Think about some of the knottiest problems facing the world today and the suggested solutions to them. Climate change? Answer it with carbon sequestering and transitions to clean energy. Migration? Answer it with streamlined visas and new systems of border control.

Humans tend to seek solutions to problems like these – both macro and micro, simple and complex – through a short-term, external perspective that doesn’t obligate individual participation.

In the West, the dominant approach to tackling the challenges we face has been to amputate emotion from our decision-making whenever possible. We instead opt for cold, technical solutions.

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This hyper-rational perspective is at least as old as Aristotle, who described passions as capricious, dangerous roadblocks on the path to becoming fully human. It became integral to the Western ethos during the 18th Century Enlightenment and still persists today.