Beyond Civilization, humanity's next great adventure

Comments on Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization, Humanity's Next Adventure"

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Introduction

(on Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization, Humanity's Next Great Adventure")

This book by Daniel Quinn is challenging us to take a few steps back and look at our own culture from a distance, enough distance to recognize the all pervading stressful and unpleasant characteristics of (our) culture that almost invariably make our days miserable.

Without trying to explain why humanity has ended up in this highly unpleasant situation of collective slavery, he clearly explains and illustrates what is our situation and since when in human history this misery started to dominate our lives. He shows how we are living in our culture, as opposed to how we would wish to live, would we have any chance to do so. As in his previous bestselling books, like "Ishmael", "The Story of B", etc., he points out that since the start of the agricultural revolution, some 10.000 years ago, gradually the "takers" took over from the "leavers", as he calls the 2 basic ways for humans to function in our present world. The "leavers" are the types that have chosen to live according to their primordial preferences and basic emotional make up. The "takers" are the types that live more in accordance with what present day culture requires from us. The latter basically live a life of slavery, in vain seeking compensations for their misery through all sorts of methods that our culture teaches us to find desirable. And they are the vast majority in our present day societies.

This Wiki adds to the books by Daniel Quinn by explaining scientifically "why" this strange and unpleasant situation could develop and what is more, why the emergence of this phase of misery in human evolution never could have been avoided in the first place, why it is a necessary but transitory state in humanity's existence.

In these pages we will take a small selection of pages of Quinn's "Beyond Civilization, Humanity's Next Great Adventure" and explain how his point of view coincides with the contents of this Wiki. What we will add subsequently is the "how and why" of it all.

In that way we aim to make Quinn's work even more comprehensible and powerful and embed it more firmly in scientific thinking.

The mysterious persistence

(from Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization, Humanity's Next Great Adventure")

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(Comments on Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization, Humanity's Next Great Adventure")

In the above text Quinn points out that it is rather remarkable that we, the ordinary human beings, keep accepting a life of relative slavery for which we do feel we are not fit. This ordinary (slavery) type he labeled elsewhere as "takers", as opposed to what he labeled as "leavers" or, in this text as "quitters".

This is quite in line with what is described in this Wiki, "takers" are the majority, having been molded into form by the power structures ruling our societies lives, whereas the "leavers" are the rare specimens that have escaped from the fetters of our civilization who insist on living a life they feel comfortable with.

In this Wiki it is argued that this miserable situation of Homo sapiens is indeed at variance with what would technically be possible for our species, but that this unpleasant situation is only a relatively short phase in our evolution, which phase by now is almost coming to an end. Basic to this misery is that since just a few thousands of years the fast evolution on the meme level put power structures in the lead of evolution, causing us humans to lag hopelessly behind in terms of where our genome has equipped us for and thus what we would prefer to experience as our social and biological environment. The power structures don't care as long as we survive suitably enough to serve as willing carriers of the meme sets of the power structures in charge. Mankind is emotionally and motivationally squeezed between its slow biological evolution of the genes and the much faster evolution of the memes we carry.

That painful friction between our hardware and "our" software only will come to an end by the time we humans start to understand the evolutionary characteristics of intelligence in general and our own intelligence in particular and we decide to take our unique situation seriously and act accordingly, finally utilizing our intelligent faculties to the full.

Quinn describes that specifically the emergence of power structures, managing and ruling food supplies and food stocks, act as the trigger and the underlying cause of the emergence and consolidation of slavery.

The turn away from tribalism

(from Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization, Humanity's Next Great Adventure")

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And on the role of religion in strengthening the power structures in keeping us enslaved, Quinn quotes Karl Marx.

