American Individualism: The We're On Our Own Society

Obama was wrong when he derided individualism as the "you're on your own" society. Humans were never meant to be alone, of course. The edifice of our social ideals, individualism, was meant to promote a certain kind of society and certain social bonds. Self reliance and personal responsibility themselves came from a moral communal vision: of God's city on a hill, an example to the world. A people who could escape the nightmare of history, the register of man's follies, total depravity, original sin. This condition is inherited by all, but salvation is not a collective affair for nobody deserves salvation just for existing. Hoover's rugged individualism was about character, of the direct link between individual effort and social good, of those who took it upon themselves to improve the welfare of others rather than impersonal bureaucracy. One can only be their brother and sister's keeper if others are as willing to take initiative as we are ourselves. In America we take individualism as a moral creed for each person directed outward.

Cartesian Physics

Descartes' physical theory is fascinating because it attempts to define from the outset any and all phenomena which can be physical under the most simple assumptions, which are three types of matter defined by motion and three laws of motion operating in infinitely divisible space. Descartes' physics in this way is metaphysical. Essentially his physical system amounts to classical mechanics operating in a plenum (space without void) which is itself composed of matter, defined solely by spatial properties, in which if anything changes its state of motion so does anything near it. Bodies with different masses form from local aggregations in space sharing the same state of motion. Massive bodies alter the straight line motion of less massive bodies which resist homogeneity of motion with the large bodies so that they circle around in a vortex of centripetal force, being pulled in with centrifugal motion and by inertia moving in a straight line. 

The method

1. accepting only information you know to be true
2. breaking down these truths into smaller units
3. solving the simple problems first
4. making complete lists of further problems

Descartes famous method of doubt philosophically established only two things or substances that can be certain to exist, matter and mind. Matter is defined solely by extension in space which contains the only qualities of matter which aren't mental. Mind is not extended in space and so cannot be broken down into smaller parts which function the same as the whole. However Descartes did believe mind and body interacted in an intimate fashion, the point of contact being the pineal gland in the brain. Though mental qualities are qualitatively different than material qualities, the physical correlates of mental activity, the passions, operate by the same rules as all matter.

"The same extension in length, breadth, and depth, which constitutes space, constitutes body; and the difference between then lies only in this, that in body we consider extension as particular...whereas in space we attribute to extension a generic unity". space is internal place, a mode in which they are conceived.

The next key principle of Descartes' physical theory was a denial of the void. The Ancient Greek atomists believed that very small uncuttable particles composed everything, comparing apart and coming together in an empty void. The pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Zeno denied the void for how could there be nothing? Existence means something instead of nothing, and so the void would be something, otherwise would be contradictory. This was very important to them since if there is not nothing, then change is impossible. For how could one thing be at one place at one time and then another place at another moment without having to go through an infinite number of steps to get there (Zeno's paradox)? Instead, matter is infinitely divisible. There are no uncuttable atoms. This is important to Descartes because he defines matter solely by space, and so all material things have the same properties which fall under the simple and certain definition of extension. It also means material bodies have no essential organizing principle to their order, which fits with Descartes' mind-body dualism. This allows mechanistic explanations to overcome scholastic physics. 

"With regard to vacuum, in the philosophical sense of that term, that is, a space where there is no substance, it is evident that such does not exist, seeing the extension of space or internal place is not different from that of body...since there is extension in it there is necessarily also substance."

Vacuum: "a place in which there is none of those things we presume ought to be there"

On atoms: "for however small we suppose these parts to be, yet because they are necessarily extended, we are always able in thought to divide any one of them into two or more smaller parts...he [God] could not deprive himself of the ability to do so"

"We still not only imagine beyond it spaced indefinitely extended, but perceive these to be truly imaginable"

Using his method, Descartes thinks that he can explain the workings of the entire material world. 

"There is no phenomenon of nature whose explanation has been omitted in this treatise; for beyond what is perceived by the senses, there is nothing that can be considered a phenomenon of nature"

The Three Types of Matter, which differ by quality of motion

First element- "parts move so quickly and are so small that no other body is able to stop them and, in addition, they do not require any determinate size, shape, or position." Sources of light, the sun and the stars.

Second element- "it's parts have a motion and size that are so moderate that, if there are many causes in the world which can increase their motion and decrease their size, there must be as many others which can do the exact opposite. Thus they remain permanently balanced in this same moderate condition" Atoms and molecules, ordinary matter for us planet dwellers.

Third element- "it's parts are so large, and so joined together, that they always have the force to resist the motion of other bodies" the earth, planets, and comets.

If something has force to move something else, it decreases its own movement. If its parts move too fast it will break apart and lose its size. There is a tendency for each element to revert to itself, and their mixture is mostly superficial.

Of Motion

"all variation in it, or diversity of form, depends on motion"

In Descartes' physics local motion has to explain a lot. Persistence and conservation explain everything metaphysically

Motion defined: "nothing more than the action by which a body passes from one place to another...the same thing may be said to change and not to change place at the same time, so we may also say that the same thing is at the same time moved and not moved"

Motion proper- "the transporting of one part of matter or of one body from the vicinity of those bodies that are in immediate contact with it, or which we regard as at rest, to the vicinity of other bodies"

"Motion is always in the movable thing, not in that which moves" [reductionism] "it is a mode of the movable thing, and not a substance."

