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./oct. 2008)

"Amathology", an introduction

This chapter is about what we could label as "amathology", the science of ignorance. It deals with the following 15 interrelated items:

• The magnitude of human ignorance.

• The special purpose and function of human ignorance about oneself.

• The fuzzy world of ethical norms in a field of Self-blindness.

• The forbidden fruit; knowledge of Good and Bad.

• The illusory character of notions of Good and Evil.

• The crucial function of the knowledge of Good and Evil for blinding human awareness about its own social- and other behaviour.

• The amounts of physical energy needed to keep illusory notions of good and bad functioning in the human mind.

• The difference between newly emerging spiritual movements and established great religions.

• the evolutionary necessity for any great religion to help block effectively anything leading to the very essence that religions pretend to bring.

• Great religions as surviving power structures binding human beings in ignorance and slavery instead of liberating them from neurotic misery.

• Religions: power structures inducing, consolidating and exploiting the deep confusion about our ethics, using "Good and Evil" illusions as a basic tool.

• P-feelings and N-demands; emotions and feelings from our Primordial evolutionary history and the New requirements and dictates from our membership of present day power structures ruling our world.

• The unavoidable friction between P-feelings and N-demands in humans; the way religions and other power structures utilize this elementary friction in mind and soul to enhance human ignorance and to strengthen confusion about its own behaviour.

• How ignorance about the own behaviour helps to trigger the emergence of guilt and perpetual neurotic fears, caused by conflicting P-feelings and N-demands.

• Great religions: how they monopolize the evolutionary necessity of ignorance, superstition and religious deceit, the major tools for inflicting perpetual neurotic fears and malleability for the sake of the power structures.

Discussions about the following items can be found elsewhere on this Wiki.

• The evolutionary necessity of the typical human blindness for the Self and the evolutionary history of this subject-specific awareness-block.

• Evolutionary "jet-lag"; the human species torn between the slow evolution of the genes and the fast evolution of the memes.

• The evolutionary dictates for the evolution of meme structures; the prerequisites of power structures.

So far the 15 issues to be addressed below.

Human culture has arrived at a point where we can control nature to the extent as to not run any risks any more, that formerly determined the lives and fate of each and all individuals. We have learned to fight and win any conflict with large predators, with cold, heat, floods, drought, starvation, and even with almost all contagious diseases. In principle, technically speaking, any healthy individual could live until old age in peaceful circumstances, were it not for mankind itself providing for fatal risks for oneself and for each other. Evolutionarily, mankind has become its own primary source of risk, its own most important selection force. As a consequence, the main direction of selection has changed dramatically since some tens of thousands of years. This can be verified also by recent DNA research that shows that the speed of change of the human DNA has increased tremendously since the beginning of this most recent period of human evolution.

In fact, the human species has arrived in a quite peculiar situation. Seen from the point of view of our most basic instincts, our most basic feelings, wishes and desires, we have, in our modern world, developed the technical means and tricks to fulfil each and every wish, stemming from our inmost primordial systems of emotions and motivations. We could in principle all be happy and safe. However, as it appears, reality is quite different. We have become our own predators and any large scale civilization is in fact just some postponement of that novel direction of our selection pressure, taking its toll anew at any occasion when things run out of control. As has been said by philosophers before, civilization can in practice be regarded as just a conspiracy against evolution, human evolution. Apparently, that is quite true and it is always just a short lasting postponement of selection pressure - in the new direction -. In any culture, periods of peace and prosperity don't last very long. Evolution has to take its course, and it does, also in us, cultured humans.

Trying to look at this situation from the outside, it seems highly peculiar that we can fly through the air with hundreds of people at a time in one machine, that we can sail the seas in vessels harbouring tens of thousands of people, that we can plan and cultivate food for a hundred times or more people than are living in the areas in question, that we can put a man on the moon and dive down into the deepest oceans and return to tell what we have seen, that we can look into the universe into distances so far away that is difficult to imagine what such distances mean, distances, travelled by light in millions of years, that we understand the most elementary particles of matter to the point where we can put together nuclear bombs and nuclear energy plants, and still, and still, we do not seem capable to organize our societies in such a way, that we can live in relative peace and security.

