The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
To many people, the idea that organisms living under one set of conditions are sometimes gradually and inexorably overtaken unawares by a fatal set of new conditions is not at all an unfamiliar one. This sort of thinking is especially familiar to people who have worked in retrospectively-oriented fields like geology, archeology, biology, and history – or to any person who has managed to keep their wits about them and survive enough such sneaky encounters to get the lesson down pat.
There is no doubt whatsoever that humanity’s ‘best case’ prefrontal cortex-based ability to observe and deliberate has ‘saved its bacon’ time and time again. However, as I have pointed out earlier on this posting site (again and again and again) there are, according to the scientific literature, clear, relatively static differences in the degree of use of these helpful abilities among different portions of humanity. For example, under stress the majority of humanity is non-deliberatively influenced by the actions and judgments of the majority of those surrounding them. The factors partially determining the degree of this sometimes-damaging proclivity to not deliberate but just ‘go along to get along’ are various, and include genetics (including sex at birth), age, diet, health, and upbringing.
The fact that, at the best of times, humanity’s ‘best case’ ability to observe and usefully deliberate is in the population minority suggests that other human abilities like the accumulation and transmission of knowledge (assuming the existence of free speech, of course) – not to mention the propensity to ‘just go along to get along’ itself – often critically help make the most of an imperfect situation.
Nevertheless, it appears we have now all just passed a collective tipping point – a human climate change -- where the usual non-deliberative and impulsive majority has become a supermajority, inexorably leading greater and greater segments of the world’s human population into an uncontrolled free fall wherein reactively shooting oneself in one own’s foot (and one’s neighbor’s foot) has become the unconsciously preferred mode of ‘adult’ human behavior.
Heaven knows at this point merely talking to other people about the problem isn’t going to fix things, so maybe we should all just clap our hands (as in believing in fairies, á la Peter Pan) and hope that all the foot-shooting eventually leads1 to re-adoption of beneficial prefrontal cortex-stimulating habits like getting outside, smoking a little nicotine after a hard day’s work, avoiding sweets, and moving and using the body for most of the day.
There is in real (versus political) Nature, after all, also such a thing as “consequences”.