Laws of motion (from Principles of Philosophy)

1) "each thing, in so far as it is simple and undivided, always remains in the same state, as far as it can, and never changes except as a result of external causes...hence we must conclude that what is in motion always, in so far as it can, continues to move" Law of inertia

2) "every piece of matter, considered in itself, always tends to continue moving, not in any oblique path but only in a straight line"

3) "when a moving body collides with another, if it's power of continuing in a straight line is less than the resistance of the other body, it is deflected so that, while the quantity of motion is retained, the direction is altered; but if its power of continuing is greater than the resistance of the other body, it carried that body along with it, and loses a quantity of motion equal to that which it imparts to the other body"

• Explanation: The larger a body is, the greater the persistence in motion or in rest, and the greater its resistance. The faster a body moves, the greater is its persistence in motion, and the greater its resistance to another body. 

• Quantity of Motion: if a body is in motion, its persistence in that state is measured by its size and velocity. 

• Quantity of Rest: "a body at rest gives more resistance to a larger velocity than to a smaller one in proportion to the excess of the one velocity to the other". a body at rest can adjust its resistance to any exterior velocity in a body of equal size, its persistence in rest is reduced to a function of its size. Measured by its size and the velocity of something else of equal size 

The three divisions of matter along with the three laws of motion are responsible for all physical phenomena in Descartes' system, including gravity.

Explanation of gravity: "I know none of them who did not suppose that there was gravity in terrestrial bodies; but although experience shows us very clearly that bodies we call heavy descend towards the center of the earth, we do not, therefore, know the nature of gravity, that is, the cause or principle in virtue of which bodies descend, and we must derive our knowledge our knowledge of it from some other source"- preface

"he [Democritus] attributed gravity to these bodies, of which I deny the existence in any body, in so far as a body is considered in itself, because it is a quality that depends on the relations of situation and motion, which several bodies bear to each other.

Descartes has a relational theory of gravity, not a force in itself. This is in contrast to Issac Newton's theory of gravity as a universal attractive force between all bodies with mass, the force inversely proportional to the square of their distances the masses. However Newtonian gravity remained an "occult quality", unexplicable in mechanical terms even though it is true. 

The Vortex
"It has been shown…that all places are full of bodies…. From this it follows that no body can move except in a complete circle of matter or ring of bodies which all move at the same time.” This follows from law of motion 2 that unimpeded motion occurs in a straight line, in application to law of motion 3 which alters direction into circular movement. When one body moves to another space, the previously occupied space is taken by another body and so on depending on the quantity displacement.

Descartes' vortex theory is very similar to the nebular hypothesis for the formation of planetary bodies. Matter builds up in an accretion disk which becomes massive enough that internal and external forces act to create a spherical body.

Time: from meditations. "It is as a matter of fact perfectly clear and evident to all those who consider with attention the nature of time, that in order to be conserved in each moment in which it endures, a substance has need of the same power and action as would be necessary to produce and create it anew, supposing it did not yet exist, so that the light of nature shows us clearly that the distinction between creation and conservation is solely a distinction of the reason.

Carl Jung and Our Symbols

I. 

Symbols express something unknown to us. They are meaningful in themselves, and not purely representative. They aren't signs as conscious thought is under the influence of the unconscious, which is always present. 

The unconscious presents the thing (object) from sense experience without a word, language being necessary for self-conscious awareness. The unconscious is intentional, the content is repressed with an expenditure of energy for the purpose of being unconscious. Association with the word would remove our ability to think, use language, without bringing up unwanted thoughts.

The unconscious can be brought to conscious awareness by use of symbols. Ordinary discourse can distract from what is motivating our actions by introducing resistance. Free verbal association without resistance from the analyst can bring out what is repressed by concentrating on the meaning behind words, without forcing the meaning into another metaphor.

The unconscious does not afford exact localization in space. We are free to use concepts from natural science as metaphors, but should not reduce the unconscious to the physical metaphors.

The unconscious is not just a repository for archaic ideas from our personal past. The symbols we use in conscious interpersonal discourse get their power from a shared unconscious. Such inherited forms allow us to understand one another at a deeper level in discourse, symbolically, than as signs representing something else in the world.

II.

Dreams are our best way to explore the meaning of symbols, of exploring the unconscious. Dreams occur regularly and their content is the least regulated and restricted from awareness.

Dreams have their own meaning, they must be interpreted as they are. Dreams are fantastical and should not be reduced to the day's events or taken as literal truth but for their symbolic relation to the unconscious.

"The main task of dreams is to bring back a sort of "recollection" of the prehistoric, as well as the infantile world, right down to the level of the most primitive instincts."

This is where we begin, with the individual to their personal history and then to deeper instinctual drives in the unconscious.

Jung's dream: "I dreamed that I was in 'my home,' apparently on the first floor, in a cozy, pleasant sitting room furnished in the manner of the eighteenth century. I was astonished that I had never seen this room before, and began to wonder what the ground floor was like. I went downstairs and found the place was rather dark, with paneled walls and heavy furniture from the sixteenth century or even earlier. My surprise and curiosity increased. I wanted to see more of the whole structure of this house. So I went down to the cellar, where I found a door opening onto a flight of stone steps that led to a large vaulted room. The floor consisted of large slabs of stone and the walls seemed very ancient. I examined the mortar and found it was mixed with splinters of brick. Obviously the walls were of Roman origin. I became increasingly excited. In one corner, I saw an iron ring on a stone slab. I pulled up the slab and saw yet another narrow flight of steps leading to a kind of cave, which seemed to be a prehistoric tomb, containing two skulls, some bones, and broken shards of pottery. Then I woke up."

"The dream is in fact a short summary of my own life, more specifically of the development of my own mind. I grew up in a house 200 years old, our furniture consisted mostly of pieces about 300 years old, and mentally my hitherto greatest spiritual adventure had been to study the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great news of the day was the work of Charles Darwin. Shortly before this, I had been living with the still medieval concepts of my parents, for whom the world and men were still presided over by divine omnipotence and providence. This world had become antiquated and obsolete. My Christian faith had become relative through its encounter with Eastern religions and Greek philosophy. It was for this reason that the ground floor was so still, dark, and obviously uninhabited.

