The answer to ignorance and our deadly cultures: incomplete specification of personal and extended identity:

“Senator Henry Dawes put his finger on it when he wrote of the Cherokees in 1887, ‘They have got as far as they can go [i.e. they are not going to progress any further], because they hold their land in common. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.”

“The English missionaries in Australia tried various measures to develop the aborigines’ sense of individuality. They made them live in separate houses and tried to stop going into each other’s. They baptized them so that they would think of themselves in terms of permanent name, instead of the fluid aboriginal names which could change and include the names of other tribe members. It didn’t work though – the aborigines never developed a sense of personal ownership over their houses and the possessions inside them. They wandered in and out of each other’s houses all the time, and continually swapped possessions…”

— an anonymous informant