Monday, December 18, 2017

You want compassion and altruism, here is the way you get it


It seems to me that religion and philosophy were fundamentally based in the mistaken notion that man is egoistic, selfish, and a material object, and so therefore compassion and altruism must be spiritual, abstract, and non-material.

Neo-Darwinism eventually explained compassion and altruism---even Darwin had problems understanding them, as did philosophers of egoism like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. So compassion and altruism were relegated by these thinkers to non-material, abstract, spiritual realms, where I suppose priests and philosophers could better control them, or get rid of them in Nietzsche's case.

As quoted the other day, sociobiologist E. O. Wilson showed that within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. So compassion and altruism are very much materially-grounded, genetically-determined, objects.

Compassion and altruism don't need mistaken abstract notions to explain themselves, they need kin and group-selection to explain and perpetuate themselves. Human beings are kin-centered and ethnocentric and over time that became a basic part of human nature because it helped humans survive and reproduce successfully.

That also explains why universal religions and ideologies don't work very well pushing a universal compassion and altruism that is naturally constrained to kin and ethnic groups and not much beyond that, other than in rare emergency survival conditions.

Rather than trying to hang on to compassion and altruism by inventing abstract-spiritual-universal forms, human beings must soon be ready to admit that what they need to do is organize themselves into an ethnopluralism of ethnostates, where real compassion and altruism have a chance of existing.

Religion and philosophy can then rise to affirming the evolution of material life toward supermaterial Godhood, beginning within thousands of ethnostates... You want compassion and altruism, that is the way you get it.

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