| Chapter 13 - What really rules our rulers? |
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in Jan. 19th 2007.
CONTENT Chapter 13. From Jerison to Jason via Kentaurson. Page or What really rules the world. 1 1. What really rules the world? A. From proximate to ultimate causes. 1 B. The striving for reproductive success. 3 2. How do you get reproductive success? A. By being fit for fight. B. By having better weapons. 3. Which type of weapons have been the best? 4 A. Bigger brains since 60 m y – Jerison 5 B. Human brains since 3 m y 6 C. Superbrains since 10,000 years – Jason 7 D. Mental weapons for 5,000 years. 8 4. Uniting man with his weapons - Kentaurson. 8 A. with the horse 9 B. with tools and weapons C. with money D. with dreams 10 5. Plutocracy – do the rich rule? 10 6. The present struggle: globalization vs. sovereignty. 11 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Chapter 13. From Jerrison to Jason via Kentaurson. or What really rules the world.
A. From proximate to ultimate causes. If you say something half insulting to your neighbour and he by a sudden hit makes your nose bleed, you tend to dislike and even hate him. But then you get to know that his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather had had similar impulsive reactions. If you are wise, you start to ask some questions. Did he do what he did by some genetic urge? Can he help what he did? Does he really have any guilt for it? If not, is it really useful to dislike, to hate him and to want revenge? You may even come to ask if it wouldn’t be better to try to be less insulting and to create a friendly relation with him. If you just see the proximate reason for your hate, the sudden hit, you tend to believe in guilt and revenge. But if you see a long set of similar actions and if you start to suspect some ultimate blind genetic cause behind the bad behaviour, don’t you start to rethink your own reaction. The three forms of power or “ruling” that was discussed in chapter 12 were only of the proximate sorts. The More deep and ultimate explanations do exist. But few of us have ever given a thought to the fact that we all are the biological results of some 250,000 successful copulations. But so it is. If we make the extremely generous assumption that only one generation in five – it might have been every second or, even, everyone – has been engaged in a hot Darwinian struggle for survival, we have 50,000 wars and conflicts behind us. In all of them the most “fit for fight” have been victorious and got reproductive success. The less “fit for fight” have been defeated and disappeared without children. We who live are the great grandchildren of the first group. Should we not start to understand who we are and why we behave as we do, like predatory animals? And to contemplate if not the same is true for our neighbours? Do any of us carry any guilt for our behaviour? The longer back in time we go, and the wider globally is our perspective, the better we can understand two facts. The first is that fighting for survival lies in the genes of all of us. It is a disposition that has a very deep biological root in us, a result of at least 50,000 occasions of selection between more or less “fit for fight” individuals. Thus, it is easily provoked by any little scare that our neighbours may give us, making us suspect that they want to rob a bit of “my” territory. From this follows the second fact, that in these aspects all alpha-males are more or less alike. We may, for Mendelian reasons, be different in our present “fit for fight” capacity. But at the bottom of the personality of all serious adrenalinomaniacs we find the same urge to fight, to fight to defend “us” and to defeat the ruling alpha-males of the threatening neighbours. The masses are normally behaving as passive and even willing cannon fodder for their own rulers, blindly hoping that will give reproductive success to their own children. This being true for generation after generation as caused by the 50,000 wars and conflicts behind us, as we assumed as a minimum, might it not be wise of us to start to ask a few essential questions? For instance, isn’t our behaviour of the same sort as my polar bears, eating seals when the possibility comes? Is it useful of laughable to condemn the polar bears for such behaviour? And, most important, aren’t we humans, in spite of all, a tiny bit more clever than the polar bears, so much so that we might even be able to solve our conflict at ever recurring Malthusian margins by peaceful compromises? And this, especially as history has taught us and as we