The Force that Accounts for a Great Deal of What’s Gone Wrong in the Human World

 

1) Dragged Downward by Systemic Forces

The heart of my case concerns the inevitable consequences of any creature’s taking the step onto the path of civilization  – i.e. taking a step unprecedented in the history of life on its planet of extricating itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing a new way of life.)

It can pretty well be proved that this Fateful Step will inevitably unleash a destructive systemic force that will drive that creature’s civilization in directions that the creature would never choose but could not avoid.

(“Pretty well proved” in my book, The Parable of the Tribes, which shows that the new system itself largely mandates how civilization will evolve – so that any creature on any planet anywhere in the cosmos that takes that Fateful Step will manifest as much ugliness as we see in the history of human civilization.

The social evolutionary force inevitably unleashed by a creature’s inventing a new way of living will have the inevitable effect of giving “the Spirit of the Gangster” a disproportionate say in how that creature’s civilization will develop.

(That’s regardless of the inborn nature of the particular creature creating the “Civilization.”)

This inevitable force – acting much as “Evil” has been traditionally envisioned, will inevitably permeate that creature’s civilization.

But that ugliness we see in human history is not a picture of what we humans are by nature.

So one way we are “better” is on the moral dimension. A social evolutionary force that favors the Spirit of the Gangster makes everything worse – more “Evil” — than it might otherwise have been.

 

DREAMCRUSHER: So, why are we worried about the southern border? Why are the prisons overcrowded? Why do we lock our homes and cars? Why do we need courts? Police officers? Gun laws? Any laws?

“The social evolutionary force inevitably unleashed by a creature” Can you tell us more about this force? Is this the same force that has taken over the GOP?

 

 

I very much appreciate your asking, dreamcrusher. It is not far from the truth to say that the attempt to tell people about this “force” has been the fundamental driving force of my life for the past more-than-half-a-century. So I have worked again and again to convey this idea in various ways and at various lengths.

 

Perhaps the best way of my responding to your question is to direct you to a 2000-word version of what I think proves that the step onto the path of civilization INEVITABLY unleashes a destructive force that will drive the world of that civilization-creating creature to develop in destructive, painful ways. REGARDLESS OF THAT CREATURE’S INBORN NATURE.

“The Ugliness We See in Human History is Not Human Nature Writ Large” (3QD-2) – A Better Human Story

That’s as accessible and brief a way of showing that truth as I’ve been able to do. But anyone who wants to really take a look at that picture more elaborately and in greater detail can read my 1984 book (published by the University of California Press), THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES: THE PROBLEM OF POWER IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION.

 

As for those questions you ask, the way I’d connect them with what I claim to show about that “inevitable destructive force” is to say that the brokenness that inevitably warps how a creature’s civilization evolves makes for broken people. And it is those broken people who do the broken things that make for crimes, police, courts.

 

But we’d need law anyway, even if people were not so broken by the inevitable “war of all [societies] against all” that civilization inevitably brings about. Everywhere else in the systems of Life on Earth every creature has evolved to do what fits in well with a larger order that works to sustain the whole system. But once we stepped onto the path of civilization — which means being the first creatures to extricate themselves into the niche in which they evolved biologically — it becomes imperative that some kind of ARTIFICAL (i.e. human-made) ORDER be imposed on all the human actors so that the system can be life-serving. And LAW — which you asked about — is one essential part of people’s efforts to manage how things unfold in the human world, to let people CHOOSE how things will happen, because in a state of anarchy it is inevitable that the course of things will be ugly.