"My intuition consisted of the sudden and most unexpected insight into the fact that my dream drapes the myself, my life and my world, my whole reality against a theoretical structure erected by another, strange kind for reasons and purposes of its own. It was not Freud's dream, it was mine; and I understood suddenly in a flash what my dream meant."

Dream analysis is individualistic, there are no ciphers.

"The individual is the only reality. The further we move away from the individual toward abstract ideas about Homo sapiens, the more likely we are to fall in error...but if we are to see things in their right perspective, we need to understand the past of man as well as his present."

We must understand the patient's predilection and forget our prejudices.

"Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analyzing a dream"

Dreams have a compensatory role for individuals. The same dream can have different meanings.

Dream analysis is a dialectical technique between persons.

How well an individual functions is partly determined socially, through relationships.

Obsessive and emotional dreams are of a different nature, relating to needs more fundamental than those of conscious origin.

Elements occur in dreams that aren't individual and not derived from personal experience. Aka archetypes, primordial images.

III.
Motifs are not archetypes, as they are conscious representations. Not inherited.

"The term "archetype" is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs. But these are nothing more than conscious representations; it would be absurd to assume that such variable representations could be inherited."

"The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif-representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern.

Freud hinted at this with archaic remnants: "mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind". Freud however linked them with the biological drives of sexuality and death, reducing mental life to representing only biological imperatives. Archetypes represent needs beyond love and hunger owing to their inherited innate nature. They are self perpetuating.

Collective symbols are chiefly religious and both human and inhuman in origin, owing to the common descent of the species.

"If archetypes were representations that originated in our consciousness...we should surely understand them"

Instincts are physiological urges perceived by the senses, having a mental as well as a behavioral aspect. They manifest themselves in fantasy and are revealed in symbols. Their manifestations are archetypes. Without known origin, reproduced across time and place.

"It is even conceivable that the early origins of mans capacity to reflect come from the painful consequences of violent emotional clashes...the shock of a similar emotional experience is often needed to make people wake up and pay attention to what they are doing."

Our consciousness is an ephemeral adaptation to the needs of the unconscious self.

"The unconscious, however, seems to be guided chiefly by instinctive trends, represented by corresponding thought forms-that is, by the archetypes."

The unconscious is more descriptive of our mental life and our self than the conscious is.

Dreams can be predictive. It doesn't ignore like consciousness does. It can be guided by trends, corresponding to known archetypes. Archetypes are dynamic.

"Something that is of a more or less unknown nature has been intuitively grasped by the unconscious and submitted to an archetypal treatment. This suggests that, instead of the process of reasoning that conscious thought would have applied, the archetypal mind has stepped in and taken over the task of prognostication. The archetypes thus have their own intuitive and their own specific energy. These powers enable them both to produce a meaningful interpretation (in their own symbolic style) and to interfere in a given situation with their own impulses and their own thought formations. Complexes compensate for faulty attitudes, myths compensate for the sufferings of mankind in general."

Complexes are compensations in the personal unconscious, myths are compensations for the collective unconscious.

IV
The self is the totality of our conscious, personal unconscious, and the shared collective unconscious which are made manifest through the ego. The shadow self is what isn't reconciled into our self and remains in opposition, closest to our irrational and more primitive instincts. In the collective unconscious the self and the shadow are the hero are type and the villain archetype, protagonist and antagonist.

Individuation reconciles opposites within the psyche. Life is the process of becoming an individual.





"These four functional types correspond to the obvious means by which consciousness obtains its orientation to experience. Sensation (I.e sense perception) tells you that something exists; thinking tells you what it is; feeling tells you whether it is agreeable or not; and intuition tells you whence it comes and where it is going"

There are also extrovert and introvert personalities. Extroverts are driven toward the outer world, toward others, while introverts have their energy directed inward, toward mind and feeling.

The persona is how our ego presents itself to the external social world which adapts the ego to the outer world instead of reconciling or accepting the deep aspects of the self, what becomes manifested in the shadow self.

Personality relates to the persona, character relates to the self. Personality is our conscious relation to the world, by sensing, thinking, feeling, intuition, extroversion or introversion. A composite type is presented to the world to meet our instinctual needs. The complexes compensate for what is missing in conscious life and remains in the unconscious, personal and collective.

The anima and animus are the respective female and male aspects of ourselves. These feminine and masculine aspects remain in the personal unconscious because of our bisexual constitution, our birth from a mother and a father.

Fundamental to the anima/animus is the passive/active orientation toward the world developed during youth, during the anal stage, which relate to the introvert/extrovert orientation towards the world. We strive for self-mastery as we separate from others early in life and must provide for our needs. We learn to receive as well as to provide. In potty training, when to withhold and contain and when to expel and direct.

The Mother Earth and God the father are manifestations of anima/animus from the collective unconscious, relating to the metaphysical division between matter and form, the ovum and the sperm, the passive-receiving aspect and the active-providing aspect of the world. The demiurge master craftsman forms the earth from preexisting matter.

(All quotes from the chapter "Approaching the Unconscious" by Carl Jung in Man and His Symbols. I expanded on what is in the chapter to better explicate Jung's thinking, and my own which is why I put this together. Roman numerals just an organizational tool.)

Two Axioms of Human Nature

1) The human organism is a botched job

Natural selection does not aim at perfection, just sufficiency for certain conditions, but humans insist on living in conditions which the species did not evolve for. These conditions fall under "civilized" life, away from natural selection which enforces a crude, blind rationality. We are enabled for these social conditions by a big and powerful brain which takes a long term to develop and a lot of energy to maintain. This makes us totally helpless and dependent on others for a long period of our lives, which protects us from the influence of reality (natural selection) and so we are able to concoct the most fantastical notions about our origins and our importance. Social life perpetuates this infantile condition and disposes us to the fantasies of others for survival.