No-go areas for our intelligence

We seem not to be capable of understanding our own behaviour, let alone organize it in a mutually useful way. It seems far more easy to organize war than to organize peace. This failure to understand our own behaviour can be corroborated by psychological research during the last decades. Indeed it appears that human being posses an uncanny capacity to not-see how they are functioning themselves. We are struck with a very strong form of blindness for our own emotions, motivations and feelings. Of course, we do have some notion of what we feel, what we see and what we want, but, as an overwhelming avalanche of scientific psychological research shows, these notions differ greatly from reality.

In fact, human beings spend surprising amounts of energy and brain capacity to just mystify and hide their own behaviour from sober and intelligent investigation, also by themselves. Evidently, it looks like this typical blindness, blocking our awareness and thinking power in certain areas, does have a significant evolutionary advantage. This human blindness is apparently an ESS, an evolutionarily stable strategy.

In this treatise we will discuss some aspects of this blindness, the importance of this specific ignorance. Especially, we will focus on a central issue in this blindness, the notion of Good versus Evil and on the highly illusory character of it. Of course, we humans know and are aware of what is good for us and what is harmful or bad for us. In general, what we need biologically, is what we like and we consider those needed things as "good". Reversely, what is harmful to us, we consider and label as "bad". So far so good. Any monkey or other animal can be shown to harbour such notions.

However, in humans something has become fishy in these matters, especially where good and bad refer to ethics, to what we ourselves should or should not do. The idea of what is most basic about Good and Bad or between Good and Evil, being at the centre of our cultural heritage, nowadays brings confusion and mystification rather than clarity about what to do and what to avoid. Notions of Good and Bad produce massive fears and neuroses, rather than clarity, tranquillity and peace. How come?

This article deals with the how and why of Good and Bad in us humans and with the evolutionary source of the confusion in these matters. This notion of Good and Evil is the most central issue in any modern human culture and it can be shown that human beings invest massive amounts of time and energy on maintaining its functioning. At the same time it can be shown that these notions, or at least crucial parts of it, are fully illusory and serve confusion rather than clarification. In fact, Good and Evil can be seen as the central and basic instruments of keeping the human species locked up in blindness, thus safeguarding the possibility of a further evolution of human intelligence and, what is more, also a strengthening of the forces that bind us present day humans in miserable slavery of the meme-level power structures that nowadays are in charge of our evolution.

The confusing role of established religions

The three or four present day monotheistic religions in the world, Islam, Christianity, Judaism 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 to us as a very “good” and useful admonition. Contrary to that however, 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 on a rather continuous basis. 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 seemingly (try to) teach us is quite at variance with daily, worldwide practice in human society, often also with the practice of the great religions themselves.

In the pages below we will try to explain this seeming contradiction and investigate its evolutionary roots and its meaning and significance for the present day human situation.

The primordial niche of Homo sapiens and the feelings and emotions "fitting" that environment

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 moderately 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.

New demands and requirements since the agricultural revolution

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).

Friction between P-feelings and N-demands; "Primordial" versus "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 now 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 for modern human beings.

The bottom line is that that which we feel deeply inside, 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, evolutionarily novel, taking care of the demands of the power structures in charge, which set of directives often feels to us however as unnatural or “bad”. From this opposite and often conflicting 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 about 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 simply 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, if we would still be living outside of modern meme level power structures. Hence the (for us) eternal tension within our own behavioural system.

After the second world war, induced by the atrocities during the war, finally some curiosity emerged again after the possible sources of the striking frictions in the human behavioural and normative systems. One finally recognized that there were some disquieting incongruities in human normative thinking and feeling, that may lead to unheard of atrocities and disasters. Research was conducted to investigate the influences from political and cultural power structures controlling our behaviour against inborn reflexes of love, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings. In particular, Milgram’s experiments with obedience to authority illustrate these effects very clearly (Milgram, .......) and have been discussed widely in those years. Only the very strong and stubborn managed to defy imposed authority and refused to torture their victims in the name of the "Good cause". It is the meek and the well adapted persons on the other hand, who are the best carriers for the power stuctures in charge, and who tend to follow the rules, no matter what. They are the most likely to press the torture button or pull the trigger to wretch compliance and obedience from the victims.

