A DESPERATE RACE AGAINST TIME!
Pavlov in his watershed experiment in behavior psychology proved that a dog could learn to salivate at the sound of a bell. The dog was offered food and a bell was rung on several occasions, after being habituated to this series of events, the dog would salivate on hearing the bell even though there was no food present.
The human race was driven, like cattle, up the steep incline towards civilization; we were forced to work, to believe, to fulfill the every need and desire of those with power. The means relied on to motivate the other determined the nature of human culture, the conscious and unconscious premises for thinking and action.
The growth and strengthening of democratic institutions has ameliorated the most obvious, destructive and harmful component of history, it has reduced and limited the degree and extent to which coercion, in any form, could be applied to human beings; however, it has not precipitated the cultural change, the fundamental cultural change that would permit the reduction of conflict, poverty and the concomitant misery and suffering that these social scourges produce.
The intensity of the primary motivation, coercion, that can be applied has been significantly diminished, where it was in the past overt, it is now covert and it is has assumed subtler more esoteric forms. But the habits produced by coercion remain with us, and one of these habits, repression, has become the major obstacle to the ushering in of the brand new world that the rejection of coercion as the means relied on to motivate the other should precipitate.
Repression is the mechanism that allowed human beings to apply coercion and be unaware of what they were doing; it allowed the burgeoning philosophical and political enterprise of ethics to coexist with unlimited and mindless predation.
To really appreciate how this mechanism worked it is necessary to examine and analyze predation. To a lion, or tiger, or killer whale, or any other powerful predator their prey is a source of food and energy in an ecological system that evolved over many eons.
The prey, the source of food and energy for predators was a component of natural system that was in balance, the availability of prey determined the number of predators, when food was scarce the number of predators diminished to preserve that balance.
Tribes of human beings were a component of that natural system that evolved over millions of years; they were completely synchronized to the inexorable rhythms of Nature - until they discovered agriculture and began to develop the means to upset that balance.
In the light of existing knowledge, the Bible story that indicates that all human beings are the progeny of Adam and Eve is preposterous, ridiculous and wholly unrealistic, yet large numbers of human beings accept this as truth, not just as truth, but sacred truth, a tenet of a religious doctrine that is grounded in faith and therefore is unchallengeable and unchangeable.
The religious doctrine I referred to is Christianity which became popular and whose popularity endured because it advanced the notion of the equality of men before God.
I would suggest that the Christian Church reached a compromise with the Absolutist ideology, a compromise that permitted human beings to pay lip service to ethics; that caused values such as justice, equity and compassion to remain concepts never practiced in precept, to be repressed and be experiences stored in the unconscious creating the unawareness that was crucial to application of coercion required for the march up the steep incline towards civilization.
I suggest that the human psyche had the potential to repress certain experiences; this was a means to insulate the mind from experiences that produced extreme emotions, from feelings of fear, or pain, that were unbearable; that human beings learned to be unaware of applying coercion when confronted with the then unsolvable conflict between the discovery of ethics and what was required for survival.
I suggest that telling the truth is a means of overcoming repression and that this is urgently necessary and functional today because the application of coercion is no longer required for survival, indeed, the use of force is a clear and present danger to the survival of human civilizations because we have developed weapons of mass destruction.
But I am getting ahead of arguments that support this hypothesis so let us return to the relations between predator and prey in which prey was the food and energy source of those more powerful up and down the food chain as part of a natural order that maintained the ecological balance.
Absolutism was a result of that mindset that human beings had learned during the many eons when they operated in this system, in this natural order, being applied to the relations between human beings and transference resulted in a system in which those with power had absolute power, the power of life or death over those subordinate to them.
To return to the source of the authority of the Christian Church; it began with the notion of equity, that social relations not only satisfy the needs of the powerful, but should also satisfy the needs of the weak; after the compromise and over time the Christian Church became the second most powerful social institution, subservient only to the Absolute Ruler and developed the power to impose its belief system on the populace.
If the Christian Church said that the earth was flat, anyone who disagreed was subject to exquisite and horrible tortures, up to and including their death. Heretics and unbelievers could be and often were burnt at the stake creating another potent source of authority for the Church.
