Eating from the Forbidden Fruit

on the power of Good and Evil since the agricultural revolution

(a consequence of “jet-lag” in recent human evolution) (by Popko P. van der Molen, sept. 2008)

The three or four present day monotheïstic religions in the world, Islam, Christianity, Judaïsm and Buddhism, have in common a very central and basic tenet saying that “one should not do unto others what one would not wish to be done unto oneself” or “treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself”. This central tenet appears a very “good” and useful admonition. Contrary to that, history, and present day newspapers as well, show us that these great religions also have been the reason, or at least the pretext, for large scale killing, wholesale rape and untold further atrocities. Still, these religion’s official basic tenets and goals are like the quotes above, only to be associated with love, care, peace and unselfish interest in the other, with positive, supportive commitment. Apparently, what the great religions (try to) teach us is quite at difference with daily, worldwide practice, often also with that of themselves.

In these pages we will try to explain this seeming contradiction and investigate its roots and its meaning for our present day situation.

First of all we should pay some attention to what happened with the human situation since the agricultural revolution, which started just some 10.000 years ago. From an evolutionary point of view this is verily a very short period of time. Since premordial times, long before the agricultural revolution, human ancestors have been subject to evolutionary selection forces which have resulted in a behaviour pattern, well suited to survive the niche of Homo sapiens and its predecessors. Stemming from earlier hominids, they did already have a behavioural repertoire, shaped and polished by many millions of years of natural selection, well fitted to the circumstances they lived in. What this means in practice on a personal level, is that one’s feelings and reflexes are such that they automatically result in behaviour with optimal survival value. Feelings and reflexes, likes and dislikes, are built into the system in such a way that they automatically trigger the behaviour in an evolutionarily useful direction. Emotions of course go up and down (otherwise a creature would not move), but large and by our ancestors were, like any other species on this planet, well in harmony with their environment of which they were a well integrated part. Our ancestors lived well in balance with the rest of it. For this discourse we will call this set of Primordial requirements, needs, feelings and reflexes the “P”- feelings (of Primordial).

Recently however, i.e. since some 10.000 years, survival pressure and selection pressure have taken a radically different direction for the species Homo. Until that moment in human evolution, our behavioural system was adapted to and was functioning smoothly in an environment and a social setting, not very different from any other socially living hominid. Each hominid species had its own niche, but all living in balance and in harmony with nature. We were functioning in small or moderatley large groups of family and relatives, dealing with surrounding nature and with the other group members. Practically all of our behaviour, of our emotions and motivational systems, is designed for and well adapted to those tasks, to survive and procreate under those circumstances.

As is further explained elsewhere on this Wiki (see .................... ), the agricultural revolution however, brought with it the rule of large power structures. Organisational structures, wielding unprecedented amounts of power over and influence on people, took over the evolutionary lead. Since such power structures are not based on genes but on memes, their mutual competition for resources and their evolutionary struggle was suddenly happening on a very different time scale than anything that came ever before in evolution. The evolution of power structures and organizational formulas happens at the meme-level, the level of software so to speak, whereas the classical evolution, the one we all stem from, is an evolution between sets of genes, an evolution on the hardware-level, the usual stuff. In order to change and evolve, meme-sets only need little time, just the time it takes to spread some news to other people or to change somebody’s mind. Memes therefore do not need to wait until their carriers have procreated fysically, handing down the memes to one’s progeny during the upbringing of the young. That way the selection process would take a number of generations at least. The software however, doesn’t need to wait for the hardware turn over, but carries on at its own, much higher, speed and in turn pulls the hardware selection along, no matter how far the latter is dragging behind.

We humans, Homo sapiens, are thus the carriers of information bits on these two different levels. That does have some peculiar consequences for us. Because of the difference in time scale between the gene evolution and the meme evolution, between hardware evolution and software evolution, we human beings need to accomodate the requirements of both evolutionary pressure systems simultaneously. Otherwise we cannot survive and participate in and contribute to the next generations. Both sets of demands and requirements have to be met, or we will be selected out and done away with.

The large and complicated power structures that are in charge these days put demands on us humans, that are therefore completely new in evolutionary terms. We have to function in enormously much larger social networks than what our early ancestors were accustomed to and emotionally were rigged up for. We also need to deal with a lot more, continuous, change of circumstances than any earlier hominid ever was confronted with and was adapted to. Furthermore we have to deal with required obedience to organizational systems and principles, rather than just to specific persons, whereas we are only emotionally rigged up for the latter. We have to be willing to live in cages, more or less luxurious, rather than enjoy the evening camp fire and the feel of wind, water, plants and soil, which, as a compensation, we seek in our “holidays”. Etc., etc. For this discourse we will call this set of New, secondary requirements and the subsequent needs, feelings and reflexes, installed and stimulated by the power systems in charge, as the “N”- demands (of New).

