From: Alan Spector <spector@calumet.purdue.edu>
>Those who too casually dismiss Marxism have sometimes not read enough
>Marxism. Over 100 years ago, Engels (Marx' collaborator) wrote of the
>slash and burn policies of capitalist agriculture in the Carribean and
>how the profit system leads to short sighted polices of environmental
>destruction.
Well, that's one explanation for environmental destruction. But in truth,
our propensity to destroy the planet is innate. That's why capitalism
is so successful: it's genetic.
Here is a snip from my REQUIEM at www.dieoff.org
____________
MIND HAPPENS
Since the mind evolved to select a few signals and then
dream up a semblance, whatever enters our consciousness is
overemphasized. It does not matter how the information
enters, whether via a television program, a newspaper
story, a friend's conversation, a strong emotional
reaction, a memory -- all is overemphasized. We ignore
other, more compelling evidence, overemphasizing and
overgeneralizing from the information close at hand
to produce a rough-and-ready realty.
-- Robert Ornstein
The word philosophy means the love of wisdom, but what
philosophers really love is reasoning. And one thing
philosophers reason about is reasoning itself. Indeed,
throughout history, most philosophers believed that reason was
sine qua non of humanity: "What continued to give humanity some
special status, though, is its capacity for rationality."[8]
But the human mind is not rational, the human mind just happened.
The mind is a billion-year accumulation of innovations through
countless animals, and through countless environments for
specific reactions to specific situations.
The ability to solve problems implies that "rational" thinking
is carefully weighing the important, known variables and making
that decision which is most likely to achieve the solution. But
studies show that people are not rational,[9] they give recently
presented information undue importance, thereby producing answers
that are not rational.
So if people are not rational, how do "experts" get the right
answers? In a paper presented to American Psychological
Association, Robert Hamm tells us: "... experts who make
consequential decisions based on their hypotheses about the
state of the world usually follow rule-like scripts, rather than
explicitly revise probabilities."[10] In other words, experts --
like all people -- behave as one of Skinner's rats in a maze,
they find out what works, and then do it again!
The human mind evolved to ignore slow changes and routine events,
but notice sudden changes and respond rapidly to them. It was
vital for primitive man to find the right food at the right time,
to mate well, to generate children, to avoid marauders, to
respond to an emergency quickly. Genes for a panic response to
threat are millions of times more likely to pass on to future
generations than genes for contemplation -- the runner wasn't as
likely to get eaten as the thinker. "Rationality is a great idea
and ideal, but we never had the time for it; we don't have time
for it now, and thus we don't have the mind for it."[11]
If people can not make rational decisions, how can democratic
governments solve problems in complex systems?
According to a rule in science and philosophy called "Ockham's
Razor", the simplest of two or more competing theories is
preferable, and an explanation for unknown phenomena should
first be attempted in terms of what is already known.
Evolutionary science provides the simplest explanation of human
behavior that fits the physical facts. People, like all animals,
were optimized by evolution to put their genes into the next
generation. Those strains of humans that were not so optimized
are no longer here. Three of the most important innovations that
allow people to put their genes into the next generation are
exploitation (making the best use of something -- including
other people), lying (I love you, so let's go to bed), and
self-deception.[12] Exploitation and lying contributed to human
survival for millions of years, self-deception for at least
40,000 years.
Self-deception contributed to our survival by making us better
liars! In business, politics and love, sincerity is everything
-- if you can fake that, you've got it made! Unfortunately, the
genetic programming that makes us so good at lying, exploitation
and self-deception, now blinds us to our obvious and terrible
fate.
[snip]
references at www.dieoff.org