Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood.

Name	Charles Darwin
Life	1809 - 1882
Country	England
Category	Wisdom
Wikipedia	>>

This is the shocking truth of Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. For "knowing ourselves", Darwin is arguably the most important philosopher in human history. People exist, and they are not few, who say that modern, realistic men should start to count a new time from the publication of this book in 1859. One of the major faults of today's media debate, mentioned already in the context of Heraclitus, is that the difference between analytical and normative statements is blurred. Whoever said you like the analytical truth you find? Darwin evidently didn't like his: "at least I have found it so". Especially the intellectuals, who should be able to make this distinction, permit themselves to be intoxicated by ideas. So much so that an honest observer puts much of the blame for 170 million murdered fellowmen on such intoxicated intellectuals. Many are still so intoxicated of beautiful Marxist dreams of a future socialist equality that they blindly refuse even to discuss the analytical importance of Darwin's evolutionary theory for man. Darwin can be seen as a modern Heraclitus. He says "natural selection" or "struggle for existence" where the old Greek would have said polemos, war. Darwin generalizes and provides a scientific basis for the idea that

warfare and the struggle for power is the father of all things, pater panton. Heraclitus added that warfare made some into kings, others into slaves. A friend of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, coined the terms "fit" and "unfit". Darwin's closest competitor, Alfred Russel Wallace, said evolution only applied to lower orders of life, not to man. Having much contemplated the issues, Darwin said Wallace was wrong and Spencer right. The struggle for existence explains also the evolution of mankind. The basic rule of it is Spencer's "survival of the fittest", that is, of Heraclitus's kings. The slaves, however, shouldn't complain. As Mandeville had suggested, the luxury living of the kings created more employment for the slaves. Kings and slaves had a common interest - they needed each other as members of the same body. In what could human "progress" consist? At least one modern observer has suggested that the essence of evolution is the growth of intelligence. Intelligence is not only the father of all technical inventions which give us a better material life. It is also what gets the "fit", the successful, to somewhat moderate their innate arrogance, and the poor and powerless, to somewhat dampen their innate envy. By using intelligence instead of de Maistres's executioner, society in this way would grow closer to that "organism" that Cournot had seen as extra fit in the struggle for survival among nations. Such a development in the direction of "one social body" must, however, be voluntary. It demands much intelligence and understanding both among the rulers and the masses. This was something that Karl Marx didn't like.