I suggest you read Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civlization" or this video of his lecture for a good analysis of this point.

GeoFee,

in answer to your OP, I think that we are a faith-based species.  We have an amazing and wonderful ability to put things into reality that do not exist in reality itself.  We are pattern-seekers.  We can believe.  This can have both good effects, neutral effects, and negative effects.  What helps us have justice in the world also helps us enjoy or feel miserable over a day or helps us think of someone as evil.

We get stuck in our worldviews, thinking of them as unchangable reality.  So we continue to vote in the same way, continue to buy groceries in the same way, continue to have countries in the same way, etc etc.  We have faith in them.

One great thing that happens, I think, is that we have learned (or is it our technologies that are getting us to do it for them?  See Susan Blackmore's Temes idea) to do more with less.  We feed a greater population with less land use for farms.  Our computers gain more computing power for less cost.  And so forth.  This is called ephemeralization.

So I think a lot of problems happen when we can't adapt/try something else.  And when certain groups become powerful enough to affect the rest of us in a negative way (like the Jihadists, or Greenpeace) because they are caught up in their worldview.