The species Homo sapiens has been around for at least 100,000 years, and the earliest examples of Homo sapiens may date to as long ago as 200 KYA. The first 90,000 to 190,000 years involved a social organization not much different than the classical chimpanzee gang. People lived in small groups of a few dozen individuals and survived by means of hunter-gatherer methodology. This methodology was sufficient to sustain human existence, and this long period of stability is proof that there was little pressure to change. To be sure, the human IQ was in place during this period as evidenced by a relatively rapid advancement of stone tool technology. These advances were rapid compared to the accomplishments of other hominids like Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, but by todays standards, this rate of progress was incredibly slow. I would like to identify "progress" as the invention or discovery of new technology and its adoption.
This view of history is controversial in that there were other factors at work. Initially technology is discovered rather than invented. Human beings are not born with the knowledge of what is possible, and so must discover it before doing it. Discovery depends upon there being something to discover, and that is a matter of geography. Geographic obstacles necessarily represented a major obstacle to progress. Once an initial invention is created, subsequent inventions are usually derived from it rather than upon wholly new discoveries. Thus Homo sapiens was forced to start with very little and gradually accumulate more and more inventions which stimulated more and more inventions. Circumstances necessarily mandate a slow start for any species that pursues technology.
From about 200 KYA to 125 KYA this planet was gripped by a major climactic upheaval known variously as the Riss, Saale or Illinoian glaciation. Conditions during this period were necessarily different than they are today and this makes it difficult to know exactly what was and what was not possible for people living in these times. However, there was a warm interglacial period between 125 KYA and 75 KYA during which conditions were similar to what they are today. Therefore it is appropriate to conclude that opportunities for discovery and innovation in this period were much as they are today.
Around 75 KYA a brief (10,000 years) glaciation took place followed by another 30,000 to 40,000 years of relatively warm climate. Again, during this interval the opportunites for discovery and innovation were not too different than what they are today. Finally another severe ice age known variously as the Wurm, Weichsel or Wisconsin glaciation ensued, and it finally ended some 10,000 years ago.
Immediately following this most recent glaciation Homo sapiens began, in slow piece-meal fashion, to domesticate plants and animals. This domestication made it possible for more people to live on a given piece of land. When circumstances changed for the worse, people with domesticated plants and animals fared better than people practicing traditional hunter gatherer methodology. This motivated a change to more and more domestication until populations increased to the point where they could only be supported by full time agriculture and animal husbandry.
Although this domestication has occured independently several times in human history, people living in the "fertile crescent" encompassing present day Israel, Syria and Iraq had a special advantage. That area contained more domesticable plants and animals than any other area on the planet. People living there were able to produce more food and achieve higher population densities more quickly than anywhere else.
One of the consequences of rising population is that the opportunity for organisms parasitical to Homo sapiens to evolve and prosper is greater. Dense populations tend to foster disease, and this in turn, after taking a toll, fosters resistance to disease. Agricultural peoples tend to harbor diseases for which they have an acquired immunity, but for which surrounding hunter-gatherer peoples do not. When contact inevitably occurs, the hunter-gatherers tend to die out and be replaced by people practicing agriculture and animal husbandry.
Agriculture and animal husbandry also foster another byproduct: war. Although fights sometimes occur between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists afford an opportunity to an aggressor that hunter-gatherers do not (i.e. large quantities of stored foodstuffs and livestock). Aggressors could steal property belonging to agriculturalists and even set themselves up as more-or-less permanent parasites at the top of a social hierarchy. Naturally agriculturalists did not like this and so sought ways to defend themselves. Thus began an arms race that has continued right up unto this very day. Historically, one of the most powerful forces driving technological advancement has been war and aggression.
War in turn fostered another byproduct: government. A large army has a better chance to win when it confronts a smaller opponent. An organized army has a better chance to win when it confronts a less organized opponent. A tight social hierarchy with capable people at the top has a better chance of imposing organization. This tight social hierarchy in control of military resources is what we today call government.
Population expansion continued to foster more and more technology, war, government and ever larger social organizations. The Renaissance brought with it the formalization of the methodology of reason, and this in turn fostered a greatly increased rate of technological progress. Today, more than half of all the scientists who have ever existed in the history of the human species are alive and on the job.
This chain of events contains some very striking anomalies. One contemporary study of a hunter-gatherer type society revealed that people were only spending about 17% of their time tending to their basic needs for food, water, etc. Prior to the advent of agriculture, our ancestors had plenty of free time on their hands. They had long periods of relative warm climate and, even during the ice ages, there were still warm climates nearer the equator. Why then didn't people invent post-paleolithic technology prior to 10,000 years ago? Afterall, basic technology like agriculture, animal husbandry and some metallurgy were practiced by generations of people who were fundamentally illiterate. Why wasn't writing invented prior to 10,000 years ago?
It seems likely that the delay in inventing writing has a plausible cause. People surviving by means of hunter-gatherer methodology are essentially nomads. Such people cannot convenienty haul libraries around with them. Writing had to wait until a sedentary lifestyle had been achieved.
