@Simone_De_Beauvoir We’ve spent a long time evolving from swinging through the trees to the first upright hominids through all the twists and turns to today’s homo sapiens, We’ve picked up a lot of evolutionary baggage along the way. Much of it still serves us well, but some of it is downright useless in today’s world, if not even dangerous. Unfortunately, natural selection is good at selecting survival behaviors and traits into a population, but not at weeding obsolete ones out unless they reduce the reproductive chances of the organism possessing them.
Through much of human evolutionary time, we were struggling to survive with everything from cave bears and saber-toothed tigers to neighboring tribes of cannibals out to turn us into their next lunch. (And please, creationists and intelligent design proponents, feel free to comment that you don’t believe in evolution, but let’s not turn this particular thread to that topic.)
We needed a strong sense of self to make it. Self preservation was a strong survival plus, and thus is deep in the gene pool. In fact, some single cell organisms seem to the rudiments of it. We further needed a sense of tribe. One human against a cave bear or saber-toothed tiger or tribe of cannibals didn’t stand much chance. But a tribe of humans could hunt the great woolly mammoth and turn him into lunch. So a sense of tribe was genetically selected for survival, as well.
In today’s world, we don’t face cave bears or saber-toothed cats or neighboring tribes of cannibals, at least not very often, but the survival instincts we learned when we did face them are still in us. Socrates said back in 399 BCE that ”“The unexamined life is not worth living.” But with the distractions of this hurly-burly life we lead today, many of us, even some that are exceedingly bright, haven’t gotten that message in nearly 2500 years.
Unless we look into self enough to realize that it is a useful construct, but just a construct, here today and gone tomorrow, we still have every bit of ego protection invested in living that the cave man did back when he ganged up with his tribe to kick a huge cave bear out and take over the cave. Anything that challenges our sense of tribe and self simultaneously, like not eating the dead bear after we win the fight, seems to smack at the very basics of survival. The ego has been challenged, The group identity has been challenged. The fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. Adrenaline is released into the blood stream. Neurons start firing in rapid secession.
Now today, most of us are cultured enough to know better than choking someone to death because they are a vegetarian and we eat meat, or vice versa. The more cultured even know better than to ridicule such a non-tribal idea. But the old demon of fight or flight is there nonetheless. That’s the traffic cop directing the neural flow of the excited brain. And that cop says, OUR TRIBE IS RIGHT! I AN RIGHT! MY very existence depends on that.
And so you have an inane debate about what one should or shouldn’t eat, of who one should or shouldn’t boink. Now mind you, if your idea of a great lunch included ME, I might chose to let that artificial construct of self take over and we’d have a very heated debate. We’d have more than that, we’d have a to-the-death fight. But if it’s just whether you do or don’t like the same things I like, I’ve examined self enough to realize it is immaterial. I’m happy to learn from you because you have experienced things that I have not. Sadly, as your experience testifies, we’ve got a good deal of self examination to go before anything like a majority of us act in that way, and I’m still working hard at acting that way myself.
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