We have false national narratives, and we all know we do, because we sure know the other guy does, same as Dawkins’ argument about religion, we already don’t believe in all but one of them, so they’re a thing. I’m always getting lost, so if you don’t know the term, false national narrative, investigoogle, it’s an important one, but I’m going to move on, try to stay on track. We also have narratives regarding the origin of not just our own currently existing nations, but of the human species itself, a thousand mythological stories and a few somewhat more scientific guesses as well.
The one of those last that seems to be the most accessible or acceptable these days is a story about group cooperation morphing into altruism and group control of destructive individuals through instances of such cooperation . . . I want to believe it myself, but I don’t. I believe this is the same story that in the next step becomes civilization because of laws and such, a set of rules that protects some of us from our nastiest selves.
Here’s my version. Not so much laws, as what the laws prescribe: abuse, the major, most indispensable component of group control, I say this every blog . . . OK, my just-so-genesis.
Some accident of group conflict among apes five million years ago or so accidentally got us selecting for abuse, like child abuse and “moral” punitive abuse followed somewhere along the way, and this is what Bible people call the Fall, when we discovered the dark magic power of abusing our own to make a more aggressive troop and move us towards more entrenched warrior lifestyles.
What ensued seems to have been an ongoing tournament where all technologies were developed, including this social one, abuse to leverage genetic and psychological changes in the troop, and many whole species of hominid are now selected out as well as certainly many less divergent human groups as well. The dominant present ones all have elaborate systems of laws and punitive abuse.
This is the dark side of the usual human origin stories about morality and civilization, and I’ll grant the usual story isn’t untrue exactly, but it’s more like ten percent of the causation in our origin story, more like a side effect, while this take of mine is the main thing. I think. Surely both my readers know Star Wars? They touched on a truth there. The dark side is indeed where the power is, of course.
Once you’ve been where I am on this for long enough, you’ll hear them try to explain a WORLD WAR as some aftershock, some eruption from our un-buried past and not as a sign of a trait that is growing and getting worse, something we are nurturing, you’ll be amazed that anyone believes it.
Ridiculous.
Absurd on its face.
Jeff
Oct. 14th., 2019
Abuse with an Excuse 