This still leaves us with a very striking anomaly. Given that people had the ability and opportunity to invent many post-paleolithic technologies prior to 10 KYA, why didn't they do so? I submit that what they lacked was motivation.
Winston Churchill once said, "Americans always do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted every other alternative." Something similar can be said of the species Homo sapiens. Collectively, human beings seem to be relatively content to drift along following simple instinctive forms of behavior and only engage their full mental powers when circumstances leave them with no other alternative. The historical record leads me to conclude that as a general rule, human beings bring their intelligence to bear on the problems that confront them only after they have exhausted every other (i.e. instinctive) alternative. I would like to identify the point at which humans have exhausted their instinctive options and are forced to engage their intelligence and resort to reason as the "Churchill Limit."
The unique combination of mental faculties that make up tetrahedral man manifest themselves in certain readily observable kinds of conspicuously consistent behavior. The long-term record of this behavior is what is commonly called history. The following list, while not exhaustive, confronts at least some of the major aspects of this behavior:
It has been said that every human being is fundamentally selfish. I submit that this is true of every living thing. Ayn Rand's identification of life as "self sustaining action" is entirely accurate. This is literally how we distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. Living things that do not act so as to sustain themselves become extinct in short order. Only those living things that tend first to their own existence survive long enough to produce progeny or contribute to a collective. Fundamental selfishness has been a requirement imposed by natural selection on all living things for the last four billion years. Incredibly, a great many people cannot get over this fact and plunge instead into a profound denial. Thus we have a striking anomaly that needs to be accounted for.
In the case of human beings, the very organs of our bodies are fundamentally selfish in that their primary functions are to sustain the life of the individual of which they are a part. There should be little cause for surprise when we discover that the basic methodology of selfishness manifests itself in that organ called the brain. Although some of the brains' functionality is quasi-automatic (e.g. emotions) other things like reason have to be set in motion by an act of will. The possibility of pleasure and emotional gratification is natural selection's attempt to motivate the brain to behave in a life-sustaining way.
Ayn Rand resisted the notion that humans automatically behaved in a selfish manner. She made a distinction between rational self interest in the full context of reality and emotional gratification. While she belabored this distinction, there is still some common ground between those who accept rational self interest as a proper moral goal for human beings and those who categorically denounce selfishness as the bane of mankind. There is a general recognition that unquestioning pursuit of emotional gratification can be destructive of human goals. The legal concept of a "crime of passion" is an example. Religious asceticism as a reaction to emotional excesses is another example. The difference between rational self interest and other value systems lies in the basis for selecting those forms of emotional gratification that can be morally pursued and those which must be categorically rejected. Ayn Rand advocated deciding this issue by means of a process of critical analysis, and other systems involve a mixed methodology including some critical analysis, some attempt to reconcile conflicting emotions and some serendipity.
In the end we can say that human beings, while not necessarily fundamentally selfish in terms of their actions, are fundamentally selfish in terms of their motivations. This selfishness may be fully consistent rational self interest, it may be the simple-minded pursuit of immediate emotional gratification, or it may be the pursuit of a slipshod amalgamation of the two.
The historical success of Capitalism and the failure of Socialism in the production of goods and services derive from the relative treatment these two systems apply to selfishness. Capitalism implicitly accepts selfishness as a given and uses it as an energy source to drive productive efforts. Socialism explicitly rejects selfishness, spends time and energy resisting it, and only pursues production as a secondary goal.
As to why selfishness is so widely denounced as a moral evil, we have to turn to Hierarchity to find the answer. One way for a person to get another person to subordinate their own preferences is through guilt. "Shame on you," is an overt attempt to get the one shamed to change his behavior to something the shamer prefers. It has the de facto effect of establishing a hierarchical relationship between two people. This effect can be used by a person who is highly motivated to achieve social hierarchy by selecting behavior that is mandated by natural selection and designating it as morally wrong. It is no accident that sundry political movements and religions have designated sexuality and material gain as evils... except under specially administered conditions.
I would like to identify collectivism as the human practice of subordinating individual goals to group goals. To be sure, the pursuit of individual goals is invariably practiced on a duplicitous basis in collective organizations, but collectivism involves a general recognition and acceptance by the collective's members that group goals are to be given priority. The psychological mechanics driving this practice primarily involve the instincts of Hierarchity and Fosterity. However Gregarity, Security, Territoriality and Alienaity play supporting roles. These instincts, in varying combinations and strengths, so dominate the human mental tetrahedron that the LogFac is persuaded to serve the EmoFac rather than manage it.
Collectivism takes the form of the value judgment that it is morally acceptable to sacrifice individual interests for the sake of the group. This sacrifice may be minor in nature and may actually involve the consent of the individual whose interests are being sacrificed. Or it may involve something as major as the taking of human life. Collectivism involves some unique psychological dynamics that are very different from what isolated individuals commonly experience. Democracy makes a good data point:
At the root of the democracy is the individual voter wielding a minuscule bit of power. A single voter, among say 50 million, would have one chance in 50 million of actually affecting the outcome of an election. Each voter knows that the probability is overwhelming, that regardless of what he personally does, the election is going to go the way it goes. Because each voter has so little impact on any given election, voters feel no sense of responsibility, and the moral constraints which affect their behavior as individuals are neatly short circuited and play no effective role when they act as part of a collective (e.g. an electorate).
