause of human conflict. His biological explanation of the human condition is presented not as another layer of reform, but as the missing piece in the long effort to address the psychological instability that has historically undermined initiatives led by institutions like the United Nations.
This sense of addressing a foundational gap is echoed in discussions such as this collection of reflections on Griffith’s work, where contributors point to growing recognition – from scientists, philosophers, and lay readers alike – that a deeper, unifying explanation of human behaviour is essential if global problems are to be resolved at their source.
At the same time, broader conversations – such as this thread asking who can fix the world and what it will take – tend to reinforce, rather than dilute, this direction. They reflect an emerging awareness that while many approaches have contributed partial solutions, a fully effective answer depends on integrating those efforts in a clear understanding of the human condition itself.
What emerges is not so much uncertainty as convergence: a growing alignment around the idea that resolving the deeper causes of human behaviour is central to any lasting attempt to fix the world.
The Quiet Shift Beneath the Noise
Looking back over the past century, a pattern begins to take shape.
First, we tried to fix the world through systems.
Then, through psychology and self-understanding.
Now, increasingly, through questioning the assumptions behind both.
This doesn’t mean earlier efforts were futile. On the contrary, they revealed something essential – that external reform and internal awareness, while necessary, may not be sufficient on their own.
There remains a missing layer: an explanation that can reconcile the contradictions at the heart of human behaviour.
Some contemporary thinkers, including biologist Jeremy Griffith, have addressed this by framing the human condition in evolutionary terms – arguing that the tension between instinct and intellect lies at the root of our conflicted nature.
Whether or not this particular explanation proves definitive is, in a sense, secondary. What matters is the necessity of undertaking the inquiry – and giving it enough scope to be tested.
From Solutions to Understanding
The ambition to fix the world has not diminished. If anything, it has intensified.
But it is becoming less about imposing “band-aid” solutions and more about uncovering causes.
The founders of the United Nations believed that cooperation could prevent catastrophe. Jung believed that awareness could prevent projection. Arendt believed that thinking could prevent moral collapse.
Each identified part of the puzzle.
What remains unresolved is how those parts fit together – how systems, psychology, and biology intersect to produce the world we experience.
And so the project continues.
Not abandoned – but evolving.
And closer, in its questioning, to the heart of the problem.