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.......................( p.76)

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(Comments on Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization, Humanity's Next Great Adventure")

This also, is in line with the postulates of this Wiki. It says that religions never can grow and prosper if they would keep working on the uplifting and the welfare of the people. Therefore, in fact because of the dictates of evolutionary forces, religions always do the opposite of what they pretend to bring to the people. Otherwise they would not be able to compete with other religious structures and they would disappear. Any spiritual initiative or movement that would fulfill its promises to its people, would very soon lose its clients because self actualized individuals don not need such support of a "superior" system any longer. They are free and don't obey all the rules any more. Therefore all successful religious systems act as (tools of the) power structures and help keeping the population down. If they don't comply with enhancing and maintaining stress, ignorance and superstition on behalf of the software power systems in charge, they very quickly disappear because they are not an ESS (evolutionarily stable strategy).

Opium of the people

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And Quinn continues describing his own struggle with carving a passable life out of the societal conditions he has been living in.

Am I building my own pyramid?

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Quinn continues explaining how he sees that most civilizations in recorded history, like the Maya, the Olmec, the Hohokam, etc., sooner or later quit with "civilization" and returned to the life we were designed for, tribal life. In his view we are the one exception to that tendency in evolution.

Putting the pieces together

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We have a different view on the rise and fall of civilizations as have occurred all over the globe during the last 10.000 years or so. In our view Quinn quite accurately describes how the agricultural revolution triggered the dominance of (software) power structures over human life. Thereafter however, the process of software evolution, competition between power structures, started running its own course. Since that software evolution evolves much faster than the evolution at the gene level, since that time in us humans there exists a strong "pull" towards being suitable as carriers of power structure's memes. And as is pointed out elsewhere on this Wiki, this is causing an unpleasant mismatch between on the one hand what we "like", what our evolution has laid down over millions of years in our genetic make up, and on the other hand what the power structures demand from us, which is "fitting" into a power structure as effective carriers of its memes.

So, in our view our culture is not an exception in the sense that Quinn says that most civilizations in human history were sooner or later abandoned by its carriers whereas our own culture has failed to be abandoned by its carriers until the present day. We think that since the time agricultural revolution took off, there has been no more any chance on a significant scale for human beings to keep living in tribal structures. In most places in the world that is simply not any longer an ESS or evolutionarily stable strategy. Since thousands of years massive military power is an indispensable ingredient for a meme level power structure to be able to survive for long. And that simply cannot coincide with tribal level organization forms. So, until now we humans did not have any choice as to collectively choose for becoming "leavers" instead of "takers". That choice only will come as soon as humanity has started to grasp the mechanisms of its own evolution and of the inescapable patterns that the evolution of intelligence is putting on our path. This Wiki is helping to approach that level of understanding.

Quinn gives an example, "Jeffrey", to illustrate and underline the existential emergencies young people can encounter while struggling with the unnaturally feeling needs of the power structures they want us to fit into.

Jeffrey

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The open tribe

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In the text below Quinn rightly point out that our culture has ran out of hand to such an extent, that it now turns much of the global living biomass and irreversably a large part of the world's biodiversity, into ever larger quantities of useless, superfluous human flesh. In that sense the world as a whole appears to be in a very critical stage of illness. The human species, through our civilization, has become a dangerous disease for the world. However, the emergency situations arising from that condition, may eventually also trigger more human leaders to start using their heads, even for the important issues that underlie the "taker" structures ruling our lives.

But is "less harmful" enough ?

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Quinn continues to point out that what he suggests is certainly not a return to prehistoric times and structures. Rather, it is applying tribe-like structures of cooperation and working together in the overall context of our complex societies. As an illustration of how such an approach works he gives the following example from practice.

To distinguish is to know

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And the chapter below he mentions how ordinary citizens tend to regard groups of "leavers" who work together in tribe-like structures, interesting for many of the young, generally feared by the established adults.

The civilized hate and fear tribal people

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In the brief chapter below Quinn addresses the idea that the general misery of human beings and human society is in certain shortcomings, the idea being that once we manage to overcome the said human faults and mistakes, things should be much better and life should be better bearable, yes, even pleasant for the majority. He points out instead that what is basically wrong is that we collectively adhere to the wrong formula of civilization and that we better had abandon that unwholesome paradigm and return to a more tribal blueprint of living and working together in groups of manageable size.