The products of an election (i.e. elected officials) have a short-circuit mechanism that helps to suspend any sense of personal responsibility they might have. "If I don't do the things I promised the voters I would do, they will just get someone else who will. The voters are inevitably going to get what they want, I am merely the chosen instrument of their will. What I want has no significance. The only thing that matters is what the voters want."
At the level of actual implementation people like law enforcement officials, bureaucrats, judges, etc. have a short-circuit mechanism. "I am only doing what the voters, through their elected officials, have ordered me to do. If I don't do this thing, they will just get somebody else who will. It's not a choice I am free to make; it's the law. But I was only following orders," the arguments go.
The point is that collectivism subverts individual morality. People who take action on their own initiative have much less to call upon if they want to escape responsibility for their actions. People who act as part of a collective can always fall back on the rationalization that the welfare of the collective is of paramount importance. When really serious malfeasance must be justified, they can always blame it on the leader of the collective, or they can argue that they had no choice. To whatever extent human behavior is constrained by moral considerations, those constraints are more likely to be manifest in individuals acting on their own initiative and less likely to be manifest in individuals who have the sanction of a collective.
Earlier, in the section on natural selection, I noted that some contemporary collectivists, in their awareness of the mechanics of natural selection, were prone to cite the collective dependencies between genes in the human genome as an argument for their obsession with compassion and altruism. Briefly the argument is that the survival of any given gene is dependent upon the other genes it is associated with. This is to say that all of a genome survives or all of it perishes. It is literally true that natural selection, as it most commonly applies to genes in the real world, is a fairly thoroughgoing collectivist affair. Even as individual genes in a genome are dependent upon each other for survival, human beings are seen as being dependent upon each other for survival. Compassion and altruism are seen as logical extensions of naturally occurring relationships.
This view of collectivist ethics rests on the premise that genes are analogous to human beings. The analogy completely glosses over the fact that genes are chemicals, without consciousness, volition or indeed any capacity to initiate action. It tries to extrapolate relationships from a world ruled purely by the laws of physics (i.e. the world of genes) into a world of near chemical equilibrium within which physical laws are more-or-less arranged as checks and balances against one another (i.e. the world of volitional consciousness and free will). It tries to equate a world of passive genes bent on simple reproduction with a world of active human beings capable of defining and pursuing an agenda different than the agenda of genes. It tries to equate things (i.e., genes) dependent upon serendipity for their survival with things (i.e., human beings) who must deliberately overcome serendipity to survive. In short, collectivist ethics, as an extension of natural selection, involves an analogy based upon non-analogous circumstances.
Collectivism is only a generic term and to understand it in the historical context, it is necessary to break it down into a finer granularity:
Totalitarianism is a form of collectivism involving Hierarchity as the dominant motivating instinct. The tyrant himself is usually operating from the aggressive-dominant aspect of Hierarchity (i.e. Androgity). However, tyrants do not simply come to power on the flip of a coin. A great deal of public support must exist for them to make that ascent. This public support derives from the simian proclivity for seeing the alpha male as a natural solution for problems that are too large for an individual to solve. Totalitarianism is enabled by the passive-submissive aspect of Hierarchity (i.e. Subservity). The attitude that "it's not worth fighting over" subverts and dissipates effective opposition to totalitarianism just as it allows chimps to acquiesce in the institution of the alpha male.
Take a look some time at some old newsreel footage of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Look at their faces. These tyrants are super-charged with emotional gratification over something. What you're seeing is a classical simian alpha male, albeit one with very high IQ, who has used that IQ to ascend successfully to the top of a social hierarchy.
I expect that most of the readers of this will be familiar with the hysterical reactions women sometimes have to entertainers like Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, et. al. As a matter of historical fact, many women reacted the same way to Hitler... albeit for different reasons. Take a look at some of the newsreels showing the reaction of the crowds as Hitler passed by and especially watch the faces of the women. Often in the crowds you can spot a wide-eyed, ecstatic face, flushed with emotion and radiating the message "Here is the solution to all my problems." To be sure, there is an element of Sexuality in these reactions, but these are reactions (i.e., secondary consequences), whereas the primary motivation is Subservity.
Males are not immune to the allure of tyrants either but for different reasons. In their case the attitude is more like "Well, we are going to have an alpha male no matter what, so it might as well be a strong one who can get something done." Or the attitude is often, "We are all the time bickering and squabbling among ourselves. We need a strong man to impose some discipline."
And so to all these blandishments the EmoFac is only too happy to respond, "Yes, it all makes sense!" To which the LogFac replies "Who am I to argue against something so certain?" The end result is often an obsessive mental state that lends itself very readily to the creation and maintenance of totalitarian institutions.
Let's face it, totalitarian institutions were very common in the 20th century. It is a patent absurdity to dismiss these recurring events as mere serendipity. This is patterned behavior of an irrational nature that can plausibly be accounted for by a small set of ubiquitous emotional proclivities.
