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 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: they monopolize the evolutionary necessity of ignorance, superstition and religious deceit, 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.

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 these pages we will try to explain this seeming contradiction and investigate its evolutionary roots and its meaning 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 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.

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 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, if we would be still 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 of the war, finally some curiosity emerged after the possible sources of the striking frictions in the human behavioural and normative systems. One finally recognized that there were some striking incongruities in human normative thinking and feeling. 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 follow the rules, no matter what. They are the most likely to press the torture button or pull the trigger to wretch obedience from the victims.

Some basic requirements for a successful power structure

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. They may be subdued into malleable neuroticism and misery, but not to the point of a complete break down, because then all useful output 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.

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 derive advantage from 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 area of murky perception for inducing the dictums, norms and rules that the power structure needs, but that would tend to induce aversive feelings in its carriers, in particular in case they could be perceived clearly and undistortedly.

As a consequence, a basic trick and cornerstone 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 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". And strikingly, this apparently most important assessment tool is not related whatsoever with any actual behaviour, only with how the observer or judge is, for personal reasons beyond his understanding, colouring in emotionally the behaviour observed. -) Apparently, 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 factoranalyses of the conceptual tools of that thinking shows, the larger part of all that energy is spent on the 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, pro- and con-. This underlines the great biological and evolutionary importance of this dimension of Good and Bad. 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, it just colours our perception of behaviour and is thus merely a tool of directing our own reactions on other people’s behaviour and, conversely, serves instead to mask reality effectively and to block a clean and sober understanding of the behaviours observed. 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 Good-Bad 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 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 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. 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, invisibly, as dominating the actual behavioural output. And the inextricable mesh of notions, beliefs and impulses 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 approach consciously. We have been trained to painfully shy away before we enter this danger zone. And religion subsequently offers itself as a soothing comforter.

As a consequence, religions, once they have become successful, not necessarily before during their emergence, serve the dual role of firstly 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 our intelligence started to expand some million or so years ago), launching us into worlds of conceit, fairy tales and lies, and secondly offering us comfort and save havens for the most urgent recovery needed, promising better life later and other promised improvements that will 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 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.

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.