This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “When will people understand that their constant selfish reckless belligerent greed is what brought society to its current disgusting miserable state of existence?”

Let’s look at someone like Donald Trump. He has spent an entire lifetime spreading hatred while bullying people to feed shallow desires, and he entertains himself through acts of cruelty he enacts on fleeting whims. He’s been behaving in ways that epitomize constant selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed, ostensibly his entire life.

His response to being criminally convicted was not remorse but to have the conviction overturned.

This question naively presumes that a person who behaves in destructive ways throughout their life will magically experience an epiphany of conscience in which they will transform into the “decent human” imagined by this querent.

Never has any evil monster throughout history found any turning point in their life that magically transformed them into saintly beings. Most who claim to have “seen the light” assume such a position as a fraudulent means of continuing their prior agenda of self-benefit at the expense of others.

The short answer to your question is “never.”

People cannot change their essential nature. They may choose to improve, but that presupposes desire that has always existed and a lifetime of dedication toward that end.

People like Donald Trump see nothing wrong with their behaviour and so will never make an effort to improve.

Epiphanies such as this question presume to be possible constitute wishful thinking on a highly destructive level of delusion that prevents us from addressing the fundamental issues of broken psychology that we must dedicate ourselves as a society to addressing on the most basic levels.

We can never truly call ourselves civilized if our systems enable and empower the kind of evil embodied by people like Donald Trump — and make no mistake about it, we encourage his evil.

Our societies embrace and enable selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed.

Until we can address the fundamentally broken human psychology on a system-wide and social scale, we will continue to be plagued by these behaviours.

Ten percent of the world’s wealthiest are destroying our planet at a rate practically matching the total of the other 90% of the rest of humanity. Instead of doing something to restrain their destructive behaviours, we put them on pedestals and worship their harmful behaviours.

Changing humans in ways that address destructive behaviours embodying selfishness, recklessness, and belligerent greed means we must start at the top and change all of human society.