Holy cats. I looked at your "A Trove of My Philosophical Writings". You have been busy. I wonder how to respond, because this is the same topic I work on... just in a rather different way. Fundamentally different.

I'll just offer a few comments about how I look at things you mention and hope they will offer thoughts to consider.

You mention "owing to their disinterest in philosophy". I do strongly believe in the value of philosphy and have asked if our civilization can persist without teaching it, as our civilization is built upon it? But is it disinterest? The way I look at it, I see philosophy being suppressed. WWI showed the power and wealth provided by science. About the time of the Scopes trial, the ancient battle between science and relion was decisively won by science. Philosophy was a casualty. Science is a jealous mistress that claims all authority over knowledge and says that anything not science is irrelevant. Science claims that philosophy is a dead study, of no value. It isn't disinterest. It is teaching. Look at typical school curriculum. Everything not science gets pared out as unimportant including home economics, civics, manual skills, physical education and everything not considered science. Blame science for that... or the powers that be that want compliant worker bees. You pick.

Please, quit talking about reason. It's not just that critical thinking isn't taught, ask someone what the "7 logical fallacies" are (we'll skip, the 10, 15, 137 for now). They will have no idea. How, especially in this disinformation age, could people not know what that means if it wasn't inhibited? You should hear me rant about some of the other implications of that.

"Let everyone be as selfish and as free as they like: the result wouldn’t be chaos or mass criminality, but a society that pulls itself together with cooperation and innovation." That assumption seems reasonable, so why doesn't it work that way? Now we are getting into my territory. What is a "viable secular civilization in the long run"? I had to solve that problem. My work has been to describe how humans can adapt genetically and strategically to a new (stable) ecology where we can survive and develop long term. Science, especially biology seems like the natural starting point, but it seems so neglected when trying to answer questions about humans. That's understandable because iit's complicated and we still have a cultural bias against it, inherited from the Catholic Church... based on that if you use biology to study humans, that would mean they are animals rather than divine. Be sure, that belief is alive and well if not very conscious. Besides, any real knowledge of Darwinian patterns postdate Nietzsche, Freud, Kant and the vast majority of "philosophers". They all inherited one of Plato's basic mistakes instead. What would biology tell you about the subject? "viable secular civilization"... the key word is viable, meaning living... and surviving. Isn't life and survival the meaning of biology? Yet no one seems to use biology to describe human survival.

OK, for brevity I'll cheat here. While I do believe biology and science in general are essential to understanding humans, even with them you're going to have trouble coming up with a "society that pulls itself together with cooperation and innovation". You need to go beyond science a bit which must mean philosophy. Unfortunately, you have to go beyond philosophy as well. What other body of knowledge could there possibly be? Religion? Sorry, just jesting there. Worse yet, it is a knowledge not based on our favorite tools of reason and logic. Surely I'm jesting again, you say. Noper. No accessible logic or reason will explain evolutionary outcomes and that's what humans are. Neither will logic and reason (alone) solve the problem of a "viable secular civilization in the long run". There is a way to solve all those pesky problems. How to make "a society that pulls itself together with cooperation and innovation". I should be writing it down instead of responding to this. I did write the first part though: Genetics For A New Human Ecology". Now I need to write the strategy.