What characteristics of humanity have philosophers labeled as the greatest obstruction to human progress?

Question

I am curious about what characteristics of humanity, considered individually or collectively, have been labeled and discussed by a somewhat iconic philosopher as a great obstruction to human progress?

There is, of course, the a priori meta-questions of whether "progress" is both definable and possible; however, I am mainly interested in commentary that assumes both of these qualities. The idea of "progress" may be the philosopher's own.

A few examples of such obstructions that I would anticipate having been discussed at some point would include

• A diminishing sense of altruistic conduct as estrangement increases
• The growing estrangement between humans and nature
• The common experience that individual humans tend to think of themselves as the most competent person in the room until experience teaches them otherwise
• Religion
• Specialization and Division of Labor

Answer 1

What do you mean by progress? Without a definition your list of examples looks arbitrary and a matter of opinion. To include religion and division of labour is to make the list highly idiosyncratic.

Clearly you want to progress in a certain direction, but it may not be what I would call progress.

Off the top of my head I'd list group-think, peer-pressure, scholastic-inertia, fear and pessimism, lack of care for truth, temperamental and self-serving-judgements, sloppy workmanship, the success of the naive exoteric Roman form of religion, human frailty and tendency to not think clearly.

But I feel Conifold nails it. It is the ego that causes all our problems. For the mystic and meditator human beings would be perfectly capable of making good progress once this problem is dealt with. The complication is only that once the ego is dealt with one's idea of what constitutes progress may tend to change rather dramatically.

Heidegger had this to say. It seems remarkably prescient.

"Man finds himself in a perilous position…A far greater danger threatens [than the outbreak of a third world war]: the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing, indifference towards ‘meditative’ thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature – that he is a meditative being. Therefore the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive."

Speech commemorating German composer Conradin Kreutzer in 1955