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History is a violent elimination game, minimizing A/P.
| Name | Gunnar Adler-Karlsson |
| Life | 1933 |
| Country | Sweden |
| Category | Meditator |
| Wikipedia | >> |
For 364 days of mankind's first megayear (see p. 00 Descartes), we lived in small family kingdoms and spread slowly across the globe. On New Years Eve of the next megayear, we united the tens of thousands of small social units into ever fewer and bigger ones, a process that is now called globalization.
The rulers, A, have become ever fewer; the population, P, ever more numerous. Write that as a fraction, A/P, and it tends towards 1/oo, which is 0.
This highly abstract way of expressing the present human condition, with only two prime factors, may also point us in the right direction if we want to postpone the coming of a "zero" mankind.
Most doomsday discussions concentrate upon the P, upon the effects of the Malthusian population and consumption explosion, destroying nature and, as Euripides suggested, leading to wars.
My conviction is that at least equally much concentration should be given to the "A's", that is, to the struggle for power between juice-driven adrenalinomaniacs. No doubt, it is this struggle for power that lies behind both the urge to wars, the unending technological arms race poisoning nature and, even, the population explosion.
What lies behind this struggle, central to both Heraclitus and Machiavelli? Marx answered: the class struggle, the conflict between rich and poor. And, indeed, today we can intuit a global class warfare between that fifth of humanity who creates and appropriates nine tenth of all progress, and that fifth which, according to UN estimates, lives on a dollar a day or, generously, three.
What, then, lies behind class warfare? Euripides pointed to the hubris, to the arrogance of the successful. Augustine, to "that devil envy" for the less so. Why do we fall into the viscous circle of arrogance and envy, feeding each other?
My hunch is that we may glean some wisdom from my philosophers.There is especially one pattern that intrigues me.
Assume that Durkheim is right. The cultural Superbrains are living organisms, sui
generis, since some ten thousand years ago. If so, why shouldn't Malthus, too, be right in suggesting that these Superbrains have a "constant tendency...to increase beyond the nourishment prepared" for them? That is, a constant unconscious tendency to imperialism, colonialism and expansion?
If so, it follows that Darwin's analytical truth about the violence of evolution - however normatively horrible - applies also to our "cultural" societies. It could help us understand the horrors of inter-European behaviour since at least 1789, as well as the globalization process.
As that "Heraclitian" process, for good and evil, has now taken us to a globally united world with six billion interdependent human beings, class warfare is also bound to become global, as well as feelings of arrogance and envy.
These feelings are, I believe, genetically based. They have, most likely, been highly relevant in the struggle for existence, for instance, in the form of the global class struggle between socialism and capitalism in the past century. With our new atomic and other terror weapons, mankind cannot afford another century of such violence.
That is the challenge to the next generations of young people! And, this is also my conviction, nothing will be more helpful for them than the fast growing genetic knowledge of ourselves. It tells us that the blame for our misfortunes should not be put on specific human scapegoats, but on some genes we all share. Neither do the successful deserve too much praise, especially not too much arrogant self-praise, because, more than anything else, they were lucky when their genetic cards were dealt, in their parents' bed.
Equipped with such genetic insights, mankind should be able to keep down both arrogance and envy, as well as suicidal behavior resulting from these aberrations in our earlier history.
Nothing will help us survive our next megayear, the next 10,000 years, as much as the wise council from Delphi: know yourself - genetically!
If so, it follows that Darwin's analytical truth about the violence of evolution - however normatively horrible - applies also to our "cultural" societies. It could help us understand the horrors of inter-European behaviour since at least 1789, as well as the globalization process.
As that "Heraclitian" process, for good and evil, has now taken us to a globally united world with six billion interdependent human beings, class warfare is also bound to become global, as well as feelings of arrogance and envy.
These feelings are, I believe, genetically based. They have, most likely, been highly relevant in the struggle for existence, for instance, in the form of the global class struggle between socialism and capitalism in the past century. With our new atomic and other terror weapons, mankind cannot afford another century of such violence.
That is the challenge to the next generations of young people! And, this is also my conviction, nothing will be more helpful for them than the fast growing genetic knowledge of ourselves. It tells us that the blame for our misfortunes should not be put on specific human scapegoats, but on some genes we all share. Neither do the successful deserve too much praise, especially not too much arrogant self-praise, because, more than anything else, they were lucky when their genetic cards were dealt, in their parents' bed.
Equipped with such genetic insights, mankind should be able to keep down both arrogance and envy, as well as suicidal behavior resulting from these aberrations in our earlier history.
Nothing will help us survive our next megayear, the next 10,000 years, as much as the wise council from Delphi: know yourself - genetically!