I think it’s a disturbing function of human group behavior. One human can be smart. Humans en masse seem to groupthink ourselves into self-affirming decisions

We thought the fauna of the plains of Africa were so plentiful they could never go extinct, until we drove a number of them to extinction

We thought the ocean was so vast that the solution to pollution was dilution, until we created garbage islands and watched corals die off

We thought we were too small to affect the global climate, until we started watching anthropogenic climate change.

We just never fucking learn.