Some basic requirements for successful power structures

Let's focus on the power structures at the level of memes, that control our lives these days, simply because their evolution outruns by far the classic evolution of physical bodies, the animal kingdom. Elsewhere on this Wiki we have commented upon the reason why this meme level evolution has become the dominant factor in our lives. In order to understand the consequences of this, let's consider what are the requirements for meme-power-structures to be an ESS, an evolutionarily stable strategy. To answer that question 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. They may be subdued into malleable neuroticism and misery, but not to the point of a complete break down, because then all useful output of the individuals would stop.

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. Expansion and proselytizing are therefore highly adaptive evolutionary tools for meme power structures.

Having determined these three basic requirements for power structures to be evolutionarily successful, we can also distinguish a number of mechanisms and rules applied by power structures to achieve the above mentioned 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 either. 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 to acquire more "Lebensraum" and other resources. It was certainly not a privilege of the Third Reich to adopt such strategies, only, these days such strategies are customarily disguised and hidden from sight in a "civilized" way, but they are the leading hidden agenda's, ruling the show, nevertheless. ........................................ ............................

Where evolution is leading us

A result of the dominating influence of the power structures in charge is that 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 original 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 of human lifes. Therefore the best tricks of the system are those that cause human beings to follow the rules without being aware too much of the price they are paying. As explained above, and in more detail 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 own, human, behaviour, the more room there is for a further development of general intelligence and analytic power, without hampering procreational contributions.

The evolutionary importance of blindness for self and the illusion of Good and Bad

Power structures of course derive advantage from concealing that they “steal” human well being and happiness. And the best way to conceal that is to strengthen the already typical human blindness for the own behaviour, reflexes and feelings and subsequently to use that area of murky perception for inducing the dictums, norms and rules that the power structure needs. However, these are norms and rules that would tend to induce aversive feelings in its carriers, us modern humans, in particular in case these dictums and rules could be perceived clearly and undistortedly.

To achieve this required level of blindness, a basic trick and cornerstone of all existing large power structures is the central notion of “Good and Bad” and of “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 judgement. We do spend enormous amounts of time and energy to keep this illusive notion of "Good and Bad" upright and kicking. 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 the consolidation of our social relations and social predictability. It helps us to socially "stay in place" and it automatically makes us act as to try keeping other people socially "in place" as well. (- For the mathematically oriented behavioural scientist among us: in the space of behavioural interactions, judgements and self-assessments, the analyses of our verbal repertoire shows that in the analyses of the covariances between the words, labels and phrases, in factor analysis the first principal component before rotation is always the dimension of "Good versus Bad" or something closely related. And strikingly, this apparently most important assessment tool is not related whatsoever with any actual behaviour. It is only related with how the observer or judge is, for personal reasons beyond his understanding, emotionally colouring in cognitively the behaviours observed. -) From these personality psychological research data it appears that it must apparently be of great evolutionary importance that our cognitive system spends so much processing capacity and time on maintaining the notion of Good versus Bad and the blindness for the Self coming with it.

Quantity of physical energy, invested in maintaining blindness and illusion

Evidently being the most important of all dimensions of human assessment and social judgement, this cognitive dimension also consumes a considerable part of the energy consumption in our brain. Our brain is one of the most energy consuming parts of our body. Our carotid arteries are relatively wide compared to those of other species. We humans spend the greater part of our time, at least since the agricultural revolution, in thinking. And a considerable part of that thinking time is spent on thinking about our own and other people's behaviour and what it means to us. Being socially living mammals this is of crucial and vital importance to us. As the above mentioned factoranalyses of the conceptual tools of that thinking show, the larger part of all that energy is spent on the first principal component of all those concepts and ideas, taking care of colouring in what we see and think with the delusive colouring of Good and Bad, of pro- and con-. This underlines again the great biological and evolutionary importance of this dimension of Good and Bad.

