Successful societies deflect selfish impulsive goals (reblog from June 2013)

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.