Because in these last 10.000 years our genes did not yet have the time to adapt sufficiently to the strongly changed artificial environment we live in, our (old) behavioural tendencies and reflexes, the P-feelings, are not suited well for our present day existence. The demands of the power structures in charge, the N-demands, do not match well with our feelings and emotions, the P-feelings. This implies, that, no matter what we do or try, we cannot, in general, organise things in such a way that we feel we are “at place”. We could achieve this in the eras before the agricultural revolution, but not any more. It has in principle become impossible. That does not mean that not some stray individuals could achieve a relative harmony and happiness with their present day life, but it means that such happiness and balance with the environmental situation is the exception, rather than the rule.

The bottom line is that that which we feel deeply inside is right, the P-feelings, are at variance with the demands of the structures we live in and depend on, the N-requirements. Human beings are therefore subject to two competing grand sets of directives for our behaviour. One grand set is what feels natural and harmonious, stemming from primordial times, and to which we are genetically fully adapted, and another grand set, taking care of the demands of the power structures in charge, which set of directives feels to us however as unnatural or “bad”. From this opposite pair of demands and requirements, sayings emerge like: “Power corrupts”, Befehl ist Befehl and also the blindness of governmental organizations and similar Kafka-like phenomena, seemingly not caring for the innate feelings of their carriers, us humans.

Large and by, modern society sucks, and there is no other way, simply because of the delay in the human hardware evolution in comparison to the much faster evolution of the software programs, ruling human societal structures these days. Dreaming of “ideal” societies therefore is useless. The ideal is not available any more. We lost it with the agricultural revolution. The demands by the meme-power structures, the N-needs, always surpass and differ from what our behavioural inclinations would suggest and trigger by themselves, the P-needs. And that discrepancy translates itself directly and unavoidably into a certain measure of stress and unhappiness. The power systems require us to do a whole range of things we would never do by ourselves. Hence the eternal tension within our own behavioural system.

To that end the influences from these power structures control our behaviour against inborn reflexes of love, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings has been investigated broadly. Milgram’s experiments with obedience to authority illustrate these effects very clearly (Milgram, .......). Only the very strong and stubborn manage to defy imposed authority and refuse to torture their victims. It is the meek and the adapted persons on the other hand, who are the best carriers for the power stuctures in charge, who follow the rules, no matter what.

Considering the requirements for meme-power-structures, we can safely make a number of basic assumptions. 1) First, the power structure should collect and condense enough power over lots of human individuals and make them compete successfully with other meme-power-structures over resources. Large numbers help, as do collective hitting power and personal subservience to the system. 2) Second, the power structure should harness the energy and activity of its carriers into parallel directed subservience to the system, without loosing too much of its member’s basic energy potential. 3) Third, in order to compete effectively with other power structures, it should make its members claim and gain as much of environment, space and resources as possible, at the expense of the carriers of competing power structures, cultures and creeds.

We can distinguish a number of mechanisms and rules that power structures apply to achieve the above mentioned three basic requirements.

• • • • • • • • • • • something about 1) ******************

To achieve goal number 2, a power structure may, in order to re-direct energy and output into directions for the benefit and growth of the power structure itself, apply so much repressive techniques, blocking the “natural” tendencies of human beings, its carriers, that the individuals lose even up to 50% or perhaps even 90% of the potential individual energy and action-ouput. Losing that much behavioural output is not a problem, as long as not all of the output is quenched. However, again, if the harnessing and subductive forces do quench all energy in a limited number of its carriers, that is not an evolutionary problem. A percentage of 1 or 3 of suicides in a population is a price, well acceptable for better controlling the remaining 97%.

To achieve goal number 3, a power structure can apply a culture of proselytizing, either through creed or through other cultural dictums, or may apply genocidal actions and wars. ........................................ ............................