HL Mencken
"As animals go, even in so limited a space as our world, man is botched and ridiculous. Few other brutes are so stupid or so cowardly...most of all, man is deficient in courage, perhaps the noblest quality of them all. He is not only mortally afraid of all other animals of his own weight or half his weight- save a few debased by artificial inbreeding-; he is even mortally afraid of his own kind- and not only of their fists and hooves, but even of their sniggers. 

"No other animal is so defectively adapted to its environment. The human infant, as it comes into the world, is so puny that if it were neglected for two days running it would infallibly perish, and this congenital infirmity, though more or less concealed later on, persists until death. Man is ill far more than any other animal, both in his savage state and under civilization.

"All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax in man. As a piece of mechanism he is the worst of them all...Alone of all animals, terrestrial, celestial or marine, man is unfit to go abroad in the world he inhabits. He must clothe himself, protect himself, swathe himself, armor himself. He is eternally in the positon of a turtle born without a shell, a dog without hair, a fish without fins.

"No doubt the imagination of man is to blame for this singular weakness. That imagination, I daresay, is what gave him his first lift above his fellow primates. It enabled him to visualize a condition of existence better than he was experiencing, and bit by bit he was able to give the picture a certain crude reality...This body of imaginings constitutes his stock of sweet beliefs, his corpus of high faiths and confidences- in brief, his burden of errors. And that burden of errors is what distinguishes man, even above his capacity for tears, his talents as a liar, his excessive hypocrisy and poltroonery, from all the other orders of mammalia."

Our botched nature politically is due to the fact that we are fundamentally selfish when it comes to advancement of ourselves, our genes, and those like us through the worst means of deceit and violence, and yet are intensely social beings. Altruism works best among competing groups so this selfishness is self-defeating. And yet is is the unavoidable result of the fact that we do not limit reproduction to one pair of male and female as the wolf does or to one queen as the hymenoptera do. We put our children above others and develop different lines of descent; we don't all have the same nest, after we spread around the world.

Thomas Hobbes described the problem thus:

It is true, that certain living creatures, as Bees, and Ants, live sociably with one another and therefore some man may perhaps desire to know, why Man-kind cannot do the same. To which I answer, 

First, that men are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity, which these creatures are not 

Secondly, that amongst these creatures, the Common good differeth not from the Private; But man, whose Joy consisteth in comparing himselfe with other men, can relish nothing but what is eminent. 

Thirdly, that these creatures, having not (as man) the use of reason, do not see, nor think that they see any fault, in the administration of their common business; whereas amongst men, there are very many, that thinke themselves wiser, and able to govern the Publique, better than the rest; and thereby bring it into Distraction and Civill warre.

Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is Naturall; that of men, is by Covenant only, which is Artificiall

Because we are not hive minds, because there is disagreement, there is the need for ethics not just through appeal to rational interest, but by convincing others to adopt our like and dislikes. All for the purpose of facilitating social life. Politics is going to a problem because of our flawed nature. 

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.” Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene

“Precepts for living together are not going to be handed down from on high. Men must use their own intelligence in imposing order on chaos, intelligence not in scientific problem-solving but in the more difficult sense of finding and maintaining agreement among themselves. Anarchy is ideal for ideal men; passionate men must be reasonable. Like so many men have done before me, I examine the bases for a society of men and women who want to be free but who recognize the inherent limits that social interdependence places on them." James Buchanan

2) Humans aren't created equal

"We need to get rid of our liberal preconceptions. Men are not born equal, this is something which has not yet got through to the politicians." Dr. Francis Crick

Genetic heredity selects particular traits which influence how tall, intelligent, or extroverted/introverted we are. Probably at least half of an individual's nature is due to genetic influence. Humans don't really believe in equality unconsciously as we have a preference for people who are like us physically, even as infants before socialization sets in. This is adaptive for the propagation of our genes, we favor those with genetic similarity. Much is made of the need for diversity and genetic variety, but the drive for homogeneity is probably more powerful. People can enjoy radically different lifestyles at a distance but not in their space, because of the inborn territorial imperative.

All humans are equal in the sense of identity because we are a species, which means no matter how dumb or defective someone is if they fit the biological definition of reproductive isolation/common descent then they are as human as we are. But this equality is totally different than the social/political sense of equality in which every individual is of the same value as every other within the species. Species is itself a hierarchical classification which falls within genus which in turn falls within order. The species Homo Sapiens of the genus homo of the primate order. Within each rank there is profound differentiation which is why some people get understandably upset with the notion we're primates. Well we are, but in a abstract way removed millions of years from even the higher apes who we don't breed with. 

"All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death." Jean Calvin

But I learned it best from John C. Calhoun

"Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it. It begins with “all men are born,” which is utterly untrue. Men are not born. Infants are born. They grow to be men. And concludes with asserting that they are born “free and equal,” which is not less false. They are not born free. While infants they are incapable of freedom, being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom. Besides, they are necessarily born subject to their parents, and remain so among all people, savage and civilized, until the development of their intellect and physical capacity enables them to take care of themselves. They grow to all the freedom of which the condition in which they were born permits, by growing to be men. Nor is it less false that they are born “equal.” They are not so in any sense in which it can be regarded; and thus, as I have asserted, there is not a word of truth in the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood.

"All men are not created. According to the Bible, only two, a man and a woman, ever were, and of these one was pronounced subordinate to the other. All others have come into the world by being born, and in no sense, as I have shown, either free or equal.