should now know, that the joint economic efforts by Castor and Pollux is infinitely more productive in solving those food crises which are the ultimate causes behind the wars around the Malthusian margins. Shouldn’t we strive to control our third human basic need, that for power and for being Number One, in the same way as we try to control our desire for obesity-giving sweet food and HIV-giving free sex? Hopefully, with somewhat better results! B. The striving for reproductive success. It is now scientifically well established that we, too, are animals. And we are not only animals, we are predatory animals. Our well deserved name, I have suggested, is Homo sapiens praedator, the astute human predator. The fundamental hypothesis for explaining the behaviour of all animals is that they blindly strive for reproductive success. There is, so far as I know, nothing in human behaviour preventing us from assuming that also the behaviour of man, since around six million years, is ruled by the same struggle for reproductive success. That, I will assume, is what rules our rulers. The well-known objection that we evidently sometimes show an altruistic behaviour has been taken care of by William Hamilton and Richard Dawkins. They have clearly shown that such behaviour can be explained by a striving for reproductive success of our own genes, our “selfish” genes. Thus, to repeat, I will assume that what really rules our rulers is the blind animal struggle for reproductive success. Reproductive success, it’s a nice term. But what does it really mean? It means that to copulate we must live, to live and to let our children live, that is, to satisfy our first two basic human needs, we must have food. To get food we must have some form of territory. When we produce more than two children per generation our territory must expand, and expansion soon leads us to some Malthusian margin. At that margin the struggle for reproductive success leads most animals, and especially predatory animals, into a Darwinian competition or warfare, a biological fact that may act at any level of life, from the gene and the cell to humans[1] and, I postulate, also to Superbrains. In such a Darwinian competition, with given external conditions on a given territory, the given Mendelian equipment of the competitors, our innate biological differences, will, to a large extent determine who is most “fit for fight”, who wins and gets that reproductive success which all strive for, but that the loses just lost. Such has been the brutal truth of the Human Condition for some 250,000 generations. Nature has simply selected for the type of human rulers that I have named adrenalinomaniacs. And this group has developed a third basic human need, the desire always to win, always to be Number One, a need that is so strong that Cainesque fratricide must be seen as a normal human tendency. This is the brutal truth about our rulers. But, please observe, while they may, temporarily, rule their fellowmen, they do not rule themselves. They do not rule themselves because their own behaviour is ruled by blind evolutionary forces, by the blind desire for reproductive success in a nature ruled by the laws of Malthus, Darwin and Mendel. Our rulers may seem almighty rulers of everything, except themselves! And few of them have ever heard and much less understood that “Imperare sibi maximum imperium est”. 2. How do you get reproductive success?
In a world of eternal Malthusian margins and Darwinian struggle you must be prepared to fight for reproductive success. Weakness is not tolerated. It may be sweet for a while, but sooner or later a new margin is reached, expansion is necessary, it will be objected to, conflicts will arise and killing will be necessary. You will get reproductive success by being a better killer. So it has been so far. Ugly. Uglissima! But….your only essential question is: How do you win? And the only relevant answer is
What is a good weapon? There is essentially only one definition: it is a weapon that is somewhat better, more murderous, than the best weapons that your enemy has. The “goodness” of weapons – if that is not another contradictio in adiecto – is never anything absolute but always something relative. Now, all men are different in some ways, the Mendelian knowledge tells us. In a world with given external conditions, the winning of a fight is to no small extent not only influenced, but even decided, I would suggest, by Mendelian differences. What is that? To try to answer that question on an ultimate level, let us look upon the evolution of weapons and fighting.
