Pretentiousness, sublimation, and higher civilization (from the archive)

I have never liked sliding away from the truth in mannerisms, speech and gestures, pretentiousness, phoniness, it always seems somehow weaker... And yet, and yet, I understand that we must sublimate aggression and even the sex drive if we want higher civilization--- those people who cannot sublimate, often remain primitive, violent, and live short lives. We need to evolve far beyond the beast and this often seems to require more than the straight talk and the real behavior that we prefer.

It seems to me that unpretentious people are stronger than pretentious people, just in face to face connections, but it also seems to be true that often unpretentious people are less successful than pretentious people. Pretentious people perhaps have a larger variety of behaviors, roles that they can play, in a complicated society, they sublimate the aggressive instincts. Some just may be inauthentic or bad actors, and pretentiousness seems to be stronger with the striving middle class and less so in the more aristocratic classes. But the skilled worker on weekends with his dogs and his gun acts not unlike the lord of the estate with his dogs and his gun. Also there is no doubt that genetic connections are involved in the ability to sublimate the instincts (see Raymond Cattell's "Beyondism".)

If we let mammalian drives, instincts (ergs), go as they go without sublimation we may end up not moving beyond the primitive level of communication, which may be okay for some roles but not for most roles in higher civilization. We don't want to create opposition between the instincts and intelligence, nevertheless some instincts need to be checked and sublimated, not blocked---sex and aggression are certainly sublimated in the higher religious and aesthetic pursuits...This all adds up to the natural often conflicted behavior of human beings.

That being said, we don't want to move too far away from basic real human nature, and we may not even be able to do so successfully, which includes such good things as kin selection, marriage-making, religious-making, among other things, with group-selection, even ethnocentrism, as the primary unit of selection. I consider the material spirit or will, which activates within material life like a Super-Id, as the zenith of all these instincts, it is leading us to evolve in the material world toward Godhood, shaped by the outside forces of evolution and selection. That is one instinct that is already sublime in its unpretentious primitive state.