Whenever the words “it’s the natural way” appear in debate or in print, I groan inwardly. They once seemed such an easy thing to say; granola, monogamous marriage, friendship and eating vegetables were “natural,” and soft drinks, aggressive selfishness, and living in tiny air-conditioned boxes were “un-natural.”
But then someone pointed out the first paradox: if we’re a product of nature, anything we do is natural.
To that I added that natural selection would enforce natural on us; but then I realized that natural selection is defined by our actions. If our society suddenly made penis size all important, in a few hundred years we might be idiots of violent dispositions, but all the men would have huge penises, even grotesque ones like the purple buttocks of baboons.
So what is natural? I’ve come to realize how this term means little because when we made fire, invented agriculture and learned to speak, we left the realm of the previously natural. We left natural selection behind for social selection; we made use of tools and technology just as natural as digging up roots with our bare hands and catching squirrels with our teeth.
From that realization came a more profitable one: since we are in the driver’s seat, and define our own destiny, we can choose what is natural as in “fits into the type of pattern designs we see in nature,” or can cut to the chase and pick what we find to be better designs, more beautiful ways of living, and so on — because the most natural thing in nature is challenging us with thresholds.
What do I mean by thresholds? I mean that there’s a default way of doing things that just works, as in all things in nature. It starts out as a hack, or temporary unorthodox fix, and through gradual improvement (natural kaizen) it evolves into something highly refined, even if its original design was awkward. What challenges evolution? Each time one of these hacks becomes the norm, there’s a reward for getting over it.
For example, early hominids found life to be OK. They hunted and gathered in groups, and were able to survive. But at some point, probably spurred on by emotion, they saw that life could be better if they were able to harvest most of their food, trading a diet of pure protein for a more regular diet. That meant they needed fields, and fire to cook the food, and permanent dwellings that were also defensible.
This was a threshold: could they escape the natural of old for the natural of new, which meant altering themselves?
Another example in a fixed society is this: we find it most natural to wander outside and take a dump wherever is convenient. But when you have a group, that becomes toxic quickly. So there’s a threshold: do we find a way of concentrating and removing our waste, or do we die in horror of feces-born diseases, or do we give up on fixed societies and go back to hunter-gathering?
It was natural to wander around foraging, and it was equally natural to construct sewer systems.
As time went on, we discovered another dimension: societies need some kind of morality. We faced two extremes:
- Let the most aggressive dominate us through violence.
- Let our fear of aggressive dominators cause us to reject collective organization and centralized power, and thus die slowly through inaction regarding non-immediate but still vital socialized problems.
You may recognize these two extremes: the far right believes in the former, and the far left believes in the latter. They’re still with us because we’re still fighting out this challenge, which is a threshold that nature offers to us with a reward if we cross it and a default state of OK-not-great if we don’t.
And all three outcomes — pass, fail, or abstain — remain “natural,” but the question faces us of which do we choose?
Nihilism as I see it is the rejection of all inherent values. There are no writings on the wall; there is no Word from the other side that didn’t pass through humans, getting distorted in the process. There is no instruction manual to life. So we must look at our options and choose not only which seems most logical, but which appeals to our emotions and sense of aesthetics.
Emotions and aesthetics after all wouldn’t exist if they didn’t serve some purpose. My guess is that their value is in their non-linearity. They consider many factors at once as a single factor. That kind of decision-making is not useful when choosing between one tool or strain of grain or another, but it’s very useful when getting up the impetus to brave doubt and opt for a change, like first learning to make fire or domesticate grain. The choice to make those choices came from pure passion.
We are in the driver’s seat. We must design our own futures. We cannot count on something being “natural” any more than we can count on writing on the wall or God screaming instructions to us through a psychedelic telepathic loudspeaker. (This is not an argument for or against God, but a statement of fact: we do not, as a group, perceive instructions from the world beyond.)
Deferring to nature is dangerous because it has us arguing from a foregone conclusion instead of considering the results at hand. What should we do? Well, what does God/the blue book/nature say? Yet there’s another hidden foregone conclusion: the individual. What do all individuals, representing the idealized individual, say?
It’s fallacious to argue from the individual because history shows us that individuals in a group default to lowest common denominator behavior, and individuals alone if given a choice pick the safer action — the one with the least risk. That doesn’t get us over the threshold; it keeps us in the default behavior.
Like a game of Secret, societies over time break down ideas into their simplest forms. This means that the default behavior, if not countered by a strong impetus to cross a threshold, results in decay of social order over time. As the old saying goes, if you’re standing still, you’re actually moving backward in a river of passing time and entropy.