If we start by looking at the very long evolutionary period over a few million years, blind nature has provided different life forms with different survival capacities. With a given nature or with a nature changing for, say, climate reasons, blind nature has selected those who have had the best summary of DNA and alleles among the competing units. Passive inner changes in the outfit of various animals have decided which of them have survived over the latest 600 million years. Can we make any better divisions for the latest part of this long period? Let me play with some ideas. 3Aa. By bigger brains since 60 m y – Jerison Several years ago I was fascinated by a study by Harry J. Jerison about Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence.[2] Pondering it, I wonder if it may not help us understand why our rulers, so far, have been unable to rule themselves. My question today may be formulated thus: is it man who creates his weapons or is it the weapons which create its men? Jerison, as I already mentioned in section ####, gave evidence for an arms race between ungulates and predators since some sixty million years ago. This was a very special arms race, one between the size of the brains. During these many years both types of animals have had a growth in the size of their brains. But the predators have all the time had a somewhat bigger brain than the ungulates. In the Darwinian struggle between the two, the ungulates have been the prey of the predators, not the other way around. In short, big brains eat small brains. This should not be seen just as a funny observation. Something more important may be hidden behind it. Some thirty years ago, a Danish researcher called Ester Boserup caused a debate about the origin of agriculture.[3] Was it, as most wanted to believe, a result of man’s intelligent thinking? Or was it, as Boserup suggested, a blind evolutionary result of the population pressure upon a restricted piece of land at what I have called “the Campbellian margin”? We may now be ready to generalize this discussion. The arms race came first, man later, much later. The arms race has existed for sixty million years, man only for six. That is what Jerison and modern genetic studies have shown us. The temptation of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” is always strong. Does the difference in age prove that man’s big brain simply is a result of a sixty million year old, but always blind selection process, steadily benefiting those with a marginally bigger brain? Let me confess, I am tempted to believe so. Then it would follow that brains are only another form of tools, like muscles, claws and teeth, extremely useful, even more useful than the other weapons, in the struggle for reproductive success. Is it these bigger brains, locked within the rather limited and too slowly growing cases of the skull, who, in the Darwinian struggle against each other, blindly have realized that the internal body weapons of man were not enough to defeat their advanced animal or human prey, that some new and even stronger weapons were necessary and that these only could be had outside of the restricted cassette of the body? What follows? Well, man is prone to brag about his “culture”, about his fabulous inventions, his technology and his incredible scientific advances. But is all this really something to brag about, by man? Isn’t he simply the instrument for a much more basic and blind evolutionary process in animals ? May it not possibly be so that the animal brain, at some level of the Darwinian struggle around some Malthusian margin, was too restricted in its fighting capacity and therefore got blind man to develop his so-called “culture”? Did blind evolution do so by transforming the arms race in internal tools, from ungulates and predators, into an equally blind arms race in outside or external weapons between, say, two tribes, capitalists and socialists or, now, between the United States and China? Robert Oppenheimer was once asked, in a hearing to get clearance to do more atomic bomb work, why he had had hesitations against the development of the hydrogen bomb. He said that part of his reason was that no one had debated the atomic bomb until after they had made it: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success”. The author from whom I quote this, Ann Finkbeiner, one of the best observers of the top American scientists behind the post-1945 arms race, adds: “Technical sweetness……..evokes a feeling intense enough to amount to a compulsion. As a motive, it is probably universal in scientists but is not at all limited to them.”[4] In sum, is a biologically pushed arms race in tools and weapons outside their body cases the driving force behind the behaviour of today’s adrenalinomaniac rulers? Is it the sixty million year blind arms race that really rules our rulers? If so, which are these arms? 3Ab. By human brains since three million years. Brains have been growing since, at least, 60 million years. But around three million years ago, this growth took a jump. Then, as discussed in sect. #### the brains of both chimpanzees and our forefathers were around 400 cubic centimetres (ccm) big. The chimps still have that. Humans have brains that are three to four times bigger, as an average around 1320 to 1350 ccm. Size is not enough. The Neanderthals had bigger brains than us who live today. Unfortunately the inside of the bony skulls is gone, so we know very little about the differences in the content of all the old skulls. But that size is important for understanding of who eats whom we should not doubt. My point here is that this growth in size of the human brain cannot be said to be a result of conscious human efforts. No human can take the praise for this development, as no chimp can be blamed for his family remaining on the same 400 ccm level. We are here looking at blind but, for us, very important natural selection. We know that chimpanzees do have “culture”, a few tools with which they can catch both fish and ants. But that is, after all, nothing compared to all the tools, instruments and weapons which man has developed outside of his own body since his brain started to grow. Cannot this be seen as a process of natural selection of an animal that is able to continue his body growth with the help of artefacts which, in fact, become united to his body? If so, is the development of man’s material culture a planned result of his conscious thinking? Or is it the result of a blind evolutionary selection of a living unit that develops ever more muscles, claws and teeth as outside parts of his body? To pinpoint, are the Noble Prize winners in physics really worth the praise? Shouldn’t we give those prizes to blind evolution? Together with all the praise and blame which we love to heap upon each other, hoping that some of the goodies will benefit also ourselves? 