Authoritarianism is yet another form of collectivism involving Hierarchity as a primary motivating instinct. Hierarchity, besides providing a way out of the "two monkeys: one banana" dilemma, leaves stresses unresolved, and these stresses often become the foundations of obsessive mental states.
Human societies are often organized into parallel competing hierarchies. Stresses experienced in one hierarchy can be relieved by ascent within a parallel hierarchy. "For the losers now will be later to win. Oh, the times today are a changin'," sang an angry Bob Dylan. The parallel economic and political hierarchies are a battleground. Relative differences in economic achievement often give rise to resentments that go far beyond anything that can be attributed to real physical deprivation. People lower in an economic hierarchy often feel insulted, especially when someone starting from the same station as they, achieves more economic success. This is what underlies the emotion of envy, and it is a primary motivation behind taxation. Often politicians will raise taxes beyond the point of diminishing returns. While this behavior makes no sense as an attempt to raise revenue, it does makes sense as an effort to inflict retribution.
Often people who feel they have been victimized, slighted or denigrated in a social or economic hierarchy can get satisfaction by ascending within a political hierarchy. Success in the political or governmental hierarchy can be especially rewarding because the winners are often left in a position to bring overwhelming physical force to bear on the losers. The quest for this kind of success leads to an obsessive mental state regarding power. Sociopathic IRS auditors who enjoy bullying are legend. The little man who sees himself as a victim, who sees himself as insignificant, who sees his life as pointless, until he dons a uniform and becomes part of something bigger than himself, part of something really important, is a classic example. Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer does an excellent job of identifying this phenomenon. Stereotypes of the sadistic prison guard, brownshirted storm trooper, pugnacious regulator, arrogant apparatchik, and grand-standing congressman are familiar to everyone. This is all clearly non-random behavior, and "power compulsion disorder" (PCD for short) can be fairly identified as a ubiquitous human phenomenon founded upon an obsessive mental state wherein power is a tonic.
Authoritarianism amounts to a diluted and protracted implementation of totalitarianism by people trying to cope with problems that are troublesome but not too serious. When the problems get really serious, people resort directly to totalitarianism.
Imperialism is a form of collectivism based upon a compound motivational state involving Autonomity, Survivity, and of course, Aggresivity as primary motivating instincts. The individual proclivity for Autonomity can be detached and reattached to the collective. If action is intrinsically good and necessary for survival, then our gang acting aggressively for the common welfare must be good the CiFac postulates. Thus begins an obsessive mental state that is often a contributing factor to war. Even the Marxist-Leninists stumbled on to a bit of truth with their concept of Imperialism. Imperialism has at times been motivated by a quest for markets, not by ideological capitalists, but by their unscrupulous cousins the Mercantilists. The history of the British in India is a classic example of this latter phenomenon. One of the causes of the American Revolution was a desire by Americans to get into the business of manufacturing and not be shackled by laws limiting them to being consumers of goods manufactured in Britain. I am not arguing that every instance of military action by quasi-capitalist nations was an exercise in imperialism. The compound nature of human motivation precludes that.
Nationalism is a form of collectivism based upon a compound mental state involving Territoriality and Gregarity. Nations are a simple linear extrapolation of the historic simian gang. Given that if groups of people are necessary for survival, and that our survival is especially desirable, then our group must be especially desirable, the rationalization goes. If it is desirable for us to reserve the resources of a geographic area for our own use, the gang seems like the only effective way to accomplish that end. Thus the same violent extremes that seem justified for one to use in sustaining one's life become justifiable to use in sustaining one's gang.
Often the obsession of nationalism gets carried far beyond the original emotions and rationalizations that led to it. The nation can become an end in and of itself rather than just a means to an end. For example, contemporary efforts to ban flag burning in the U.S. are conclusive evidence of people in highly charged emotional states that transcend the pursuit of any real material advantage.
Nationalism has been very effective as a means of rallying civilian support behind governments in conflict. In fact, governments suffering from a deficit of popular support have been known to start wars as a means of achieving "solidarity" (e.g. Argentina and the Falklands War). It has even been useful in motivating people to join the military. It may have even had some utility in getting soldiers as far as the battlefield, but it is very rare for anyone to actually "die for his country." The thing that sustains soldiers in combat is personal loyalty to their fellow soldiers (i.e. Gregarity, not Territoriality).
Ethnocentrism is a form of collectivism deriving from a compound motivational state involving Gregarity, Alienaity and Territoriality. Culture is a tool created by human beings for the purpose of managing human relationships in an expedient, stable and orderly manner. Culture formalizes some aspects of human interaction so that cooperative actions can be carried out in a more efficient manner. For example, people will find it vastly easier to build a bridge if they can agree to speak a common language from the outset. Certainly it is possible to judge the utility of a culture on an objective basis. However it is equally possible to associate emotions with culture that go far beyond mere considerations of utility, and that is what ethnocentrism is.
The mechanics of ethnocentrism are something like this: If we are a good thing, and our culture is what identifies and allows us to efficiently pursue survival cooperatively, then our culture must be a good thing. Anything that threatens to undermine or change our culture is potentially a threat to our survival. Any culture that is different from ours is potentially a threat to our survival. This rationale can be cycled through the tetrahedron and amplified into really bizarre obsessive mental states.