"But it is equally clear, that man cannot exist in such a state [of nature]; that he is by nature social, and that society is necessary, not only to the proper development of all his faculties, moral and intellectual, but to the very existence of his race. Such being the case, the state is a purely hypothetical one; and when we say all men are free and equal in it, we announce a mere hypothetical truism; that is, a truism resting on a mere supposition that cannot exist, and of course one of little or no practical value.

"Nor is the social state of itself his natural state; for society can no more exist without government, in one form or another, than man without society. It is the political, then, which includes the social, that is his natural state. It is the one for which his Creator formed him, into which he is impelled irresistibly, and in which only his race can exist and all its faculties be fully developed.

Such being the case, it follows that any, the worst form of government, is better than anarchy; and that individual liberty, or freedom, must be subordinate to whatever power may be necessary to protect society against anarchy within or destruction from without; for the safety and well-being of society is as paramount to individual liberty, as the safety and well-being of the race is to that of individuals; and in the same proportion, the power necessary for the safety of society is paramount to individual liberty. On the contrary, government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of government and the liberty of the citizen or subject in the political state, which, as I have shown, is the natural state of man — the only one in which his race can exist, and the one in which he is born, lives, and dies.

"It follows from all this that the quantum of power on the part of the government, and of liberty on that of individuals, instead of being equal in all cases, must necessarily be very unequal among different people, according to their different conditions. For just in proportion as a people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger from without, the power necessary for government to possess, in order to preserve society against anarchy and destruction becomes greater and greater, and individual liberty less and less, until the lowest condition is reached, when absolute and despotic power becomes necessary on the part of the government, and individual liberty extinct.

"liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances. Instead, then, of liberty and equality being born with man; instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are high prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won — and when won, the most difficult to be preserved.

Let us have liberty and equality in accordance with social development, always with the consideration that such ideals emerge from a certain way of life and are not the natural state of human existence.

Travis Bickle

"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."

Voltaire said that if God did not exist we would have to invent him. If Travis Bickle didn't exist we would invent him, whether we wanted to or not.

For God's a lonely man. God is a transcendental being, not to be found in the world of experience. Neither can the soul which is also transcendental.

Man's also a lonely being, because he has a soul. No amount of searching will ever determine its nature or purpose. Ultimate purpose itself is transcendental.

Loneliness has followed me my entire life. It is fundamental to understanding the world, by keeping us apart from it.

Denying thinghood to God and the soul protects them from encroachment by the sensualists. But it makes us very lonely, as we will never find them in the world.


"You got no choice, anyway. I mean we're all fucked. More or less, you know?"

The Moral Animal by Robert Wright

"Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die." Charles Darwin

"As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. The point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" Darwin 1882

"Darwin, on grounds such as this, believed that the human species is a moral one-that is, in fact, we are the only moral animal. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past or future actions or motives, and of approving or disproving them," he wrote. "We have no reason to suppose any of the lower animals have this ability."

"Deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as to not betray-by the subtle signs of self-knowledge-the deception being practised." Richard Dawkins

"The conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view" Robert Trivers

"We spend our lives desperately seeking status; we are addicted to social esteem in a fairly literal sense, dependent on the neurotransmitters we get upon impressing people...we are all self-promoters and social climbers. The people known as such are either so effective as to arouse envy or so graceless as to make their effort obvious, or both.

"The young, plastic mind is shaped by cues that, in the environment of our evolution, suggested what behavioral strategies were most likely to get genes spread. The cues presumably tend to mirror two things: the sort of social environment you find yourself in [Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness]; and the sorts of assets and liabilities you bring into that environment [Parental Investment]."

"Our generosity and affection have a narrow underlying purpose. They're aimed either at kin, who share our genes, at nonkin of the opposite sex who can help package our genes for shipment to the next generation, or at nonkin of either sex who seem likely to return the favor. What's more, the favor often entails dishonesty or malice...Affection is a tool of hostility. We form bonds to deepen fissures.

"The basic paradox here-the intellectual groundlessness of blame, and the practical need for it.

"The shift from nineteenth century earnestness to twentieth century cynicism has been traced, in part, to Sigmund Freud. Like the new Darwinism, Freudian thought finds sly unconscious aims in the most innocent acts. And like the new Darwinism, it sees an animal essence at the core of the unconscious.

"Nor are those the only things Freudian and Darwinian thought have in common. For all the criticism it has drawn in recent decades, Freudian remains the most influential behavioral paradigm-academically, morally, spiritually-of our time. And to this proposition the new Darwinian paradigm aspires.

"Freud was right to sense that relatives-parents, in particular, have a lot to say about the shape of the emerging psyche. Freud was also right to sense that parents are not wholly benign, and that deep conflicts between parents and offspring are possible.

"All told, Freud's scorecard is not bad: he (and his followers) have identified lots of mental dynamics that may have deep evolutionary roots. He rightly saw the mind as a place of turbulence, much of it subterranean. And, in a general way, he saw the source of the turbulence: an animal of ultimately complete ruthlessness is born into a complex and inescapable social web.

"If present-day Freudians start taking these hints and recast their ideas accordingly, maybe they can save Freud's name from the eclipse it will probably suffer if the task is left to Darwinians."

¨If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one to the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals...If Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended nature as a scheme to be amended, not initiated, by Man." John Stuart Mill

"The practice of that which is ethically best-what we call goddess or virtue-involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for success. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive."-Thomas Henry Huxley

"Huxley viewed the cosmic process as an enemy that must be combated. I take a similar but more extreme position, based both on the more extreme contemporary view of natural selection as a process for maximizing selfishness, and on the longer list of vices now assignable to the enemy. If this enemy is worse than Huxley thought, there is a more urgent need for biological understanding." George Williams

"The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice." Samuel Smiles

"Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do." Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene


(All quotations by Robert Wright unless otherwise noted.)

