humanitism - part 1
All animals have a primary way of thinking. Escape (or eat), or get eaten. Eat, or die. Plants also have this existential imperative. Animals and plants are forever contending to maintain their niche in the ecosystem. So, almost every breath they take is a fight for survival. If they can keep it going, then things are great. The sun keeps shining. Even as you age, from the ravages of entropy, babies somehow proceed from you.
When animals can afford to take a little break from this dog-eat-dog contest, they like to delight in sleep, dreams, rollicking fun, and the magic of universal diversity. They cannot get to this point of enjoyment until they feel safe. (And it doesn't matter if they feel safe if they are not safe). Diversity, fun, coexistence, abundance at your leisure, imagination, possibilities - progress - these don't happen without, first, some little moment of escape to safety.
If you can approach an animal, or tame him/her, and you both find you have enough to eat, and enough safety, for the near future, then you may become friends. You will have leaped over that wall of black-versus-white fear - your own fear, and the animal's fear. You can then proceed to both delight in the wonder, delight and diversity of nature, which the universe calls us all to do. Against the back-drop of survival of the fittest, which shows itself in the human world as the will to power. (The will to power would be the intention to eat everyone, if it kept to its core principles).
Plants have been like wallflowers, pretty OK with what comes their way, so long as they can survive - at least vicariously, via seeds. They do shrink at danger. They do lust for life. They do prefer a pleasant day. Most of the time, plants don't have to worry - to indulge in anxious black-versus-white fear and competition, at least as we see it - at least to the extent of animal experience.
Yet, along comes a fire, or a fungus, or what-have-you, and they suddenly light up on the scream index. Trees tell the rest of the forest they are in distress - to beware - to shunt resources wisely, etc. When this happens, all cells in a plant are singing the same song, "Us versus them!"
I am certain that some plant shall be discovered to have evolved ways of processing potential threats into more diverse alternatives for reacting, and therefore, of choosing more advantageous futures. In other words, I have no doubts that there shall be discovered some plants that have a kind of neocortical edge over their compatriots. I only say this because it is a natural bridge. It is a certain bridge.
Animals have been running around, looking for food, for hundreds of millions of years. For virtually all of this time, they have been locked into the eat-or-be-eaten paradigm - paradigm my ass - if you are IN it, it's not a paradigm, right? Either you eat, or you get eaten. That's not having rent money. That's sleeping on the sidewalk. That's falling out a window. That's not a paradigm. That is, "don't fuck with me or I will fuck with you." And, sometimes, a very nihilistic, "Sorry, I don't care about you or anything else, but now I am eating you!"
This bleak world still exists, in humanity, to degrees here or there. And it is the conservatives who tend to know this. Consequently, conservatives are blamed as having a countre-humanitarian, countre-progressive, EAT-EVERYBODY, philosophy.
Well. The sad fact is. That monstrous sort, who does exist, does often align with conservatives. Which is to say this: Those who know that the world is eat-or-be-eaten, though they all be mainly folks not wanting to get eaten, become aligned with those great monsters who believe the same philosophy, though their intentions is to EAT EVERYONE. This is the central flaw in Libertarian philosophy. Freedom for everyone, and therefore freedom for the predatory corporations and hedge funds, at the expense of everyone else who wants and deserves to be free. Am I right?
Well, this hampered struggle to progress exists not just in plants, but also in humans, here and today. This fight to resist getting eaten, getting all bound up with those who want to eat everyone. Not a fair game. But that is what our present system brings you. Not exactly progress. Not exactly escape from injustice.
Meanwhile, over the course of millions of years, the brains of animals, especially mammals, have been evolving. Trying to figure out the best - the easiest - the safest - ways of striving towards an easier life, without getting eaten. The existential drive to exist does not stop at existing. It pushes on to prevail, especially if it is contradicted.
We know that animals react to threat by making threats or fighting back. But the will to exist insists on pushing on past and beyond this. And, so, brains developed, figuring out new ways to react, to create. Miraculously, through the amazing laws of chaos theory, like self-organisation, and more, animals' brains developed the otherwise unlikely ability to look into the future. To act towards envisioned futures. So, very, very slowly, brains developed away from the black-versus-white fight for survival, and towards predicting and even manipulating the future. Ergo: the human neocortex.
That is surely not to say that more 'evolved' animals therefore divested themselves of the fight-or-flight mentality. Not at all! This 'reptilian', polarised, black-versus-white mentality continues within us all, to this day. It will NEVER disappear, because its main goal is SURVIVAL!
If you want to survive a great crocodile grabbing at your leg and throwing you about, and you happen to have a flame-thrower on you... are you going to stop, step into your refined neocortex, and consider that a flame thrower might harm fish? Or are you going to use it to stay alive!?! Everybody has the same answer to this! What is it to be human if not for the fuck-it-all mentality?!