Near Houston, Texas is a suburb called Pasadena. A couple decades ago an elementary school student living in that suburb had the misfortune to be born with a misshapen ear. Children, being as they are, tended to ridicule, insult and generally harass the boy. As a defensive measure his mother allowed his hair to grow out long enough to cover his ears. This brought her into conflict with the Pasadena School District, which demanded that she cut her son's hair. They saw his hair style as being different than the cultural norm, potentially a criticism and/or act of rebellion against the cultural norm, and they were not about to tolerate that. When she refused to cut her son's hair, they expelled him from school. Strangely enough, professional educators came to the irrational conclusion that a hair cut was more important than a child's education. The motivations for this had to be emotional.
Sometimes office environments can get so formal that neck ties are mandatory attire. From a physiological perspective, a neck tie may very well reduce blood flow to the brain thereby lowering mental efficiency. As a matter of fact, some people get headaches from wearing neck ties. None of these facts suffices to persuade some office managers. Their cultural norm is that anyone not wearing a neck tie is not part of "the team", and they will send people out of the office, during business hours, if they forget.
Incidents of religious persecution and religious wars are straightforward manifestations of ethnocentrism.
Much of what is often identified as racism is, strictly speaking, ethnocentrism. I was born and raised in Ohio, and there people who speak with southern accents and especially southern drawls, sound well...dim witted. This phenomenon works the other way too. Often times people with New York accents sound arrogant and snooty to southerners. At any rate, I once worked with a fellow from Alabama. He was a very intelligent fellow and was well aware of the effect that a southern accent could have on a non-southerner. Thus he came to affect a standard mid-western accent. You could see that he was consciously and deliberately controlling the way he enunciated his words. Thus he neatly side stepped some discrimination that might have otherwise fallen upon him. Much of the discrimination that falls on black people in this country is not because of their genetic heritage, it is because of their dialect, and that is ethnocentrism, not racism.
Democracy is a form of collectivism deriving from a compound motivational state involving Gregarity and Androgity. People are attracted to people, and it is a manifestation of Gregarity for people to see social organization as an intrinsically good thing. The idea that all people acting together are more powerful than any one individual acting alone invokes the instinct of Androgity (i.e. the gang becomes a surrogate for the alpha male). Even if some people act in a destructive manner, most people will not the CiFac argues. Thus an obsessive mental state forms around democracy. Democracy has a tendency to acquire ethnocentric-religious overtones (Gregarity and Androgity again) wherein the collective is effectively venerated as a deity that can do no wrong. Often people find it impossible to seriously contemplate the possibility that our gang could ever do something morally wrong.
Often democracy is publicly perceived and touted as an antidote to totalitarianism. After all, the gang is one thing and the alpha male is something else. However, democracy as an antidote to totalitarianism often prooves illusory. Democracy often functions like a diode (i.e. an electrical device that will transmit electrical current in one direction but acts as an insulator when current attempts to flow the other way). I submit that "diode democracy" is the rule rather than the exception. This is a state of affairs wherein the electorate forfeits rights and powers so that they may be exercised by government. So long as the flow of power is from the electorate to government, proponents of "diode democracy" will fawn upon the wisdom of the electorate. However, the minute the tables start to turn and the electorate starts to channel power and prerogative back to the individual, a great hue and cry goes up that precious public institutions are being sabotaged. Psychologically, so long as the electorate pursues Gregarity and Androgity in traditional forms, proponents of "diode democracy" feel that all is in order. However, when these instincts are set aside, they immediately sense that something undesirable is happening and resist. Thus, democracy as a practical matter is usually not an antidote to totalitarianism. Usually it amounts to a protracted implementation of authoritarianism, and occasionally fosters a spontaneous leap to totalitarianism (e.g. the autotransformation of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany).
In its purest and simplest form, democracy vests absolute power in the political majority. It is literally the dictatorship of the political majority. As such, it is based upon the theory that the greater the number of dictators, the better the chances are that their vices and errors will cancel out rather than compound. In the short run, this is probably a marginally safe assumption. However, what the long-term holds remains to be seen. In the long run other instincts will tend to come into play. For example Hierarchity can produce large numbers of alienated people. If these same people possess political power, they will be tempted to use it to "get even" with the "higher-ups." Specifically, democracy often involves a move toward egalitarianism in the form of "economic democracy" (i.e. two monkeys combine forces to steal a banana in the possession of a third monkey). Democracy is a paradoxical attempt to escape the more odious aspects of Androgity by casting the political majority in the role of the alpha male.
Democracy in and of itself is nether good or bad. Everything depends on what the political majority makes of it. They can pursue simian imperatives to the point where democracy becomes indistinguishable from gangsterism, or if they choose to pursue objective morality, it can become real civilization... at least in theory.