Why what we've got is unsustainable

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Jet lag in human evolution; friction between the gene level evolution and the meme level evolution

(Comments on Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization, Humanity's Next Great Adventure")

Whereas the further contents of this Wiki amply support the idea of Quinn that humanity is in a cultural situation in which it cannot lead happy lives, a situation that causes most of us to be manipulated into a permanent state of neurotic stress and misery, this Wiki attempts to go one step further and uncover the underlying inevitable causes of this dramatic state of affairs.

On this Wiki it is on the one hand argued that we humans are the unique carriers of a superior level of intelligence and capacity to comprehend complex matters. One of the tenets defended here is that that intelligence only could rise above the general ordinary level at which in most phyla in the animal kingdom the development of intelligence is halted, after a special provision had been built in, a provision that blocks the application of the intelligent faculties in any areas pertaining to the own and to each other's behaviours.

The idea is that without such a specific block on the utilization of intelligence, a further evolution and growth of intelligence cannot be an ESS, because clever manipulation of proximate behavioural and motivational mechanisms within the individuals themselves, would then undercut the ultimate reasons of the behavioural mechanisms, harbouring the very evolutionary reasons of those behavioural systems, thus exerting a negative selection pressure on higher (too high) intelligence levels. In short, normally, in any other phylum, intelligence cannot rise higher because then it would start biting in its own tail, producing shortcuts in the proximate mechanisms and thus undercutting the very ultimate reasons for those behavioural reflexes, thus diminishing the relative contribution to the next generations, weeding itself out.

Only in us humans this ordinary upper limit to intelligence has been surpassed, but only after specific blocks on the use of such intelligence, in other words specific sets of blindness and stupidity, had been built in genetically. We could say that this building in of specific stupidities and blindnesses is The Last Great Trick of Evolution on this planet Earth.

This Wiki thus provides an explanation of a series of specific and peculiar, typically human, traits of stupidity and blindness that in itself seem very strange to exist at all. We can design airplanes and rockets that bring us to the moon and back, we can dive into the depths of the oceans, we can harness the enormous forces, hidden in the tiniest of particles, nuclear power. With those powers we could destroy our own and each others lives and the world at that, or we could utilize those powers to generate energy, almost without limits. However, when faced with a mirror, showing our own personal behaviour or the behaviour of our close partners, our thinking faculties automatically and unavoidably switch into the "moron"-state, a state which even seems an insult to a chimpanzee or an octopus. We can achieve all those said technical performances, but we cannot produce even the simplest intelligence thought about ourselves. How peculiar !!

However, in view of the basic evolutionary ways behaviour is organized, this specific blindness can be seen as an unavoidable ingredient in a species overcoming the usual and general intelligence boundary. And that species happens to have become Homo sapiens.

Having explained the how and why of this peculiar state of affairs in the application, or rather the "non application", of human intelligence, this Wiki further explains that sooner or later this higher intelligence would also automatically lead to the start of a software-, a meme-evolution. In us humans this explosion of the meme evolution started some 10.000 years ago, after our intelligence had developed upwards for a couple of millions of years, after the intelligence blocks had been built into the behavioural repertoire of our hominid ancestors. This period of 10.000 years is very short in evolutionary terms. On the other hand, the software evolution, the meme evolution, runs very much faster than does the gene level evolution. This causes a strong friction within the human behavioural system, our primordial, millions years old genetic basis of our behaviour being pulled by the very recent demands of the meme level evolution, of which we humans are the carriers, like it or not.