3B. By Superbrains since 10,000 years – Jason What is a good weapon? My answer was that it is a weapon that is somewhat better, more murderous, than the best weapons that your enemy has. Some ten- or twelve thousand years ago mankind hit the “Campbellian margin”. The intensity in the survival struggle increased. New weapons were necessary. Perhaps the capacity of single brains for thinking up new tools and weapons also had come to some limit. If that was so, why not combine two or more brains?! Why not replace generalized individual competition and warfare with cooperation and, especially, with co-thinking? That was what Castor and Pollux did, replacing Cain and Abel as archetypes for human behaviour. And if two brains could develop better weapons then one, why shouldn’t four brains be better yet, and eight and sixteen and so on, until all the world becomes one co-thinking Superbrain? Well, well, we should perhaps go a bit easy. A recent book about “the Jasons” give us the situation today. It reveals how in secrecy the top physicists in the This book also shows with what ugly arrogance these supermen look upon reality and their fellowmen. xxxxx
But what it does demonstrate is that the best weapons, that is, the most murderous weapons we have, are developed by co-thinking in groups of highly intelligent individuals, in Superbrains, who blindly sell their capacity to the political rulers. It is not the intelligent who rule us. Even the best of them are normally but grant- or career-slaves to some ruling adrenalinomaniac. And those are normally driven by the blind desire for reproductive success for their own kinship group or, for the growing groups that have replaced the kinship ones, from tribes to Superbrains. 3C. By Mental weapons. Around 5,000 years ago, that is my guessmate, a new type of tools and weapons emerged, the mental tools and weapons. Once the State Cultural Council of Sweden asked me to write a paper on culture, on “Humanism and consumism”[1]. I then found some 200 different definitions of that term, giving prestige to the ones who had formulated them. My solution was to create one of my own. Everything that man has invented, that didn’t exist in “natural nature”, that is, before agriculture, I call “culture”. This is, indeed, a very broad definition. But it does point to one important fact: you start to see all types of culture as tools and weapons against the threat of death. Especially against the new threats of death that the Campbellian margin presented. The major new threat at that margin was the intensification of the violent competition for food and territory. But now that competition wasn’t any more against nature, but between men, between kinship groups and between the emerging Superbrains. To keep those growing social entities together, the rulers needed not only daggers and the whip, the physical tools and weapons, but also such things as myth and religion, mental tools and weapons. These are the ones which still unite fighting soldiers. To about 99,99 percent they are biologically DNA-identical to primitive pre-agricultural savages. They are also equipped with the one million billion connections in the brain, 1015, which permit man not only to dream of, but also to believe in any dream, however metaphysical or even crazy. This is where the Mahabarata, the Bible, the Illiad and similar “narratives” – that is today the politically correct term – are starting to grow. They do so as instruments for strengthening the coherence inside the growing entities as well as for reinforcing their mental fighting fitness in the eternal struggles outside of them. Thus, in both ways, they serve the power of the ruler and the reproductive success of his people. In a more proximate light, this is where some of the most murderous pair of concepts started to take over our rational thinking, if we ever had any. Feelings of what is good for us, what gives us our lives, and feelings for what is bad for ut, what threatens with suffering and death have, of course always been with us. The feelings! Emotions are, as I have pointed out, at least 200 times older in us than the special human intelligence. But what now happens, during the latest one or two thousand parts of our existence, is that those feelings are getting words attached to them, words which then have been elaborated into for instance sermons, laws and literature, three of the more important fields of our culture. We ourselves are “good”, our enemies are “evil”. We belong to a good “God”, our enemies to an evil “devil”. Who is not with us, is against us. Who once was with us but isn’t anymore is even worse evil, a “heretic” who should be killed or, at the least, isolated and marginalized. Because, in fact, you must understand, those who are not with us are not human or, to be mild, not really human; they are animals, crawling animals, subhumans, Untermenschen, golems or goys. All these horrible dichotomies were once good for the coherence of “our” group, as well as for strengthening, through contempt, hate and violence, the will to kill “the others”. Man is still to about 99.99 percent biologically DNA-equal to those who invented these ideas. Thus, we should not be surprised that they have the same force over the masses - any masses - today as five thousand years ago! Neither should we be astonished over how unscrupulous leaders use these ideas as mental weapons also in the 21st century after Christ ! That is how the masses have been made into mental instruments for their leaders, That is how ever more individuals have become mental soldiers for ever fewer leaders and how the World Spirit has continued the minimization of A/P. 4. Uniting man with his weapons - Kentaurson.