Racism is a form of collectivism involving Alienaity as a primary motivating instinct. It begins as a tiny pinprick of irritation when a slight physical difference is detected in another human being. The CiFac postulates that something is actually wrong with the person. The LogFac, recognizing that the other person is not part of "my gang," identifies the difference with a concept. These actions can be cycled through the tetrahedron and amplified with the result being the obsessive mental state commonly called racism.
Racism is collectivism in the sense that a judgment is applied generically to a large group of people. This is to say that an individual affected by feelings of Alienaity toward one person is highly likely to harbor those same feelings toward many other people. And where one person is affected by feelings of Alienaity, the probability is very high that there will be a great many other people affected the same way. If nothing else, mimicry tends to proliferate racist attitudes. While racism originates in individual behavior, it is commonly a shared form of behavior justified as an attempt to achieve a shared goal and as such qualifies as a form of collectivism.
I submit that the proper use of the term Racism is to describe Alienaity that has been triggered by a genetic difference. Alienaity that has been triggered by a difference in culture (i.e. behavior) is properly called ethnocentrism. There is a very strong tendency to dismiss all forms of Alienaity as racism, but I think the reality is that ethnocentrism is a far more common phenomenon. This distinction can be very hard to make at times because people who are prone to building obsessive mental states around Alienaity will often mix and interlace racism with ethnocentrism.
Welfare Statism (a.k.a. Socialism) is a form of collectivism involving Fosterity and Hierarchity as primary motivating instincts. Fosterity, besides being an extremely strong emotion, lends itself very readily to reattachment. Fosterity, detached from its initial connection to one's own progeny can and is routinely reattached to all people. The manifestation of this reattachment is what is commonly called compassion. Compassion, moved to the LogFac and supported by the CiFac becomes the concept altruism. Thus amplified, compassion becomes the foundation of a powerful obsessive mental state that easily suffices to justify aggressive behavior. Social hierarchy effectively serves as the compulsive mechanism to force recalcitrants to comply with the altruistic/compassionate agenda.
Since parents are potentially willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their own children, no one should find it surprising that Fosterity in the reattached form of compassion is potentially able to motivate humans to sacrifice some humans for the sake of others. Or if the practitioners of compassion do not have the stomach to enforce the sacrifices themselves, that task can be delegated and performed by proxy. While the bloody rampages of Stalin and Mao are the most extreme examples that have been fostered by this delegation, the commonly accepted less extreme example of it is the willingness of welfare state advocates to sanction physical violence as the last resort for extracting tax revenue from recalcitrants. Make no mistake, the advocates of the welfare state are willing to commit murder by proxy (i.e. through government and law enforcement) of those who would resist, and the emotion of compassion, the concept of altruism and the obsessive mental state deriving from these things sustains their willingness all too effectively.
Advocates of compassion, altruism and welfare statism are often so mesmerized that they cannot (or will not) contemplate the possibility that there might be bad side effects deriving from their obsession. For example, despite the massive failure of Marxism-Leninism to deliver more than the most primitive economic benefits, people worldwide still eagerly embrace Socialism as an ideal. If one points to the historical record and presses the idea that there have been problems, one is often greeted by confusion and disbelief that one could be so obnoxious and heartless as to point out the facts. If one continues to bring the facts into focus, the reaction often turns to anger as if the mere quotation of facts constituted a physical assault.
Environmentalism is a form of collectivism involving Fosterity and Hierarchity as the primary motivating instincts. Fosterity, detached from its initial connection to one's own progeny can and is commonly reattached to all living things. To be sure, environmentalism derives its intellectual roots from the formal science of ecology, but like so many aspects of human behavior, it has deep emotional roots as well. Social hierarchy becomes the enforcement mechanism.
Given the historical record of success that Fosterity has had in creating and sustaining murderous totalitarianism, it is clear that when environmentalists speak of the human race as being a "cancer" on the planet earth, they should be taken very seriously indeed. While many environmentalists no doubt recognize cancer as a metaphor, I think it inevitable that there will be environmentalists who will want to treat people as if they literally were cancer. Some of the people in the former "Earth First" were far progressed along this path. "Squeaky" Fromm attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford in an effort to "save the redwoods."
Feminism is a manifestation of the dissatisfaction of females with Subsurvity or with the dominant-aggressive aspect of Hierarchity (i.e. Androgity). The current fashion of speaking of "testosterone poisoning" is a direct reference to problems associated with Androgity.
Feminism may involve an obsession with Subservity. Passivity, rather than being seen as demeaning, is seen as a chauvinistic virtue entitling the practitioner to a higher station within the social hierarchy. Beyond this there are many diverse aspects to the feminist phenomena created by the interaction of this dissatisfaction with other instincts.
Feminism may involve the interaction of Dominaity with Autonomity. Obviously Ayn Rand comes to mind here.
It may involve the interaction of Dominaity with Fosterity. Perhaps there is no better example of this than Hillary Clinton with her chauvinistic and pugnacious advocacy of welfare statism. This variation of feminism paradoxically rejects the alpha male in the form of a "pater familias" and wholeheartedly embraces the alpha male in the form of the welfare state. Presumably this contradiction will not be lost on everyone, and we will ultimately hear about "estrogen poisoning."
