"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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Contemplating a catastrophic future with a sense of confidence rather than despair
As I envision it, groups with an appreciation of the sanctity of life will tend to survive and the rest will perish clearing the way for a better future for the species. To argue that the result will go the other way is meaningless since in that case the species will not survive and humans will become a small footnote in the history of life on Earth, a failed evolutionary experiment, and hence not worth considering. Modern neuroscience has confirmed that our species is specialized to cooperate rather than be primarily predatory. The drive, over the last few millennia, to ever larger social units has been fostered by the need for mutual defense in the face of ever increasing threats. These large social units are fundamentally anti-biological and are now self-destructing as a logical consequence of the inefficiencies and contradictions inherent in such oversized social units. Just as humans confronted the species destroying challenge of cannibalism through taboo, slavery in its various forms, which is the system that underlies large scale social organization, will also join cannibalism as a taboo behavior. The addiction to security through overwhelming military capacity is bringing the species to the point where, analogously to the individual addict, it will hit bottom and can finally face the necessity of denying this urge to power over multitudes of others. It is going to be a long hangover, and the future is going to look nothing like the past, but there is no reason to completely count the species out on the basis of the self-destructiveness that we have so gloriously had on display over the last few millennia. There is genetic evidence that our species at one point sank in numbers to as few as 1500 individuals and passed through what is known as a genetic bottleneck. What we know as human nature is the result of that severe selection process. Such an event may well happen again, and if that remnant consists of people with a deep seated and genetically favored aversion to coercion of their fellows, we may well be opening a new chapter in the history of the species that will be much, much more edifying than our recent chapter. So, I would say cheer up, we have nothing to lose in the coming catastrophe but a set of bad habits that the species will have to shake off if it is to survive. It really does not matter that the odds seem so bleak for our species in light of current events. All that we need, as a species, is for some individuals survive that express more assertively that part of our genetic endowment that favors cooperation over exploitation. I say good riddance to the thugs and criminals that will preferentially perish in our coming time of trial. Those who favor further aggrandizement of power and use of violence and excess are species traitors and need to perish in order for the species to flourish anew. We are truly dealing with a group psychotic delusional system that equates military victory with the total destruction of the life support system of Earth itself. It is impossible to be too alarmist in our discussions of what confronts us, and any future generations, if we do not bring these crazies to heel. Total strategic disarmament backed up by an enforceable demand for transparency of greatly decentralized governmental processes seems to be the only path to survival. And a Happy New Year.
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