Kentauros is the Greek word for a man who is united with his horse at its neck. The man kept his arms and his head. But he got four legs. This species was born in That is why I speak of a development from the Kentaursons to the Jasons. I will here also play with the idea that man, in fact, becomes so united with his external weapons that the two can be seen as equally much united as more muscles, longer claws and sharper teeth.
Why? Because life is a series of Darwinian struggles. The outcome of them is largely decided by the weapons available. Few can develop the new and more superior ones – superior in murdering – but all can copy. And when a new weapon has been developed, after a little while all have it, may it be better daggers or mini-nukes. It follows that those involved in these struggles become so dependent upon the best and most murderous weapons they have that they can not do without them. They become so united with them that the external weapons become as much a part of them as are the internal ones. 4a. with the horse The first example of such a union is, as the Greek myth suggests, that between man and his horse. For a few thousand years the horse has been the most important weapon of man. Man succeeded, so to say, to subordinate the brain of the horse as an obedient living weapon for man’s warfare. Excellent stories of that has been written by authors such as William McNeill and the British journalist and war historian…….####
4b. with the tools and weapons The same story is repeated when good leaders are skilled enough to subordinate not the brain of horses but the brains of other men, in ever bigger armies and ever more clever weapon builders. Today the classical example is the
Between the horses and that horrible bomb we have the long long history of scientific and technological development. Each step in this long chain, I would suggest, is but a unification of man with each new “superior” weapon into one single unit. That is the modern version, I would suggest, in the race with external weapons, not much different from the arms race of the internal brain weapon, as described by Jerison. 4c. with money We usually don’t look upon money as a weapon. But, of course it is! Students of economics have for long been taught that money is a means of exchange, a store of value and a tool for comparing values. I have yet to see a textbook of economics that tell the students that money, primarily, is not only one, but the most important weapon in the present arms race between competing Superbrains in the world. Why? How? Very simple! Because money is the instrument with which you can buy all other tools and instruments, dead as well as alive, as the story of the Jasons show. The more money you have, the more power you may become, first over your own life and then over the brains of others. If conflicts are unavoidable, it is thus utterly rational to try strive for money. And, as we have defined the good weapon as one that is slightly stronger than that of your next competitor or enemy - he who always tries to copy you and to get what you already have - you necessarily need to get a bit more money than you already have. This is what drives the present world capitalist economic system, I would suggest, a blind arms race for ever more money, between nations, companies, religions as well as between individuals throughout the modern social hierarchies, both at the top, the middle, and the bottom of any modern society. It is not a question of greed. It is a question of survival in an eternal Darwinian elimination contest, at any level of society. 4d. with dreams. While horses, weapons and money are external weapons, the new cultural weapons may be externally created but in a way they become even more united with the bodies of men. They form part of our brains. They are nurtured by our copious ability to dream. And they are guided by priests and ideological gurus, sometimes into those fanatical beliefs for which, also today, so-called modern men kill and die in huge numbers. These are the weapons which shamans, conjurors, haruspices, magicians, priests, scientists and politicians for around five millennia have been – and still are – putting into our heads, thereby getting us to defend and die for what we are made to believe in. And also to attack and kill those who have been made to dream about and to believe in something different. It seems now increasingly to be the case that fanatical beliefs in such mental weapons are united with the most murderous physical weapons, ruthlessly used, it does become urgent to meditate upon how mankind might avoid that Armageddon or Rapture, which fanatics believe in and hope for, or that somewhat more realistic Annihilation of our species that an increasing number of sceptics tend to fear and lament. 