The general direction of recent human evolution is a moving away from Eden, from our Primordial state of living as our hunter-gatherer ancestors were used to. We are moving away from a state of harmony between environment and behavioural tendencies and feelings. We are pulled away from that state and evolutionarily pushed into adaptations to large power structures, adaptations that our genetic evolution cannot achieve quickly enough to produce a “good fit” between our emotional make up and the power systems ruling our days. In fact, looking at the details of the political power struggles throughout human history, this model would predict that the more unpleasant power systems tend to win, or at least the power structures that succeed best in harnessing human’s primordial feelings and tendencies and replace them with the needs and requirements of the system, that are often felt by us humans as “inhuman”, but unavoidable. (“Lex dura, sed lex”, as the Romans already stated and without it the state would collapse.)

However, the less stress a system induces, while still succeeding to invoke obedience, the better and the less loss of productivity and human lifes. Therefore the best system tricks are those that cause human beings to follow the rules without being aware too much of the prices they pay. As explained elsewhere on this Wiki (see ..........................), Homo sapiens is not so very “sapiens”, in that special mechanisms have been built in, that block the use of our intelligent facilities on our own personal and group behaviour. It does not need further explanation that this facility is being utilized to the full by the power structures in charge and that any method to strengthen this specific and peculiar blindness for the self, is applied. We can therefore safely assume that the most successful cultures on earth are also those that induce and strengthen these typical blindnesses best, where possible, paired to great intelligence and analytic power. The more specific the blindness is for strictly the human behaviour, the more space there is for a further development of general intelligence and analytic power without impairing procreational contribution.

Power structures of course have advantage of concealing that they “steal” human wellbeing and happiness and the best way to conceal is to strengthen the already typical human blindness for the own behaviour, reflexes and feelings and to use that murky area for inducing the dictums, norms and rules that the power structure needs, but that tend to induce aversive feelings in its carriers.

As a consequence, the basic trick of all power structures is the central notion of “Good and Bad” and of the “primal sin”. As is shown elsewhere on this Wiki (see ............................), the Good and Bad dimension is one of the most conspicuous and striking features of the human system of assessment and judgment. It does steer human normative systems and rules of behaviour and channels our social behaviour as well. In fact that dimension of Good and Bad takes care of consolidation of our social relations and social predictability. Being the most important of all dimensions of human assessment and social judgment, this cognitive dimension also consumes a considerable part of the energy consumption in our brain. This underlines the great importance of this dimension, which is one aspect of the notion of Good and Bad. Strikingly however, it can be shown from ethologicsal research on humans, that this Good-Bad dimension, being one of our major tools of social behaviour, does not correlate whatsoever with actual behaviour, it just colours our perception of behaviour and is thus merely a tool of directing our own reactions on other people’s behaviour by means of masking reality effectively. In other words, the most important tool we humans utilize for assessing our own and each other’s behaviour is a tool that only and exclusively serves for enforcing our blindness for our own behaviour. Apparently, it evolutionarily pays off for us humans to spend a major part of our intellectual activity and our energy on this blinding tool of mystification. (For a further elucidation and scientific analysis of the role of this dimension in the overall system of the perception of personality differences, see: ...................................)

In short, the knowledge of Good and Bad is in human culture a central and very important notion. But also, it is the basis of illusions and distortion of reality. Reality does not bother with Good and Bad, but only with principles of survival and evolution. This distortion holds in particular for the application of Good and Bad on our own behaviour. In that area it is an effective veil, hiding the real significance of our own behaviour, making space for the unhampered expression of our primordial social impulses, without any intelligent manipulation modifying the aeons old social reflexes. Little wonder that the major religions on this earth have the notion of Good and Bad as central themes in their teachings, and also do have in common that they mix up and conceal the millennia old tension between the P-feelings and the N-needs. They make such distinctions large and by invisible and indistinguishable from one another (beter formuleren ............................) exploiting the always already existing tension between our primordial feelings and the system requirements and **********. Whether a religion focusses on Primal Sin or not, large religions always have in common that they install in its carriers a fundamental feeling of “not being good enough”, opening the road to inplant any set of behavioural directives the power system in question requires.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • This text is still under construction **************************

Weer terug verbinden met de eerste alinea van dit artikel.

Hier een goed stuk uitleg over de goed-slecht verwarring wordt gebruikt als hoeksteen voor het dooreenklutsen tot een onbegrijpelijke brei van alle aansporingen en vermaningen van de power structures, met de oergevoelens en reflexen, die altijd als "intrinsiek goed' worden gevoeld diep van binnen. En voor zover die oergevoelens en reflexen niet van pas komen in de betreffende power structure en dus moeten worden onderdrukt, worden de taboes die dat moeten bewerkstelligen gebruikt als neurotiserende invloeden, die de plooibaarheid goed hoog houden (ook al gaat de totale gedrags-output daardoor naar beneden.