Humanity, Devolving

And very quickly too

With all due respect to the Darwinists, we're actually 'evolving' backwards.

Sure, we hominids have a large brain size, and developed the capacity for language, tool use, and social activity. Yes, we even have the Internet, possible cures for cancer, and sophisticated financial instruments.

But, are we better? No. Stronger? No. Are the weaker being weeded out and some new superman being created out of all this? No, and I'd be very leery of the Social Darwinists at this point.

All civilizations rise, decline, and fall. One of the reasons given in Machiavelli's The Prince is sloth, or laziness, if you can believe it. You spend or enjoy what you have, without looking to the future. Or the rulers are greedy and "rob people of their patrimony" and end up being hated. Or weaker civilizations in their declining years get gobbled up or assimilated by the stronger.

But that's politics. One 'civilization' of greed, sloth, and incurable decrepitude is falling apart without anyone trying to create an alternative. I'd like to look at the signs of our decline as a species, and point, hopefully, at the possible solutions.

The Physical: Rachel Carson tried to warn us in Silent Spring. Birth defects in Nature would one day lead to birth defects in humanity. The onslaught of chemical poisoning from our environment leads to decreased sperm counts in males and fertility problems in females. This is Not A Good Thing, and those who say so, even those who want population control are strict Eugenics fetishists who fail to see the major impact on the environment isn't made by the rural African with a large family, but the nuclear Western family and industrialized world. We have the capacity, still, to solve all these problems once we have enlightened leadership. Sadly, that doesn't exist. The answers lie within the articles I have written so far.

The Emotional: We think the Mind, capable of Reason, can resolve Everything. I disagree. The Mind is affected by the Ego, which so skews our perceptions we see things the way we want to, or conditioned to, than the way they, or we, are. I see the failure of Psychology, and yet, the absolute hold it has over the collective consciousness and culture as we try to understand our motivations and reactions is very sad. Don't misunderstand me. I believe that Jung, Freud and Adler were geniuses who started off right, but they galloped off into left field. But I'll explain it in the form of a question. Why is it so hard to meditate? You could spend years, and if you want the challenge, good. And if you want me to show you how to do that in a flash, I can. And I propose a new paradigm for psychology, based on Psyche, the Soul. Think of it as LSD without the drugs :)

The Spiritual: Somewhere along the way we lost the glue that holds us together, which is the spiritual. The spiritual always had to be something beyond us, but our blind ego which tries to control our surroundings turned to a Humanism formed on the belief that we were the center of the Universe, that we were the highest form of evolution. No, we're not. We're devolving and returning to the chaos we were born in, and what we don't know is pitiable. And that's what is so sad, that spirituality is reduced to some sort of self-centered feel good philosophy. Religion, for all its faults, for all its tribal unevolving set of rules, at least accepted there was a higher consciousness, and made it a goal to reach there. Instead, we worship the pursuit of the material. Sorry, the material is only the foundation of the spiritual. And meh! to those who think of morality and ethics as some sort of evolutionary group dynamic which may not be followed, if our consciousness develops a rationalization that somehow exempts us from those rules of balance and inner peace.

And yet: we were meant to evolve. The ancients handed us this amazing knowledge, which sadly, we have lost.

This, is something I wish to share with you.