5. Plutocracy – do the rich rule? Well, if money really is so important, don’t we live in what, with the old Greeks, might rightly be called a plutocracy? If it is the richest of the world’s capitalists who have access to the best instruments, both physical and mental, including American Presidents, British Prime Ministers, and Saudi sheiks, shouldn’t we believe that it is these rich who rule us? No, we shouldn’t! Because it is still the blind struggle for survival, but now over top capitalists united into economic Superbrains who rule. And it is still the old evolutionary struggle around some Malthusian margins, now called the climate or the environmental crisis. In this Darwinian struggle in the world as it is now given, it is still the Mendelian differences. too, which heavily influence who will win and get reproductive success and who will lose and whose genetic markers will thus disappear in future generations. It is still the blind struggle for reproductive success that guides all this development. Again, what is reproductive success? Isn’t it, simply, what we in daily talk call power. Is the concept of “reproductive success” but a clever way for politically correct scientists to avoid insulting the powerful adrenalinomaniacs? Because these, normally, not only want to believe that they are the ones who rule the world, and try to prove it by giving money to the scientific grant slaves. But who also hate to hear that their actions are but blind biological reactions to challenges in a given situation, decided more by their genes and alleles and less by themselves. 6. The present power struggle: globalization versus sovereignty. Does anything of practical importance follow from all these meditations? Yes, I guess so. But let me first summarize. In several places I have suggested that mankind is confronted with a Hegelian World Spirit striving to minimize the fraction A/P, to get as many people, P, as possible – reproductive success – by elimination of as many competing adrenalinomaniacs, A, as possible. Can we now translate that into something that sounds less metaphysical and more realistic? The struggle for life gave rise to a blind arms race at least sixty million years ago. The desire to have more than two surviving children on a restricted piece of territory can easily explain such a biological development. Much later man has tried to explain this with reference to a half conscious attempt to overcome ever new Malthusian margins in a Darwinian competition with ever better tools and weapons. As the size of conquests in this struggle is decided by how far a canon can shoot from a capital or, more generally, by how strong the arms are, a process of integration, getting rid of weaker A:s, now tending towards globalization, is what logically follows. That is what is daily discussed in the political discussion and its media. That this process is identical to a diminishing degree of sovereignty seems, however, largely to be forgotten. Hardly a day passes without some middle or smaller nation tells us that they have a “sovereign right” to do this or that, to nationalize their oil fields as in Venezuela in early 2007, or to develop an atomic bomb, as several politically sovereign nations now want to do. The world does now have two important types of Superbrains. The political ones, connected to the 192 nations in the United Nations (Jan. 2007) all refer to the principles of the Peace of Westphalia from 1648, establishing the sovereign right of rulers inside a national territory to do what they want to. The economic Superbrains are now working all over the world. They have no respect for national borders and they are rich enough to buy themselves a political influence in many of the smaller and poorer nations. In fact, I want to repeat, one of the potentially most difficult conflicts we already are in, and that will grow in importance, is that between formal political sovereignty and informal economic globalization. The old time political, and formally sovereign A:s in many of the smaller nations will either be eliminated or replaced by economic Quislings. The gaps in the world economy are bound to become bigger, with the capitalist owners of the active multinational companies will become ever richer while a part of the growing masses at the bottom of the world hierarchy will not become poorer, but stay at the margin of survival in abject poverty. The horrible truth may be that, as the system now functions, the poor who live at the margin of survival in an abject poverty, contrary to what they believe, they live not in spite of but thanks to what is called the greed of the rich ones. But this greed may in reality be nothing but an expression of the blind struggle for reproductive success – also at the very top level. The super billionaires who are unable “sibi imperare” blindly continue the vain competition, without any end, to become somewhat richer than their next competitor. In so doing, however, they stimulate the scientific-technological-inventive arms race which, at its very end, at least give some simple food for survival to the next seventy million human fellow-beings with which our globe will increase in the year 2007. Until we have got a wide understanding of this seemingly inhuman, but in fact life-giving widening of all gaps, the process of globalization is bound to lead to a new and this time global class conflicts. ******* Is mankind determined to commit suicide in some such type of conflict? Or are we, with the help of our bigger brains, at all able to change our behaviour before it is too late? And, if so, how? That will be the question in chapter 14.
[1] Science, 8 Dec. 2006, p. 1558. [2] Academic Press 1973. [3] Ester Boserup, Economic and demographic relationships in development. Johns [4] Finkbeiner, The Jasons, Viking 2006, p.42.
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