One of the most widely denounced and detested aspects of Androgity is war. While war depends heavily upon the male capacity for aggression, aggression need not be the exclusive province of males. The actions of Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands war and of Janet Reno in the Waco incident demonstrate the point. Gynecity is very much a real human option.
Feminism can also manifest itself as misanthropy. Recently I noticed a couple window stickers on a car. One sticker showed a stick figure of a little girl kicking a little boy; "Girls kick butt," the caption read. The other sticker showed a stick figure of a little girl standing with one foot resting on the crumpled figure of a little boy; "Girls rule," the caption said. Five million years of male domination has resulted in a great deal of alienation, and that has the potential to be transformed into retaliation.
On the face of it, war would seem to be a simple derivative of Aggressivity, and without doubt, Aggressivity is absolutely fundamental to it. But like most human actions, war is driven by a compound motivational state involving other instincts as well. It seems to me that Territoriality is probably the most common instinct involved in motivating human beings to wage war. Obvious examples like "liebensraum," the "eastern co-prosperity sphere" and the oil of Kuwait come to mind.
What causes war in the first place is entirely different from what sustains war. The American civil war makes an interesting study:
It seems likely that Autonomity played a part in motivating the south. To be sure, an attitude of Territoriality toward slaves was an element, but most southerners who fought in the war were not slave owners. Most southerners saw themselves as revolutionaries staging a heroic resistance to Northern tyranny.
The motivation of northerners is more difficult to understand. Abraham Lincoln relied on appeals to "save the union" to motivate northerners. Apparently it is possible to assemble some very substantial obsessive mental states around Territoriality and Gregarity. Then, too, one can sense feelings of Androgity towards Abraham Lincoln by northerners. By the end of the war, one union soldier in ten was of African descent. The motivation of these soldiers had to be Autonomity (i.e. putting an end to slavery). Of course these motivations sufficed primarily to motivate civilians to support the war and only sustained troops long enough to get them to their first battle. Personal loyalty between soldiers (i.e. Gregarity) is what sustained troops on both sides of the conflict through battle after battle.
Yugoslavia makes another interesting case regarding compound motivations in war. Alienaity in the form of ethnocentrism is obviously the primary motivating factor. But Territoriality in the most literal sense (i.e. a desire to control geographic areas) is also readily observable. Normally, people never inherit the particular individual passions that motivated their grandparents and the individual motivational states of their great grandparents are remote indeed. However, in the case of Yugoslavia there is a collective sense of Alienaity as an article of culture that has been projected across four hundred years. It seems likely to me that once Alienaity has resulted in physical violence on a massive scale, that it tends to be come immortal... at least in cases where the people involved remain in intimate geographic contact.
Genocide is perhaps the most underrated problem deriving from human instincts. Few people are aware of just exactly how often genocide is practiced. R.J. Rummel in his book Death by Government does a thorough job of documenting the dimensions of the problem. Using Rummel's statistics and some other statistics of my own, I calculate that something on the order of 75% of all murders committed in the 20th century were committed by governments. Or if you will, during the course of the 20th century governments murdered people at the rate of 1 murder every 19 seconds... for an entire century. That does not include soldiers killing other soldiers in wars. It includes only governments killing unarmed civilians by various and sundry means.
Genocide is especially difficult to understand and explain. In fact, the injunction against taking human life is one of the most powerful moral injunctions. Gwynne Dyer in his book War reported that during WWII, so long as they were alone and unobserved by their fellow soldiers, that 85% of allied infantry would not fire their weapons even when their own lives and the lives of their fellows were in danger. But put the very same people together in a group where they could observe each other, and the willingness to use deadly force jumped to essentially 100%. Likewise, put the same people on a crew served weapon under the supervision of an authority figure, and the willingness to use deadly force jumped to essentially 100%. Gregarity and Hierarchity can play powerful roles in allowing collectives to completely reverse their very own moral injunctions. They can exert a force greater than even Survivity itself.
In all cases it seems clear that Alienaity is fundamental to the execution of a genocide. The ethnocentric antipathy between the Hutu and the Tutsi tribes has been fundamental to the genocide in Burundi. The attitude of the Nazis toward Jews is well known. And the murder deriving from the ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia is obvious. The "rape of Nanking" demonstrated that soldiers who would never think of committing mass murder against the inhabitants of their native Japan, were all too willing to do it when the victims were Chinese. Soviet Russia was notorious for setting up members of one ethnic group to act as border guards and secret police in territory populated by a different ethnic group. In Cambodia the target of the genocide was anyone perceived to be tainted by any degree of "foreign influence."
Probably one of the most bizarre twists of human psychology took place in the Nazi death camps. At first, the executioners were reluctant to do their job because of the normal moral injunction against murder. They went ahead because they were ordered to do so by the leaders of their social hierarchy. This did not stop feelings of intense guilt from accumulating. In classic fashion the CiFac came to the rescue with the fantasy that the victims were the wrongdoers and that the executioners were correcting an injustice that had been done to them. The executioners became angry and resentful that their victims were inflicting guilt upon them. They began to act out feelings of retaliation. Guilt as a mechanism for stopping immoral behavior had backfired. In the light of these events, I submit that the Objectivist passion for loudly denouncing the opposition as "evil" needs to be subjected to critical analysis. Ayn Rand's assertion that one must withhold the sanction of the victim, makes sense when one is dealing with rational beings, but one needs to be very careful when one is dealing with chimpanzees with high IQ's.
