Wisdom, and Ending Apathy.
I was tempted to make a list of all sorts of virtues, and order them by importance, but decided these two are really the only ones that matter. With enough wisdom, all problems would be comprehended and their solutions found, and without apathy, these solutions can actually be implemented.
Wisdom
Wisdom can be a tricky beast to grasp, because it's hard to know what it is until you have it, and even then it's never complete. However the easiest way to gain wisdom is to NEVER STOP LEARNING, and never assume you really know it all.
"All I know, is that I know nothing." -Socrates.
Keep in mind he said it in Classic Greek and the quote has different translations, but what Socrates meant by this idea was that before you can learn about a thing and become wise, you must first admit that you don't actually know anything about it. Furthermore, after you have learned, you must stay open to the possibility that the facts you know aren't the facts after all. Assuming you know it all is arrogant, and there's nothing wise about arrogance.
Where to begin? It's easy: we live in an age of information. The internet is an unparalleled source of easy to access knowledge, yet many people are content to just use it for social media and funny cat pictures. BE AN INFORMATION SPONGE. You've heard before that knowledge is power, and it's true. If you stop learning, you will lose that power. You'll end up a slave and you won't even know it.
(Social media and funny cat pictures are pretty great though.)
Ending Apathy
Wisdom without action doesn't really help much; it can only identify problems, not solve them. To solve them we need action, and people that care enough to take action. I thought about using a term like "compassion" but instead thought that Ending Apathy said it best. Compassion is great, but it talks to a spectrum of people that are already trying to do the right thing. What we need is for the apathetic masses to wake up.
I believe the leading causes of apathy are greed, willful ignorance and hopelessness.
Greed is bad, everyone knows that, but I think a lot of people don't see the different forms greed can take. At it's most basic, greed is about making your own life better, and rating how great your life is by how much stuff you have. A corporate CEO getting rich off products made and sold by minimum wage workers is an easy example of greed, but that CEO's prosperity is made possible by another kind of greed: the consumer culture. These are people who don't care about how a product is made, only that they need to have it. Caring about what brand of clothes you wear is greed. Acting like your taste in music is better than someone else's is greed. Buying an SUV for your family of four is greed. Getting the new phone or gadget simply because it's the newest is greed. It's all a self-centered competition, and self centered people are apathetic to the needs of others.
Willful ignorance is sometimes even worse than greed, and often related. A willfully ignorant person will recognize a problem, but do nothing about it because it would disturb their own life too much. They vote over and over for lying politicians, call them frauds, then do it all over again. They know big box retail chains get rich by any means necessary but wont pass up saving a few dollars. They know fossil fuels are destroying the planet and still love them, stopping only to cry out when the price goes up. The willfully ignorant know what's wrong, but don't care enough to change it. It's embarrassing, and no way for a civilized person to behave.
Finally, we have hopelessness. This is the most important, and where many of the good intentioned people get sidetracked. They don't see how a change is possible, and so they give up. They quit. What they need to understand is that hope AND hopelessness are contagious. If people act hopeless, then other people see hopelessness. However, if we could turn the tables, and get more people thinking and doing, we could eventually tip the scales, and soon it will be genuine hope and optimism that is being spread like wildfire. I know humanity's problems are huge and incredibly complex, but I'm still going to fix them. I have to at least try.
Worst case scenario, we die knowing we really gave it our best shot. Best case scenario, we save the day, and all future generations of human civilization will celebrate and be inspired by what we did.