What would this ongoing self-reducing default be, in our modern time? It’s a curious type of conservatism — the kind that places the individual above all else, and so is unwilling to inconvenience anyone. It’s the default that says we should divide up our wealth and focus on each other’s psychology, not try to move forward collectively. On the left it is anarchy, on the right it’s American conservatism or libertarianism. Same impulse: stick with the default, because it doesn’t challenge us as individuals.
But this lack of desire to surge over thresholds comes at a cost. Individualism of the rugged kind decays into convenience. Anarchy creates consumerism on a vast scale. Libertarianism encourages the wealthy to withdraw from society until the rest of society saddles itself with so many problems it explodes in revolution, and then libertarians die outnumbered a thousand to one. History shows us this pattern repeating like wallpaper. It’s the universal “society fail” that marks the end of productive existence for a civilization.
This creates a bizarre hybrid of individualism, utilitarianism, bureaucracy and anarchy. It is created by a struggle for control by the individual: when faced with a group, the individual must appeal to the group in order to have power. So they construct a virus of honey, not vinegar. “If we’re all equal as a group, we each get what we want, and we don’t have to face any thresholds.” Thus the individual uses the group to achieve independence from the group, at the expense of collective action, which would cause conflict in the group. In turn, because “independence” and “freedom” don’t address a balance between individual needs and group needs, strong control forces are needed — with a centralized administration, of course — to apply the rules of the herd onto the herd and so to filter out destabilizers, both predators and ideologues who oppose this strange jury-rig.
Although it seems completely weird, it’s very normal, at least in the latter half of a civilization’s lifespan. It allows us to indulge in the idea of “equality,” otherwise known as interchangeable parts, in which we treat individuals as composites who can be controlled by providing the right motivation and threats. We don’t treat them as individuals; we treat them as political individuals, or people who can be managed. The more we strive for freedom and individualism, on an external level, the more we get away from it on an internal level.
In this sense, all of society’s history is like watching 4chan’s /b: people show up and post memes, hoping a Personal Army will arise which through the force of its numbers, will crush the enemy. At the same time, the society functions under the pretense of individual choice determining when a personal army arises, even though the personal army is a mob spurred on by the lowest of human impulses: revenge, destruction, resentment and so on. And maybe this, too, is a threshold.
In other words, if we’re able to out-evolve our self-awareness and progress to a level in which we’re aware of self, others and world at large at once, and make our decisions on that basis, we will have left an OK but not great default in favor of a more productive and beautiful way of living. It’s something to think about any time you see people doing what is natural for this time, and yet remaining unfulfilled as they see nothing of greatness on this side of this latest threshold.
We have never caught squirrels with our teeth.
If males carried such natively large phallic packages it would effect their brain chemistry function with excessive testosterone and that would be a massive mistake because we already pay the largest caloric penalty for our intelligence of any species extant. 250 at rest. 500 when learning. Out of a 1,250-1,500 calorie day overall.
Just because modern society generates the excess food capacity to feed this intellect doesn’t mean we should try to stress that capability to the point of burnout fallback to cognitive herd-submission.
Nature is instinct. Instinct fulfills elements of brain function which are so deeply rooted that we will never live beyond them short of mass, ‘transhumanist’ revision of the brain.
If you accept that the body of which the brain is a part needs reinforcement of natural rhythms to provide the mind the level of balance and security by which our mind thinks sybologically (_not_ ‘abstractly’ for you can never think beyond the environment of experience and that reality is itself telling about our mass psychological response to the modern day world) as the principle difference between sentience and sapience.
‘Wisdom’ in turn derives from the ability to see recombination elements in the environment whose understanding gives us insight to trends of change. That awareness being what makes us able to see the sculpture not /before/ we make it. But as we do so, in a future of tunneled time in which we are living several presences along the same, focussed, timeline.
With this, I would equally argue that a desire to do something ‘more’ is unlikely. Rather you would begin collecting seasonal items because you sensed that a need to do so and when you noticed that spill caused local growth, you realized that if you spilled some on purpose, you wouldn’t have to go so far to gather it. i.e. Cold Weather and short seasons may drive a sense of urgency but it is the response to that urgency, conscious or otherwise, which develops agriculture, not a desire for ‘more’.
With the above as a hypothesy, I think that the ultimate driver for achieving balanced (crystalized) intellect that is symbologic in it’s ability to pick up on these subtleties of instinct-becomes-conscious response EARLY is one of freedom from constant labor.
You create ditch diggers even as you exploit the aggression and wanderlust of hunters before turning them into warriors with deliberate scenarios of necessary (enslaving) exploitation of the labor force.
But all’s this does is expand the Bell Curve, it doesn’t argue for or against it’s ‘social order’ elevation within an enforced set of social rules.