I submit that the driving force behind the "war on drugs" is, and its attendant artificial crime wave is by and large Fosterity. People want to save their children from the scourge of drug addiction, and they are willing to inflict vast expense and suffering on everyone else in an effort to achieve that goal. Never mind that the effort is failing. Results are only of secondary importance. The instinct of Fosterity must be served regardless of any other real considerations.
Hoplophobia is the fear of weaponry. In reality, human predators exist and the basic instinct of Survivity gives rise to Fear. The ability to establish and remember the concept "human predator" means that human beings can experience Fear of predators even when none are present. An obsessive mental state that I previously identified as the Chronic Fear Syndrome is very common. The CiFac often comes to the rescue with a fantasy that, through the institution of the alpha male, circumstances can be contrived wherein there are no more human predators. The most common contemporary manifestation of this obsession is "gun control."
If this solution to the problem is to yield psychological benefits, the notion that the alpha male may be the worst human predator cannot be seriously contemplated. Thus, despite the fact that something like 75% of all the murders committed in the 20th century were committed by governments (i.e. the alpha male), the popular perception is that the most serious threat is individuals. Incredibly, even people who have survived genocide, often cannot learn from the experience and at their next opportunity begin again endowing their government with the power to commit genocide. Many Holocaust survivors living in the U.S. are advocates of "gun control."
It is very clear that we have not yet reached a Churchill limit where limited governments (i.e. without the unopposed power to commit genocide) are recognized and accepted as a rational imperative.
There seems no way to escape voicing the truism that the contemporary manifestation of the instinct of Autonomity is the various and sundry individualist movements including Objectivism and Libertarianism.
There are really two distinctive types of slavery. The first is overt slavery which involves a formal institution and in which slavery is called slavery. The second is covert slavery in which the institution is labeled something else and hidden behind an extensive series of rationalizations. I submit that the instincts driving these two different varieties are fundamentally different.
The most likely motivations for overt slavery have to be Autonomity coupled with Aggressivity. People want to run their own lives and achieve their own happiness and welfare. Often they are willing to behave very aggressively to achieve those goals. It is possible to assemble a sufficiently strong obsessive mental state around these drives that other people become the means to those ends. To be sure, feelings of Hierarchity and Alienaity come into play against those who are enslaved, but these instincts are only invoked as secondary consequences of a decision already taken.
The motivations behind covert slavery involve Fosterity and Aggresivity. The rationalizations sound like this: "If it is morally correct for me to sacrifice my interests for the sake of people in need, then it must be morally correct for you to do likewise, and if you resist, it is fair to use force to make you comply. Afterall, human life is at stake." The actual implementation of covert slavery is very much like an exercise in thermodynamics. In physics, if two bodies contain different concentrations of heat energy, the flow of energy from the hotter to the cooler body can be used to do work. In politics, if one citizen has earned more money than two others, a politician can use taxation to dispossess the first citizen and use the revenue to buy the votes of the other two. This is to say that differences in wealth are a political energy source that can be used to do political work (i.e. sustain a politician in office). The net result in the U.S. is the situation of the average 33 year old male who can expect to pay $194,000 more in taxes over his lifetime than he will receive in government benefits. This is human exploitation in the form of covert slavery, and it can be most readily explained as a derivative of the instincts of Fosterity and Aggresivity.
Religion is one of the most conspicuous forms of patterned human behavior. From the most ancient times human societies have involved some concept of a deity or deities. I submit that the mechanism involved here is the Chronic Fear Syndrome. All manner of threats to human survival exist in the real world. Everything from the weather up to mortality itself cause people to Fear. With a LogFac that can comprehend the concept death, and with a MemFac that can pop that information onto the tetrahedral network. It should come as no surprise that human beings assemble major obsessive states deriving from Survivity. These obsessive mental states can be an appalling burden that leads to simple fatigue. These circumstances are perfect for the CiFac to jump in with a nice stress-relieving fantasy. Androgity in the form of an alpha male with super-natural powers is a prescription with real appeal to living simians of high IQ. This suffices to explain the behavior of the consumers of religion, but what of the vendors?
The intermediaries between the deity and the faithful will necessarily occupy positions higher in the social hierarchy. In early civilizations it was not at all uncommon for the government and the high priests to be one and the same. If any doubts linger about the connection between religion and Hierarchity, the spectre of Roman emperors proclaiming themselves gods ought to seal the case. In a word, power lust is a fundamental component of the motivational states that drive religious evangelists.
The political conflict surrounding the abortion/free choice issue is a classic confrontation between Fosterity and Autonomity. Fosterity comes into play in the minds of those seeking to prohibit abortion via a straightforward reattachment of Fosterity from one's own children to all children (including the unborn). Autonomity operates in the very linear sense that women literally want to impose their own preferences on their own bodies.