What is more, it is shown on this Wiki that the evolutionary competition between sets of meme clusters appears in our society as a struggle between "power structures". These power structures can wield more power by manoeuvring us humans into states of permanent neurotic tension. Those neurotic states do reduce the effective output of each individual involved, but the advantage for the power structures is in the increased malleability of the neurotic subjects. The result is that only neuroticizing, unpleasant patterns of civilization can win the evolutionary battles with competing power structures, precluding the survival of societal structures that would seem "ideal" from a general human perspective.

On the other hand it is also shown on this Wiki that this highly unpleasant state of affairs is to be a very temporary phase in the evolution of intelligence. 10.000 years is rather nothing in evolutionary terms. It is argued here that the mechanisms by which our societal systems, our civilization, the power structures ruling our lives, keep us under control, are losing their firm grip on our behaviour and on our lives. Humanity is reaching the point at which intelligence will start to understand itself. Once that happens, intelligence will break loose, the repression systems of the power structures will lose their grip on our emotional (fear) system and many of the societal control systems that we generally take for granted, will collapse for lack of emotional energy being put in by the subjugated neurotic masses.

After all, we humans are the carriers of the meme systems involved and we provide the energy keeping those systems alive. Once intelligence breaks lose, understanding will replace superstition and ignorance and the fuel feeding the power structures that keep us down, will dwindle away by atrophy.

On this Wiki it is also shown that such a transition will inevitably happen rather sudden, because of the way our learning system is working. Learning is based on the acquisition of relevant experiences and the internal processing thereof. This mechanism is regulated through the Reversal System of emotions and motivations. This reversal system implies that there is a very high contageousness within, but also between individuals. That means that there exists a critical mass in the balance between the percentage of neurotic victims in a population and the percentage of escapees from the supressive power systems, who have re-gained for themselves an optimal rhythm of experiences and emotional-motivational reversals, resulting in an optimal learning process. Once such "self-actualizers" have reached a certain critical mass or percentage of the population, the effect of contageousness will trigger an avalanche of escapees, "leavers" in Quinn's words, entering in optimal rhythms of telic-paratelic switches, resulting in optimal learning cycles, resulting in processes of self-actualization, resulting in replacement of supressive and detrimental societal structures by supportive, wholesome structures, supporting ever more individuals to escape from the fetters of the power structures that have kept us in slavery for the better part of the last 10.000 years. Because of the technical way these mechanisms operate, this process will run like a chain reaction, hence its unexpected speed once that critical mass has been reached.

nu nog pagina's 172,173,174182, and 202

The evolutionary leap ******* of Point Omega

(comments on Richard Dawkins' "The God delusion")

If creationists would have known about the difficulty of our evolution moving from the previous, more common, level of intelligence of say, 1 to 2 million years ago, towards our present and in particular our future level of intelligence, creationists would certainly have embraced this transition as "impossible to explain evolutionarily". As is shown above (Climbing Mount Improbable), that would be completely wrong because although indeed showing a rather sudden and strong leap in phenotypic intelligence, it is all based as usual on very gradual processes of selection and mutation.

In fact, on this Wiki it is shown that this development of human intelligence is a good example of how in evolution some phenotypic achievements (may) occur in sudden leaps, simply because for a full deployment certain already built in design characteristics have to be overcome in order to make the novel characteristic express itself fully. For such transitions evolution does not show a smooth and gradual series of changes, but happens in sudden bursts and leaps. Fodder for creationists it seems, but as this Wiki shows, the phenomenon of creationists and other deluded souls are themselves part of the cultural strengthening of the awareness blocks regarding the self, that have been built into the genetic basis of our behavior before the explosive development of human intelligence could start in the first place.

Once we all understand the why and how of the existence of "creationists" and all other cultural tricks that keep our already innate self-blindness securely in place, the typically human stupidity will finally understand itself and as a consequence a rather sudden explosion of higher intelligence will grab the whole of humanity. It will be a highly contagious process that nobody can escape from and that nobody in his right mind would want to escape from anyway. In the transition phase it will be primarily the so called "privileged" and powerful, not yet aware that they in particular have all along been taken for a ride, who will resist the awareness to spread. But they will not any more be able to prevent the transition from happening. They will still be a majority, but their majority will have lost its critical mass. At that point in time the minority of enlightened souls will have reached its own critical mass, triggering a chain reaction from that point on, resulting in a mass transition that we call Point Omega.