The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov is about the conflict between a father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, and his sons, a powerful theme in western literature. Dmitri is his first son born to his first wife; Ivan (middle son) and Alyosha (the youngest) are born to his second wife. There is also Smerdyakov who it is strongly suggested is his illegitimate son of a street woman. He doesn't take much care of any of them, leaving them to the care of relatives, and lives as a drunken oaf engaging in orgies. Each son takes a different path in life: Alyosha enters an orthodox Christian seminary where he learns love and forgiveness, Ivan becomes a radical atheist intellectual who actually gets along and moves in with his father, and Dmitri competes with his father for his inheritance from his mother as well as the love of a woman Grushenka and is blamed for his murder, all of which which constitutes the main plot, and Smerdyakov who lives with the father as a servant and murders him under influence of the Ivan's philosophy.

The Brothers Karamazov was Fyodor Dostoyevsky's final novel; he died a year after its publication in 1881. Though the themes are universal in their reach, fully appreciating the novel requires knowing some facts about the author himself as well as the time he lived in. For instance, Dostoevsky had a son named Alyosha, the name of the youngest son in the novel, who died at age three from epilepsy.

It is claimed that when Dostoyevsky's own father died when he was 18 he had an epileptic seizure, though this has been disputed. Sigmund Freud made much of this in his essay on him in 1928, claiming that the episode represents his conflicted feelings towards his father who he in some way hated. That after Smerdyakov murders father Pavlovich he has an epileptic seizure connects the epilepsy to the Oedipal hatred of the father and love for his mother, who died after giving birth to Smerdyakov. The epilepsy both for Dostoevsky and Smerdyakov is an inability to process such feelings of aggression and remorse.

It's also widely held that his father was murdered by serfs. Fyodor's father Mikhail was a doctor wealthy enough to own property as well as serfs and was by accounts a cruel man. The alleged murder adds to the Oedipal feelings toward his father and sympathy for the peasants. The peasants did what he Dostoyevsky wanted in his heart, but was perhaps caused by the injustice of their social position and they did it perhaps collectively rather than individually. This myth would attest to Freud's own "primal horde" myth that the origin of religion comes from the collective murder of the father by his sons and the remorse felt motivated them to reify the father ideal for themselves as a social consciousness, in this case with the orthodox Christianity of the common people.

Father Karamazov seemingly represents the Russian state, as well as Dostoyevsky's own father. The reactionary autocratic Russian state of his time repressed attempts to improve the lot of the serfs and reveled in its own decadence. Dostoyevsky reviled the condition of the peasants which brought him to involvement in radical socialist politics, which aimed at freeing the lower class, reforming the state in a way he by himself is unable to do. Much like the alleged murder of his father by the serfs.

Dostoyevsky was arrested for his radical political activity and sentenced to death. At the last moment the Tsar gave reprieve and he was instead sent to exile in Siberia. This parallels Dmitri's arrest for the murder of his father and his own imprisonment in Siberia. While in Siberia Dostoevsky became more religious, owing to the near death experience which sent him there. He identified with the ideology of his jailers and abandoned radical politics, becoming a reactionary.

Though Dostoyevsky gave up his activity against the Russian state, the morality he adopted from orthodox Christianity still aimed at the liberation of the misery of the people. The values of unconditional love for all were most likely learned from his mother who was a sensitive caring woman. Father Zossima from whom Alyosha learns to go out into the world to promote love and forgiveness for all represents these maternal values, which Fyodor wishes he could have passed on to his own Alyosha. Fyodor's mother died before his father, just as Zossima dies before Pavlovich. Alyosha's attempt to this end takes place in the subplot with the schoolboys, one in particular Ilyusha who is sick and picked on by others. His condition is partly to blame on the debt squabbles of Alyosha's own family. Of course Ilyusha sounds pretty close to Alyosha, and he dies just like the real life child Alyosha.

Dostoyevsky's own Alyosha died of an epileptic seizure, a condition which Dostoyevsky most likely inherited from his own father. Had Alyosha lived he would have been raised with the values Dostoyevsky learned from his mother, but instead was killed by the father's condition. It will be the peasants, holding the values of his loved mother, who can end this nightmare of history perpetuated by the Russian state, which represents the values of his father. This is the latent message of The Brothers Karamazov.

The manifest message of The Brothers Karamazov is that all people must love one another and we can only find our own salvation by going out into the world and assist in the salvation of others. This is the doctrine Alyosha learns from father Zossima. It is also explicated in a parable about an old woman and an onion told by Grushenka. The woman lived a wicked life and was sent to hell. But there was one good deed she did, giving an onion to a beggar. God let her take hold of that same onion and told her that if she can hold onto it she will be lifted to heaven, but if the onion breaks she will stay in hell. She holds on and when she is almost free, other sinners hold on to her to be pulled out. The woman kicked them with her feet saying its her onion and only she is being saved for her deed. The onion breaks and she falls back to hell. If she had allowed others to share in her salvation, doing a good deed for others, she and the others would have made it to heaven. If everybody worked to save one another as they did for their self, everybody would make it and there would be no more evil in the world.