Indeed, I would not be at all surprised if we were not happier AND smarter as primitives, within a specialist range of symbologic understanding, than ever we are today where we are lost within the architecture we depend on 2% percent of our population to be able to create.
Which is where the danger of society building really becomes obvious. You NEED labor to make a social order happen and that process of dig-the-metal-make-the-sword-train-the-warrior-conquer-the-new-mine is itself the basis of a distributionist capitalist economic model from which you conquer the world by elevating it, socially.
It is, however; thermodynamically untenable. For even as the rich gain position from which to become ever wiser by (penny per back) controlling a labor system they do not lose perspective partaking directly of, so too does their own position suffer upwards pressure from below as the best of their managers who DO interact, seek to leave behind their slave collars. And thus it is that you must create more labor at the bottom to support more wealth at the top and the make work which is taxable, from the mine to the mine becomes a coglike infrastructure which replaces the rythmic sense of existence that provides the basis of instinctive certainty of ‘what is good in life’.
It certainly overpopulates and resource depletes the planet on the false assumption that a society created to conserve wealth enables equality in gaining it.
And that is the point of departure from which destabilization becomes entropic anarchy. As some degree of nobility that is symbologic wisdom is finally so badly quashed as to destroy the interface between instinctive awareness of what is good. And detached wisdom about the processes of getting it.
Not in competition with each other. But as a balanced whole.
IMO, one needs only look at the great societies of the past to see where we have lost our way. And that is, ironically, true slavery. Where some base element is truly ‘free’ and all the conditional compromises past that point are based on sustaining it’s ready supply.
We no longer need to create a manufacturing indenturement. We have so depleted our societies awareness as much as ability to reach towards simple, natural, satiation of food/shelter/woman/future instinct in the cost of achieving same that it is dangerous to continue to try and do so, solely for the benefit of the system which artificially creates it.
Psychologically and Logistically, it is a bomb waiting to explode.
But if you could trade birth rate against ‘direct delivery’ of resources to automated manufacture within nations that bartered population size for resource access, you could both shrink the middle of the bell curve directly (rather than trying to elevate it upwards) and create the opportunity for study and observation that maximized what intelligence was present to create a symbologic = symbiotic understanding of the elements you needed to CONSERVE to hold onto a position of happiness.
Whether that position was one of luxury, entertainment and freedom from societal angst. Or elective (genius = 2% of rightside of curve) participation in it’s development through transition challenges would then be a function of how you maximized your time to activate and stabilize whatever crystalized intellectual functions you possessed.
Given what we are now coming to realize about epigenetic controls over body functions like cancer (recent studies show that 40+ genes related to prostate issues in men could be shut down, simply be removing the causative stresses that enable them) and the existence of very fast evolution genes (HAR-F1) related to both brain and genital development, the ultimate answer may not be why we fail to try as hard as our parents did before us. But why we don’t use the progress of technology they have gifted us with to create a society where we don’t have to.
Striving vs. Entropic Decay are delusional extremes of perception as much as Instinct vs. Cognitive achievement thresholds are seen as opposed rather than complimentary polars. Societal Homeostasis means riding out the highs and lows of what sapient awareness tries to drive us too as aberrant or panicky behaviors rather than accepting a constant sine-curve of civilization rise and fall.
Indeed, the latter may no longer be an option given the kinds of detritus we would leave behind now (103 active reactors in the U.S. alone. Create a 200nm radius around each meltdown and you start to wonder whether we can afford to let slip the reins of technology as much as society at any level).
Learn to live at ease people as the first rule people.
Knowing that what you take from this earth is never more than what you are willing to give back to it and thus you owe nothing to a society which seeks to force upon you a debt of propinquity as much as true synergy.
Once you drop the guilt complex over this, train your senses to seeing patterns in the symbols your mind creates from observing what you are not directly a part of.
Then begin to learn what elements of that pattern have environmental weighting sufficient to enable change as an alteration of conscience as much as condition.
Now apply the first three rules to love of others as a balance of what you will do in your achievements for yourself vs. what you will accept in the needs and social ‘equality’ of others.
You may find that humanity is a lot less social an organism than those who would keep you dependent may care to have you realize.
At which point it becomes easy to let go of worry over whether you should be doing more or accepting less as a function of differentiating societal zeitgeist or cathartic return to instinct.
KPl.
This is the best post yet.
Forget, please, “conservatism.” It has been, operationally, de facto, Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
“[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
PS – And “Mr. Worldly Wiseman” Rush Limbaugh never made a bigger ass of himself than at CPAC where he told that blasphemous “joke” about himself and God.