Friday, June 21, 2013
Successful societies deflect selfish impulsive goals
Evidence is being compiled by
sociobiology but it seems likely that successful societies deflect
ergic (instinctive) goal satisfaction from selfish impulsive
goals, and this seems to happen both genetically and culturally.
When this doesn't happen societies tend to destroy themselves by a
dysgenic process. Could this genetic/cultural process be made more conscious in our
social philosophies?
We can see that it is selfish to talk
about individual civil rights without including the rights of the
group, and the the state, because individual rights are determined by
the survival of the group and the state and the circumstances of the
time. Raymond Cattell thought this process was related to vanity and
the failure to escape selfish instinctive impulsive demands, which
are not appropriate to advanced cultures. Libertarians take note.
Jung thought that our preferred paths
toward a given goal are instinctive, he also thought that the more
intrafamilial archetypes were innate. It would seem that the sublimating deflection of selfish ergic goals after
centuries would lead to humans who innately find the
adjustment less difficult. Expanding this forward into future
evolution and one sees how evolution slowly progresses toward
civilizing of the beast. We can perhaps see an example of these civilizing
genetic/cultural changes happening in the way that the glands
governing fear and pugnacity are larger in wild than domesticated
animals.
I am not irrationally afraid of
instinctive drives overcoming the civilizing ego because I coined the idea of a Super-Id, in the form of the activating material Spirit-Will within
material life that is shaped by outside evolution, which can be mediated or
harmonized by the mind and the ego. But this process of civilizing
ergic drives does seem opposite
the barbarian instincts of war, which is the usual accusation hurled
against the subject of appling sociobiology in our social philosophies.
If we ever want to actually do something about the suffering people in this world, rather than just blaming the downtrodden on the evil rich, we will need to look at these genetic/cultural dynamics.
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