The illusory aspects of the Positive/negative or Good/Bad dimension

Strikingly however, as pointed out above, it can also be shown from ethological research on humans, that this Good-Bad dimension, being one of our major tools of social behaviour, does not correlate whatsoever with actual behaviour. Of course the notions of good and bad are quite useful in describing what is good for our health and survival and what is harmful. As such there is no problem and it shall be clear that such notions must be of crucial importance for our communication about what to avoid and what to strive after. However, there has evolved a catch in us humans. Applying these notions of Good and Bad on our own behaviour and on the behaviour of others appears to be a tricky business. Rather than just labelling other individuals as Good or Bad, which certainly also happens, we humans tend to colour any judgement or qualification with either a positive, wished for variety of that judgement, or to colour it in with a negative, not wanted variety of the same descriptive qualification. Without being aware of it, we humans are applying a "double" toolbox of qualifications, carrying positive sets of qualificative descriptions and negative sets of qualificative descriptions. Whereas such positive or negative qualifications, in fact, in reality, often refer to the same actual behaviours, we human judges, applying these judgement sets, are not aware that the positive or negative colourings of these judgements are just our own imagination. We are not aware that the positively judged behaviour is actually the same as the negatively judged behaviour, even in cases where we can show experimentally that the behaviour in question is or was exactly the same. (For more information about this type of research, see ................... .) So, apart from being very simple and useful tools for describing what items in our environment are harmful or beneficial to us, the Good and Bad differences also serve to colour all types of descriptive qualifications of one's own and other people's behaviours. In fact, by that mechanism, we are utilizing double sets of descriptions for behaviour. At the same time, we ascribe reality value to those positive and negative descriptions, beyond the actual objective assessment of what kind of behaviour has or shall occur. In other words, we, as judges, do not know that the qualifications we apply for ourselves and other people, express in particular whether we are in favour of that person, or not. We utilize a complete descriptive set of behaviours and characteristics on the positive side as well as a complete descriptive set of behaviours and characteristics on the negative side. But we do hold the differences between those two sets for actual behavioural differences, which they are not. Those differences just exist in our heads. The only effect they have on us, is that they do consolidate and stabilize our attitude to the judged persons in question. In that way these double judgement sets obscure reality from our sober perception and what in fact happens is that primordial social reflexes of attraction and repulsion are consolidated and stabilized by the colouring in of our cognitive social world.

In summary, the positive - negative colouring in of judgements and assessments of behaviour, which we could label as the Good versus Bad dimension in all judgements, just serves to colour our perception of behaviour and is thus merely a tool of directing our own reactions on other people’s behaviour. Instead of helping to sort out reality, it serves to mask reality effectively and blocks a clean and sober understanding of the behaviours observed. In other words, the evidently most important tool we humans utilize for assessing our own and each other’s behaviour is a tool that primarily 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 and delusion. (For a further elucidation and scientific analysis of the role of this Good-Bad dimension in the overall system of the perception of personality differences, see: ...................................)

Cultural power structures using Good and Evil as an effective blinding tool

In short, the knowledge of Good and Bad is in human culture a central and very important notion, but not only for knowing what is beneficial and what is harmful to us. It also is the basis of illusions and of a powerful distortion of reality. Reality itself 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 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 (see above). They make such distinctions large and by invisible and indistinguishable. Instead, they help to mix up these two categories of feelings and directives, turning them into a thoroughly mixed, incomprehensible tohuwabohu of half-truths, outright lies, primordial emotions, system directives and some bits and pieces, borrowed from reality. The most successful cultures make sure that from this incomprehensible broth the system directives come out, however invisibly, as dominating the actual behavioural output. And the inextricable mesh of notions, beliefs and impulses thus effectively protects the seat of these system instructions and directives from intelligent investigation. Otherwise one might figure out that what is demanded from us, goes counter to what we really want. The chaos is simply too big and too much emotionally loaded to be approached consciously. Besides, all of us have been trained to painfully shy away before we enter this danger zone. And, subsequently, religion offers itself deceptively as a soothing comforter in this neuroticizing swamp of delusions and fears.

As a consequence, religions, once they have become successful, but not necessarily before during their emergence, serve the dual role of firstly (1) inducing and consolidating a complete confusion and delusion about ourselves and our deepest and most important feelings (for which we do already have an inborn knack since the time our intelligence started to expand some million or so years ago; see elsewhere on this Wiki). Doing so they launch us into worlds of conceit, fairy tales and lies. Secondly (2) they offer us comfort and save havens for the most urgent recovery needed, promising a better life later and promising other improvements that will however never need to come. The most cynical of these types of lies is of course the fairy tale of an afterlife. Given the incredible gullability of this intelligent species of Homo sapiens, one cannot but admit that this is the best con trick that evolution could possibly have played on us. It is without doubt one of the best meme tricks evolved that help keep us down in miserable slavery of the meme level power structures in charge, seducing us suckers with claims that only "they" hold the keys for a better (after)life ("they" being the Gods or the religious and/or political authorities).