Down the road, if you survive this crocodile attack, you might use your unnatural, unwarranted human privilege to work to make public safety better, the better the lives of crocodiles, or anything. Individual humans, given the opportunity, are capable of solving problems never-before even dared to be posed in the history of all time.
We humans have a neocortex. We are supposed to use it to figure out problems of fight-or-flight at an even higher, more discrete, more democratic level. Unfortunately, this does not happen with all humans. Often, it does. And that's great! But, often it doesn't.
I have pondered this question, and I have heard it on talk radio, to some extent, and amongst friends. Why is it that assholes also tend to be idiots, and vice versa? Very simply, assholes do things that make them end up looking like idiots. Because their best laid plans are anti-social. Therefore, THEY NEVER LEARN...
And idiots do really stupid things that never reach their 'ideals', and so the idiots react by lashing out in very ASSHOLE ways.
Assholes and idiots, e.g., idiots and assholes, is a vastly widespread phenomenon. It usually reflects an insistence by young males that their status quo is fine and not to be messed with. The whole point is to keep things as they are. The ways of doing things. The people in power. The food. The possible sex. Especially, the choices available to the young men defending the town, or city, or wherever.
What does it take for a young dude to defend his city? Not a lot of thinking. That is not to say that cities need to have their own defense from cultural urbanisation. I think they need this. I am just showing how easy it is for rural young dudes to take up a home-centric cause. Compare that with urban people taking up every progressive cause, and I think they can be forgiven.
Whatever the exigency of the moment - whatever the fad or the movie or the movement - and even, less so, whatever the drought or the waterfall - human beings have outdone every other species and developed this more considerate, more exploratory way of assessing impending threat. It's the higher, neocortex, baby, and, because of it, we are now without animal predators!
What is going to happen now? Now that we are supreme? What is going to please or push us towards the greater achievements of our race - without still looking at the whole carry-over of evolution - flight-or-flight, black-or-white anxiety?! Surely, we shall look to Hollywood, to show us how to rise out of these evolutionary bottlenecks we always get caught up. For mathematical reasons. Rising above is a mathematical problem.
It doesn't mean humans are any way out of the mire, of fighting to exist. It means that sufficient easier times have come along, enabling the evolution of a neocortex. This doesn't mean that man is extracted from the slings and arrows of brute survivalism. Man is as bound to these as he ever has been. It is just that, now, man has more in his quiver, and explaining why that matters, to the rest of a restive swarm, is virtually pointless.
When animals can afford to take a little break from this dog-eat-dog contest, they like to delight in sleep, dreams, rollicking fun, and the magic of universal diversity. They cannot get to this point of enjoyment until they feel safe. (And it doesn't matter if they feel safe if they are not safe). Diversity, fun, coexistence, abundance at your leisure, imagination, possibilities - progress - these don't happen without, first, some little moment of escape to safety.
If you can approach an animal, or tame him/her, and you both find you have enough to eat, and enough safety, for the near future, then you may become friends. You will have leaped over that wall of black-versus-white fear - your own fear, and the animal's fear. You can then proceed to both delight in the wonder, delight and diversity of nature, which the universe calls us all to do. Against the back-drop of survival of the fittest, which shows itself in the human world as the will to power. (The will to power would be the intention to eat everyone, if it kept to its core principles).
Plants have been like wallflowers, pretty OK with what comes their way, so long as they can survive - at least vicariously, via seeds. They do shrink at danger. They do lust for life. They do prefer a pleasant day. Most of the time, plants don't have to worry - to indulge in anxious black-versus-white fear and competition, at least as we see it - at least to the extent of animal experience.
Yet, along comes a fire, or a fungus, or what-have-you, and they suddenly light up on the scream index. Trees tell the rest of the forest they are in distress - to beware - to shunt resources wisely, etc. When this happens, all cells in a plant are singing the same song, "Us versus them!"
I am certain that some plant shall be discovered to have evolved ways of processing potential threats into more diverse alternatives for reacting, and therefore, of choosing more advantageous futures. In other words, I have no doubts that there shall be discovered some plants that have a kind of neocortical edge over their compatriots. I only say this because it is a natural bridge. It is a certain bridge.
Animals have been running around, looking for food, for hundreds of millions of years. For virtually all of this time, they have been locked into the eat-or-be-eaten paradigm - paradigm my ass - if you are IN it, it's not a paradigm, right? Either you eat, or you get eaten. That's not having rent money. That's sleeping on the sidewalk. That's falling out a window. That's not a paradigm. That is, "don't fuck with me or I will fuck with you." And, sometimes, a very nihilistic, "Sorry, I don't care about you or anything else, but now I am eating you!"