I suggest that repression of the application of coercion and the consequences of that application is the key log in the mental logjam that is the major obstacle to achieving the fundamental cultural change necessary for progress that does not rely on coercion as the motivating factor that substitute’s positive reinforcements as the stimulus relied on.
What are the practical impediments to changing the mind of someone who believes that Adam and Eve were the two sole progenitors of the human race?
The enduring popularity of the notion of equity; that social interaction should satisfy the needs, desires and aspirations of both actors in the drama of experience, which has been inextricably associated with the Christian Church, and, the authority of that institution which authority is driven by its capacity for coercion which no longer exists but which is deeply embedded in tradition.
The human race is unconsciously engaged in a desperate race against time as it grapples with this paradox.
There are two clear dimensions to this problem; the first being that we have reduced and diminished the extent and degree to which coercion, in any form, can be applied to individuals in Western civilizations, since this was the engine that produced function, has the consequence that all social institutions, the government, the family, the school, the workplace have become dysfunctional and anomie is widespread.
We seem incapable of making the logical and rational leap forward, and adopt positive reinforcements as the means relied to motivate behavior, so democracy seems to be failing when in fact it has never really being tested; what would happen if there was equity in social relations, if cooperation replaced competition as the ethos of human societies; what would be the effect on conflict would it diminish and create a world at peace, would we be able to harness the energies of the populace to the national plow and usher in a new age of wealth and prosperity?
The other is that in the physical environment where repression is not a factor, where human creativity has reached its zenith, this unlimited and unrestrained application of intelligence has produced a burgeoning scientific and technological establishment capable of unleashing awesome forces, forces with the capacity to human civilizations, certainly capable, if just one weapon of mass destruction is unleashed, of ending an experiment in democracy that is barely three hundred years old.
The human race is trapped in a nexus, a null point of low levels of motivation between the past and the future; to escape this we must find the intelligence to untie the skein of experience, of the ways of thinking, ideas and beliefs that buttressed coercion based culture and embrace those permissive of the transformation to positive reinforcements as the means relied to motivate action essential to progress, societal order and even the survival of human civilizations.
Are we really content to dispense with democracy without creating the motivation the necessary prerequisite for its success, to suit our own individual selfish interests and ambitions?
William E. Virtue
Memphis, Tennessee
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
The human race was driven, like cattle, up the steep incline towards civilization; we were forced to work, to believe, to fulfill the every need and desire of those with power. The means relied on to motivate the other determined the nature of human culture, the conscious and unconscious premises for thinking and action.
The growth and strengthening of democratic institutions has ameliorated the most obvious, destructive and harmful component of history, it has reduced and limited the degree and extent to which coercion, in any form, could be applied to human beings; however, it has not precipitated the cultural change, the fundamental cultural change that would permit the reduction of conflict, poverty and the concomitant misery and suffering that these social scourges produce.
The intensity of the primary motivation, coercion, that can be applied has been significantly diminished, where it was in the past overt, it is now covert and it is has assumed subtler more esoteric forms. But the habits produced by coercion remain with us, and one of these habits, repression, has become the major obstacle to the ushering in of the brand new world that the rejection of coercion as the means relied on to motivate the other should precipitate.
Repression is the mechanism that allowed human beings to apply coercion and be unaware of what they were doing; it allowed the burgeoning philosophical and political enterprise of ethics to coexist with unlimited and mindless predation.
To really appreciate how this mechanism worked it is necessary to examine and analyze predation. To a lion, or tiger, or killer whale, or any other powerful predator their prey is a source of food and energy in an ecological system that evolved over many eons.
The prey, the source of food and energy for predators was a component of natural system that was in balance, the availability of prey determined the number of predators, when food was scarce the number of predators diminished to preserve that balance.
Tribes of human beings were a component of that natural system that evolved over millions of years; they were completely synchronized to the inexorable rhythms of Nature - until they discovered agriculture and began to develop the means to upset that balance.
In the light of existing knowledge, the Bible story that indicates that all human beings are the progeny of Adam and Eve is preposterous, ridiculous and wholly unrealistic, yet large numbers of human beings accept this as truth, not just as truth, but sacred truth, a tenet of a religious doctrine that is grounded in faith and therefore is unchallengeable and unchangeable.
