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comment was removed from the following thread The real threat to our liberties by GP Wayne, 28/05/09
31 May 09, 9:42am (removed by moderator) [Lionel]: ". . evolution has . . given rise to the existence of a certain very small minority . . who are obsessively driven by the urge to power and little if at all by any urge toward altruism." The dividing line between the desire for power and the inclination towards altruism, like that between good and evil, does not run between between individuals (or groups of individuals), but through each and every individual, including you and I, Lionel. Even within our immediate family group there is tension between individual self-interest and group-interest (as anyone with teenage children will testify, while the central relationship between husband and wife is characterized by this very tension), yet the larger that group gets the more difficult it is to maintain a sense of group-interest (altruism), especially when other group members are seen to get away with, and are even admired for pursuing and indulging their own self-interests. Note how the STATE, contradictively, promotes and legitimizes self-interest and admiration of individual wealth, advantage and power, on the one hand, while expecting hard work for a minimum wage and altruism on the other, in its role of facilitating society's self-exploitation, which I offer a simple human-evolutionary explanation for in the brief introduction I LINKED to in my first post. Altruism only makes sense from an evolutionary perspective if it serves the survival and propagation of the individual's own genes, which is clearly the case when parents behave altruistically towards their own children, as found not just in humans, but in many other animal species as well. Group, or tribal, altruism is obviously an extension of parent altruism and must have evolved when we lived in extended family groups, as we did for millions of years, before the advent of civilisation. The STATE has always sought to exploit, by claiming for itself, our tribal feelings and behaviours, including altruism, in its role of facilitating society's self-exploitation to the advantage of its dominant and privileged elites, and we have all been domesticated, trained and conditioned by the state and its agents (especially religion) for this purpose (in much the same way that we domesticate and train animals, also to exploit them, using a regime of rewards and punishments). In this process of "self-domestication", we have all completely internalized the training and conditioning, which we thus believe to represent our own best nature, when in fact, our best (tribal) nature is being used and exploited in the institutionalized pursuit and exercise of POWER, which forms both the foundation and the framework of our civilisation. Since going multiethnic, the state has broken the last, already rather tenuous, connection between the tribal behaviours it seeks to harness, including altruism, and their evolutionary purpose. which it rationalizes and glorifies in the ideology of "one human race", i.e. super-tribe (which the Nazis simply restricted to Germans), which gives rise, necessarily, to the ideology of "colourblindness", of "indifference to ethnic difference" and of "race doesn't matter", i.e. is of no personal, social or political significance, except to evil "racists", who are vilified as agents of the Devil. It's surprising just how little some things have changed since the Middle Ages. |