Usefulness of ***************** Religion

(from Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion")

Dawkins points out that much research has been done to compare the moral and ethical attitudes of religious people as compared to non-religious people. Many institutions, political parties and religious authorities would relish the idea that religion breeds moral and ethical behavior. However, such a correlation, let alone a causal explanation, has never been found. On the contrary, the massive number of attempts to find such an effect, paired to the failure to do so, is an overwhelmingly strong evidence that such a relationship does not exist indeed.

If there is any relationship at all, it is rather the other way around. It has been shown by a number of researchers that in our modern and relatively prosperous societies there clearly exists a positive correlation between religious belief and zeal and the frequency of criminal behavior. Also, religion tends to give shape, coordination and direction to human evil behavior. It makes evil behavior more massive and therefore much more dangerous and destructive. Dawkins quotes Blaise Pascal (1670) saying that "One never commits evil deeds so happily and thoroughly as when instigated by religious conviction". And this seems a very accurate and true statement, valid until today.

Baseline of Dawkins' comments is that religions are not serving any positive and useful goal in boosting and preserving human "goodness" and in controlling human destructiveness and other evil behavior and that we could better do without these delusive and confusing mind sets.

But, as one can ask, if religious delusions are so utterly useless, why then are they so common and influential in any modern human society ? Why would such anomalies exist if there was not one or other evolutionary advantage on some level of functioning ? The whole situation looks like an evolutionary anomaly.

On this Wiki we defend the notion that religious fervour and zeal do indeed have a specific purpose. Only, they are not useful to the individuals themselves. The individual carriers of these religious notions clearly do have an impaired capacity to see the truth and to grasp the important mechanisms of social life in a sober and coherent way. Cognitively and also in terms of personal flexibility and personal opportunities they are at a strong disadvantage as compared to individuals with a more sober and intelligent mind set. They do carry an enormous load of confusing rubbish with them all their lives. On the other hand the religious zealots may enjoy a more solid embedding in the prevalent culture and derive safety and security from their apparent adaptation to societal norms and requirements. But that then only comes at the high personal price of loss of personal freedom and self sufficiency. Besides, such advantages would also hold in case the communal belief systems were not so full of superstition and lies.

As is described on this Wiki, religious zeal and fervour, yes, what is more, the advantage of religious delusions and blindness, yes even the advantage of blocking intelligence and thus reducing the potential useful output of the individuals, do indeed have a high evolutionary advantage. What seems unbelievable and self contradictory on the level of individual functioning and what seems an anomaly from the evolutionary perspectives of human beings, becomes quite logical and "natural" if seen from the perspective of the evolution of "power structures", Power Structures being the meme set entities that rule our evolution since the agricultural revolution.

It is also shown on this Wiki that this situation, this anomaly of human intelligent faculties being hampered and constricted by all overruling and powerful meme sets of delusion and collective blindnesses and superstitions, no matter how useful they may be from the perspective of the present evolution of "power structure meme sets", are only a transitory state in human evolution, or rather in the evolution of any hypothetical intelligence in the universe, and that humanity, for purely technical reasons, is at the brink of the next giant evolutionary (phenotypic) leap into a future without further needing religions or any other system of "collective blinding". In that for us humans novel situation our intelligent faculties will no longer be hampered, limited and controlled by the present all pervasive power structures, but can be exploited to the full of their potential, causing an as yet unexpected and for most people unbelievable take off of a truly enlightened society. It is also shown on this Wiki that, because of the underlying mechanisms of the contagiousness of human development and social interactions, this transition, Point Omega, will happen rather suddenly and at a surprising speed.