Opposing the manifest moral message is the philosophy of Ivan Karamazov, told in the famous poem The Grand Inquisitor. In the poem Jesus comes back to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is actually arrested, to be put to death the next day. While jailed he is told by the grand inquisitor that Jesus put an intolerable burden on mankind by giving them free will which is incompatible with happiness. Jesus rejected Satan's temptation to turn stones into bread, gain recognition as the messiah, and rule over the world in favor of freedom which would guarantee the suffering of man. So the Catholic Church has opted to take for itself the awful task of trying to understand God's creation and provide answers for the population who can be satisfied on bread alone, making Jesus' return problematic. "They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them...For it is but we, we the keepers of the great Mystery who will be miserable. There will be thousands of millions of happy infants, and one hundred thousand martyrs who have taken upon themselves the curse of knowledge of good and evil." Christ is silent throughout the inquisitor's speech and instead of responding kisses him. Alyosha after hearing the story kisses Ivan. This is supposed to mean that all the reason and discourse in the world won't save man, but only unconditional love. Reason leads to such awful conclusions. By such reasoning Ivan arrives at the conclusion that it isn't possible to love one's neighbors, but only at a distance for one can never experience the world the way others do and we all remain separate. Our Euclidean minds are also inadequate to understand the world and God himself Ivan concludes.

Ivan is portrayed and remembered as the rationalist atheist committed to socialism because of a profound nihilism, but this is also because he is very sensitive to the suffering in the world. However his deterministic naturalist philosophy has no room for evil and so discounts the feelings which haunt Ivan along with removing his free will to rectify the situation. When Smerdyakov murders father Pavlovich Ivan is haunted by the devil and goes mad.

The latent motivation for Dostoevsky's distrust of naturalism is that it justifies the murder of the father, much like the overthrow of the Russian state, because evil is not real but due to the actual activity of father Dostoyevsky, father Karamazov, and the Russian state which can be overcome with violence. Dostoevsky, given his near death experience from involvement with such politics as well as his continued epileptic episodes throughout his life, had to condemn this solution and its worldview. Nonetheless he never abandoned a moral critique of worldly power embodied in the Catholic Church in Ivan's poem and the Russian state in his life which removed the difficulty of understanding God and questioning the evil of the world from people in exchange for their freedom.

But unable to accept the solution taken by Smerdyakov, it is the flawed Dmitri who must be punished by the state and the theorist Ivan who must be driven mad by guilt. Dmitri for his part expressed in public his hatred of his father which is what leads to his arrest and imprisonment. It is simply unacceptable to express such feelings, and it is this which society cannot tolerate.

Freud said that The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel ever written. And he is right. The personal nature of the story in the form of a family drama, a manifest and latent one,  I think is what makes it so given the deep philosophical issues raised.

Dostoyevsky is a forerunner to existentialism given his preoccupation with freedom and the inability of reason to establish moral certainty and remove the dread of death. The famous quote "if God does not exist everything is permitted" attributed to the book is actually without God and the afterlife everything is permitted. It is told to Alyosha by Dmitri in a conversation he had with seminary student Rakitin who is an atheist (Joseph Stalin was in seminary too). "But what will become of men then?' I asked him, 'without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?" This is the dilemma of atheism from the existentialist point of view. Even if God cannot be established by fact or reason, many of society's morals aren't either and would also be invalid. This would make the good dependent on our actions and our dread of death found in our resistance to accept responsibility for our actions and the state of the world.

...

My own take is that we just can't save everyone, and we shouldn't let that bother us. Only a small number of us have God's grace or if you're an atheist are destined to have a happy life, and you better hope you're one of them. Most people are just fucked and there is nothing we can do about it. Men struggle for their own salvation which even with the greatest effort it isn't guaranteed, it just isn't a group affair. Despair at this is a sign of a weak will, that you don't think you're going to be saved. We're all born with evil and aren't entitled to anything. In reality salvation from death and despair just like the consequences of all our actions are independent of our willing. Reasoning from the cause will only reveal it to be an effect of yet another cause, as does reasoning from the effect to the cause will only give you another effect. One ought to have confidence in the turning of worldly events and see that nothing too good or too bad is precluded or avoidable according to the laws of nature. Dostoyevsky abhorred this determinism, but it does give a certainty and rationalization of the course of history. It allows us to remove ourselves from the nightmare of history by seeing that all happens as it must and therefore can be understood and lived with as individuals.

The real question is wherever did people get the idea that life is supposed to have a meaning? The answer is that before we are born we are indistinguishable from our mother and have all of our needs provided in the womb. When we are born we are completely helpless and live in total dependency on others who answer our cries (all we are able to do). Even when we are physically independent and can stand on our own two legs, we never get over that helplessness and dependency on others. We take in the ideal of our parents, good and bad, for ourselves against a world which does not care for human wants. So we wish to see the authority of our parents in nature, a wish which grows greater with misfortune. The life of a complex organism is bound for tragedy given the great amount of time it takes to develop and the accompanying helplessness. Unfortunately this dependence on others removes us from the harsh reality of the external world and inculcates the expectation of a meaning for life acceptable for us. So it's good for us to face the truth through art from time to time.

Three Years of Schopenhauer

The Ice Age and Human Civilization

The oldest human societies don't go back much further than 10,000 years from the present. Six civilizations developed independently: Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, Peru, Mexico, and India. The earliest, Egypt and Mesopotamia, don't go back before 8-10,000 years. I've always wondered why this took so long if anatomically modern humans developed over a hundred thousand years ago and control of fire, to make tools, thousands of years before civilization. For most of our existence we were hunter gatherers, coexisting with other hominids and large land mammals as competition. We had bipedalism, tool use, and intelligence, but didn't make the leap to "civilization."

What is civilization anyway? One could describe it as "a place for my stuff", invoking comedian George Carlin's routine. One day we had so much stuff that we couldn't walk around without leaving some behind. And another day we had so much that we couldn't just pack up and go from a campsite we had to settle more permanently, to get more stuff. Being bipedal slowed us down as does the long time it takes for children to develop their big heads, which increases the investment from male hunters, to come home and share, and prevents female gatherers from going too far from camp, where the most important stuff is.