So, what is actually the case from an evolutionary point of view, is that the meme level power structures, that nowadays determine our human existence, exploit to the full the tension that exists in our human behavioural system, the tension between the P-feelings and the N-needs. These are two sets of instincts, basic urges, emotional reflexes, learned instructions and other cultural dictums. These two basic sets are to a large extent each others opposites, because they stem from different sources and serve different goals. The P-feelings stem from premordial times. They harbour the most basic instincts and emotional reflexes and are geared quite perfectly to humanity's original way of life "in the wild". The newly developed N-needs stem from the demands and requirements of large organizations, going with the power structures on the meme level. They only exist since some 10.000 years. They harbour less basic instincts and more learned instructions and cultural rules. Since the meme evolution runs so much faster than the classic gene evolution, adaptations to the requirements of the meme-power-structures, the N-needs, lags behind in comparison to the behavioural organization of the P-feelings. The human species is thus suffering from a sort of evolutionary "jet lag". This means that there will unavoidably exist a permanent field of emotional tension between the aeons old human reflexes and feelings (P-feelings) and the modern needs stemming from the organizational requirements. By such a continuous emotional friction, each person is naturally more prone to confusion and stress.

This present day source of confusion unavoidably adds to the already much longer existing characteristic of the human species that we are large and by blind for our own behavioural organization. As explained in further detail elsewhere on this Wiki (................), Homo sapiens is, for good evolutionary reasons, saddled with an uncanny capacity to nót understand its own or other people's behaviour. These two, added together, opened the road for the meme-power-structures in charge to further increase the ignorance about the own behaviour by maximizing the already existing confusion by the "jet lag" in our evolution, thus amplifying maximally the already existing blindness and ignorance regarding ourselves.

In this light it is also not surprising to find that under the power structures a whole range of mechanisms and techniques have developed that help inflicting and maintaining a high level of neuroticism and fears in human beings. That again increases stress and lack of awareness and thus even better prevents humans to investigate intelligently its own behaviour. That way the power structures have two great advantages. One is that the chance diminishes further that human beings will intelligently investigate the influence on and the power over human behaviour. The other is that the utter internal confusion as to the own behaviour opens the road to a more precise and farther reaching instructing and programming of the human beings manning the power structures in question.

In the light of the above considerations it is not surprising any more to find that the confusing notion of Good and Evil is utilized by any power structure to further confuse its carriers and consolidate their utter malleability. This blinding tool makes use of the already for some odd million years inbred tendency to be blind for the own behavioural reflexes and provides an excellent opportunity to mix the power structure instructions and admonitions inextricably with the already incomprehensible mesh of personal motivational impulses, thus preventing detection of the lies and false promises that are unavoidable attributes of these instructions from the meme-power-structures. Because of the "jet-lag" in human evolution namely, the power structures cannot but cheat and lie about their effects on personal well being. What people really want deep inside is what successful power structures can never provide, because they made us move away from our original niche.

The Good and Evil tool provides an effective method to help inflicting feelings of guilt and failure in people. In complex societies people are trained to be aware that they are falling short of expectations and of the formal requirements. They are basically taught that they are "no good". In general, after socialization the vast majority of people in any modern society has entered a state of average neuroticism and perpetual fear of failure. In this state the idea of Good versus Evil plays a crucial role. One has been taught that one is full of evil, an evil that has to be combatted fervently from the inside and the outside of course is prepared to help with that arduous task. By teaching that a whole range of primordial impulses and reflexes (P-feelings) are sinful, bad or even evil and that contrary to that a number of requirements from the power structure demands (N-needs) are "good", although deep inside they feel like "difficult" or "not fitting well", the confusion is complete, the fear of failure is further entrenched and malleability is further secured.

Any successful power structure therefore strengthens its power and influence and its survival chances compared to competing power structures, if it manages to monopolize the notions of Good and Evil and to fill out the specifications of Good and Bad for its carriers, us human beings. For that reason we can conclude that it is quite understandable that in all major religious systems, that by sheer size and influence can be regarded as successful power systems, no matter what their pretended spiritual background may be, the ideas of Good and Evil have been monopolized, while at the same time inflicting utter confusion and feelings of guilt and failure regarding the own behavioural impulses and feelings.

So, it is not surprising at all to find that

• • • • • • • (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 alw

ays 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.