This bleak world still exists, in humanity, to degrees here or there. And it is the conservatives who tend to know this. Consequently, conservatives are blamed as having a countre-humanitarian, countre-progressive, EAT-EVERYBODY, philosophy.
Well. The sad fact is. That monstrous sort, who does exist, does often align with conservatives. Which is to say this: Those who know that the world is eat-or-be-eaten, though they all be mainly folks not wanting to get eaten, become aligned with those great monsters who believe the same philosophy, though their intentions is to EAT EVERYONE. This is the central flaw in Libertarian philosophy. Freedom for everyone, and therefore freedom for the predatory corporations and hedge funds, at the expense of everyone else who wants and deserves to be free. Am I right?
Well, this hampered struggle to progress exists not just in plants, but also in humans, here and today. This fight to resist getting eaten, getting all bound up with those who want to eat everyone. Not a fair game. But that is what our present system brings you. Not exactly progress. Not exactly escape from injustice.
Meanwhile, over the course of millions of years, the brains of animals, especially mammals, have been evolving. Trying to figure out the best - the easiest - the safest - ways of striving towards an easier life, without getting eaten. The existential drive to exist does not stop at existing. It pushes on to prevail, especially if it is contradicted.
We know that animals react to threat by making threats or fighting back. But the will to exist insists on pushing on past and beyond this. And, so, brains developed, figuring out new ways to react, to create. Miraculously, through the amazing laws of chaos theory, like self-organisation, and more, animals' brains developed the otherwise unlikely ability to look into the future. To act towards envisioned futures. So, very, very slowly, brains developed away from the black-versus-white fight for survival, and towards predicting and even manipulating the future. Ergo: the human neocortex.
That is surely not to say that more 'evolved' animals therefore divested themselves of the fight-or-flight mentality. Not at all! This 'reptilian', polarised, black-versus-white mentality continues within us all, to this day. It will NEVER disappear, because its main goal is SURVIVAL!
If you want to survive a great crocodile grabbing at your leg and throwing you about, and you happen to have a flame-thrower on you... are you going to stop, step into your refined neocortex, and consider that a flame thrower might harm fish? Or are you going to use it to stay alive!?! Everybody has the same answer to this! What is it to be human if not for the fuck-it-all mentality?!
Down the road, if you survive this crocodile attack, you might use your unnatural, unwarranted human privilege to work to make public safety better, the better the lives of crocodiles, or anything. Individual humans, given the opportunity, are capable of solving problems never-before even dared to be posed in the history of all time.
We humans have a neocortex. We are supposed to use it to figure out problems of fight-or-flight at an even higher, more discrete, more democratic level. Unfortunately, this does not happen with all humans. Often, it does. And that's great! But, often it doesn't.
I have pondered this question, and I have heard it on talk radio, to some extent, and amongst friends. Why is it that assholes also tend to be idiots, and vice versa? Very simply, assholes do things that make them end up looking like idiots. Because their best laid plans are anti-social. Therefore, THEY NEVER LEARN...
And idiots do really stupid things that never reach their 'ideals', and so the idiots react by lashing out in very ASSHOLE ways.
Assholes and idiots, e.g., idiots and assholes, is a vastly widespread phenomenon. It usually reflects an insistence by young males that their status quo is fine and not to be messed with. The whole point is to keep things as they are. The ways of doing things. The people in power. The food. The possible sex. Especially, the choices available to the young men defending the town, or city, or wherever.
What does it take for a young dude to defend his city? Not a lot of thinking. That is not to say that cities need to have their own defense from cultural urbanisation. I think they need this. I am just showing how easy it is for rural young dudes to take up a home-centric cause. Compare that with urban people taking up every progressive cause, and I think they can be forgiven.
Whatever the exigency of the moment - whatever the fad or the movie or the movement - and even, less so, whatever the drought or the waterfall - human beings have outdone every other species and developed this more considerate, more exploratory way of assessing impending threat. It's the higher, neocortex, baby, and, because of it, we are now without animal predators!
What is going to happen now? Now that we are supreme? What is going to please or push us towards the greater achievements of our race - without still looking at the whole carry-over of evolution - flight-or-flight, black-or-white anxiety?! Surely, we shall look to Hollywood, to show us how to rise out of these evolutionary bottlenecks we always get caught up. For mathematical reasons. Rising above is a mathematical problem.
It doesn't mean humans are any way out of the mire, of fighting to exist. It means that sufficient easier times have come along, enabling the evolution of a neocortex. This doesn't mean that man is extracted from the slings and arrows of brute survivalism. Man is as bound to these as he ever has been. It is just that, now, man has more in his quiver, and explaining why that matters, to the rest of a restive swarm, is virtually pointless.