The religious doctrine I referred to is Christianity which became popular and whose popularity endured because it advanced the notion of the equality of men before God.
I would suggest that the Christian Church reached a compromise with the Absolutist ideology, a compromise that permitted human beings to pay lip service to ethics; that caused values such as justice, equity and compassion to remain concepts never practiced in precept, to be repressed and be experiences stored in the unconscious creating the unawareness that was crucial to application of coercion required for the march up the steep incline towards civilization.
I suggest that the human psyche had the potential to repress certain experiences; this was a means to insulate the mind from experiences that produced extreme emotions, from feelings of fear, or pain, that were unbearable; that human beings learned to be unaware of applying coercion when confronted with the then unsolvable conflict between the discovery of ethics and what was required for survival.
I suggest that telling the truth is a means of overcoming repression and that this is urgently necessary and functional today because the application of coercion is no longer required for survival, indeed, the use of force is a clear and present danger to the survival of human civilizations because we have developed weapons of mass destruction.
But I am getting ahead of arguments that support this hypothesis so let us return to the relations between predator and prey in which prey was the food and energy source of those more powerful up and down the food chain as part of a natural order that maintained the ecological balance.
Absolutism was a result of that mindset that human beings had learned during the many eons when they operated in this system, in this natural order, being applied to the relations between human beings and transference resulted in a system in which those with power had absolute power, the power of life or death over those subordinate to them.
To return to the source of the authority of the Christian Church; it began with the notion of equity, that social relations not only satisfy the needs of the powerful, but should also satisfy the needs of the weak; after the compromise and over time the Christian Church became the second most powerful social institution, subservient only to the Absolute Ruler and developed the power to impose its belief system on the populace.
If the Christian Church said that the earth was flat, anyone who disagreed was subject to exquisite and horrible tortures, up to and including their death. Heretics and unbelievers could be and often were burnt at the stake creating another potent source of authority for the Church.
I suggest that repression of the application of coercion and the consequences of that application is the key log in the mental logjam that is the major obstacle to achieving the fundamental cultural change necessary for progress that does not rely on coercion as the motivating factor that substitute’s positive reinforcements as the stimulus relied on.
What are the practical impediments to changing the mind of someone who believes that Adam and Eve were the two sole progenitors of the human race?
The enduring popularity of the notion of equity; that social interaction should satisfy the needs, desires and aspirations of both actors in the drama of experience, which has been inextricably associated with the Christian Church, and, the authority of that institution which authority is driven by its capacity for coercion which no longer exists but which is deeply embedded in tradition.
The human race is unconsciously engaged in a desperate race against time as it grapples with this paradox.
There are two clear dimensions to this problem; the first being that we have reduced and diminished the extent and degree to which coercion, in any form, can be applied to individuals in Western civilizations, since this was the engine that produced function, has the consequence that all social institutions, the government, the family, the school, the workplace have become dysfunctional and anomie is widespread.
We seem incapable of making the logical and rational leap forward, and adopt positive reinforcements as the means relied to motivate behavior, so democracy seems to be failing when in fact it has never really being tested; what would happen if there was equity in social relations, if cooperation replaced competition as the ethos of human societies; what would be the effect on conflict would it diminish and create a world at peace, would we be able to harness the energies of the populace to the national plow and usher in a new age of wealth and prosperity?
The other is that in the physical environment where repression is not a factor, where human creativity has reached its zenith, this unlimited and unrestrained application of intelligence has produced a burgeoning scientific and technological establishment capable of unleashing awesome forces, forces with the capacity to human civilizations, certainly capable, if just one weapon of mass destruction is unleashed, of ending an experiment in democracy that is barely three hundred years old.
The human race is trapped in a nexus, a null point of low levels of motivation between the past and the future; to escape this we must find the intelligence to untie the skein of experience, of the ways of thinking, ideas and beliefs that buttressed coercion based culture and embrace those permissive of the transformation to positive reinforcements as the means relied to motivate action essential to progress, societal order and even the survival of human civilizations.
Are we really content to dispense with democracy without creating the motivation the necessary prerequisite for its success, to suit our own individual selfish interests and ambitions?
William E. Virtue
Memphis, Tennessee
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
posted by voiceofpeace at 11:09 AM
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