Civilization in a general sense is a situation where humans gain some command over nature so that they can remain in the same place and get used to the area to learn more methods of control. Culture comes from Latin cultus; to cultivate, to till. Sedentary existence, agriculture, domestication of animals, prediction and expectation of weather/climate, and some common social expression and communication are basic markers of society from this definition. For society to get growing, there had to be security that we could reap what we sowed. Protection from marauders, natural calamity like flood or drought, storage of surplus production which would enable greater division of labor.

Why did it take until about 10,000 years ago for some of us to settle down permanently? Humans spread all over the Earth from presumably a small single population, until some people stopped leaving or never came back to where they came from. The answer I think is the environment itself, the last ice age 2 million to 12,000 years ago, the Pleistocene and the Paleolithic. The last ice age was when we learned to live together after we transitioned from ape to human. It was by the end of the ice age that we learned to control fire, domesticate our first animal the wolf, other hominids went extinct, large land animals provided our opportunities for hunting and eventually went extinct, and Homo sapiens moved from Africa to Europe, Asia, and North America. Neanderthals in Europe disappeared around 30,000 years ago. Necessity caused all these factors and by the time the climate warmed, we were triumphant in our new environments, with the preconditions to settle down.

Our transition to hunting ape was perfected during the ice age, marking our transition from ape society. Colder temperatures began back in the Pliocene 5 to 2 millions of years ago when the trees began to disappear, forcing our ancestors to adapt to life on foot in the savanna. As the climate got colder and trees fewer, having a diet of some meat would have been adaptive. Rather than being dependent on nature, we could take the prerogative of finding our own food. Eating meat along with cooking it shaped our complex social organization, sharing food and greater parental investment in young, and enabled a big brain, providing lots of energy and decreasing our jaw size relative to the nut and fruit eating primates.

This change to hunting precipitated a social change from primate society, away from a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male on top to one with more equality between males as well as more investment in offspring. The alpha male had primary access to females, probably taking a few mates for himself. Hunting to the contrary was most likely a cooperative venture of acquisition with primitive tools, against large animals. A system of either sexual promiscuity or serial monogamy guaranteeing individual sexual access would have been more advantageous to male loyalty, and so the alpha ape had to die. During this time, a forced egalitarianism in small groups would develop to ensure the sharing of meat. Attachment to multiple females, by confusing paternity, or a single partner, guaranteeing paternity, would guarantee such paternal investment.

Sandor Ferenczi the Hungarian psychoanalyst made a connection between Sigmund Freud's psychosexual stage of latency and the last ice age.

"Having ventured so far beyond the knowable, we have no reason to shrink before the last analogy and from bringing the last great step into individual repression, the latency period, into connection with the last and greatest catastrophe that smote our primate ancestors...,i.e. with the misery of the glacial period, which we faithfully recapitulate in our individual life." Sandor Ferenczi, Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality 1913

Freud himself mentioned the theory in The Ego and the Id 1923.
"According to one psychoanalytic hypothesis [by Ferenczi], the last mentioned phenomenon, which seems to be peculiar to man, is a heritage of the cultural development necessitated by the glacial epoch. We see, then, that the differentiation of the superego from the ego is no matter of chance"

Latency is the period after age 5 or 6 and before puberty, around age 12-13. Sexual identification has already occurred during the previous genital stage. During this period sexual urges are held back and the child is able to make social relationships with fellow children of the same sex and through education take in the morals of adults, fully developing a superego. The sexual instinct is chilled during this cool off period so we can live together.

The ice age would have been miserable and therefore formative on our social character for two major reasons; climate and large predators. The former is obvious and is connected with the latter. Bergmann's rule states that a more massive organism has a smaller surface area to volume ratio (short and stocky), the effect of which is less heat loss. This means larger animals fare better in cold environments, also due to storing more fat. Woolly mammoths, giant beavers, saber tooth cats, mastodons and other megafauna roamed the Earth. To survive we would have to work together, hunt the megafauna together. 

Closer look?

When the climate changed and the Earth warmed, humans emerged as one species. Humans do much better in warm climate it seems, having already learned to survive in various climates.Warmer temperatures open up new land for agriculture, the viking colony of Greenland during the medieval warming period as well as wine being grown in Britain as examples. The industrial revolution occurred soon after the end of the "little ice age" around the 19th century and temperatures have risen since along with massive population growth. There were 1 billion people in 1800, 1.6 billion at the start of the twentieth century, and 6 billion by the end of the century. The last two centuries have seen exponential growth, occurring along with the end of this little ice, lowering poverty rates and increasing populations.

This is a however somewhat pessimistic answer for the beginnings of civilization. Our entry into civilization was as dependent on the environment as much it was a break away from environmental influence. We learned to live together during harder times where we were forced to live in close quarters and cooperate for our survival, developing at best a negative or forced altruism in small groups of kin or near-kin.

The next ice age could mean the end of our interglacial success, a punishment for our decadence. Post-Christian western society still loves the idea of apocalypse, that there will be a cataclysmic end to humanity because of our attitudes toward each other and the world. More likely is gradual or bumpy decline. And it isn't as if nothing of the past would remain. Those of us descended from the collapse of the western Roman empire have the collective memory of the dark ages which followed. But the eastern Roman Empire continued on until the 15th century, and the Islamic Middle East had a golden age of science and philosophy. Glacial periods however are much longer than interglacial periods, lasting in the hundreds of thousands of years. Even with current global warming, the amount of fossil fuels if continued to burn will only last a few centuries and the natural climate cycle due to Earth's orbit around the sun will start to cool the climate. This is far into the future from our perspective though, and much will happen.