You people make it as if you have a choice. We all care about ourselves 1st, and our species 2nd, it’s perfectly natural, normal and healthy. You think a coe gives a shit about you, or an elephant? However, there may be selfish reasons for not consuming all our resources, and allowing nature to recover a little, but if this entails my destruction, or the loss of my freedom, then I am ardently and vehemently opposed.
Perhaps if we focused more on what’s important, and less on what’s “natural, normal and healthy…”
Made me think of this
Finishedman, I’m more than just a pawn in their game, I use society, I do not allow it to use me. Objectively speaking, we have no more purpose than a bug, but we won… to the victor go the spoils.
Nature is havoc, species come and go, equilibrium is a myth, adapt, like cows, horses, cats, dogs, cockroaches and crows did, or perish, like the tazmanian tiger, ot the dodo.
Yeah, what he said.
Humanity is an end. We have evolved all we were ever going to evolve.
Natural Selection, however, lives on.
Yes. We now “evolve” in the mind. See my post here
This is what you said:
(another beautiful post from Aletheia)
Memetics do not occur in a vacuum; physically strong people have a place in the final balance of things.
Sure, they have a place in it. They still tend to have more influence on others, for instance, more charisma. But my point is just that physical health, in terms of reproductive selection, is no longer relevant. Any left-over or tangental relevance for physical health is entirely secondary and conditional to mental health, to the power of mind.
What about the conscious cultivation of physically strong men to form armies?
I understand what you mean, and agree, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that physichality no longer has a place in natural selection for humans. Rather, it’s place as an element in natural selection has shifted.
If humans now evolve predominantly in terms of the mind, of ideas, beliefs, affectation and personality, etc etc… then what place is there for physicality? Physical fitness is useful in nature, in the wild, because it is largely what secures survival potential in order to mate. Thus, we find physical fitness more beautiful than its inverse. But now, for humans, we do not survive in the wild, in nature. We survive by society. Which includes a whole host of things such as technology, socialization, political systems, ideological/memetic systems of thought, etc.
Of course physical fitness is still there, and still plays a large role in mate selection. But in terms of mate selection, this itself is largely irrelevant since any mated pair of humans, no matter how physically unfit, can generally procreate. In terms of personality, charisma and politics, which is to say social influence, yes physical fitness still plays a large role. It is within this latter avenue which physicality matters for human evolution; but I would argue that this is a diminishing avenue of importance. Ideas do not care about physical fitness, the mind may be powerful or weak regardless of one’s physical health. Of course many people will link the two, which is fine; I would not claim there is no such link, only that it amounts to very little overall effect.
Humans survive via our ideas, our thinking and philosophy and religion, our sociality and politics and economics, our technology and science… none of this survival relies any longer on being physically fit. Not that there is no benefit to physical fitness rather than unfitness, of course, but I am talking about Homo sapien evolution here, the collective species. This species entity is such that it no longer “cares” about how physically fit you are (or are not). What it “cares” about is the power of your mind, of your ideas, and of your overall influence and social/memetic/technological “power”.
Yeas, of course, but memes do not act in a vacuum.
What is the reason the military complex meme is so good at survival? Because of its “phenotypic” effects, which require physically strong men to attack each other.
True, but war is now waged through technology, economics and information as much as it is through raw physical strength. A single piece of technology (a bomb, a missile, a tank, a B-2, whatever) is worth much more than raw manpower alone. Physical strength is still relevant to warfare, but this physical strength is becoming less important over time – as well as warfare itself is also becoming less relevant as a cultural-sustianing mechanism. Mankind is finally able to become a species which goes beyond “physically strong men attack each other”; we are able to be more. Let us work to develop the memes and mechanisms of the future, and to integrate these within the modes of the present, rather than focus exclusively on the past or present modes of sustainability. Let us see the subtler, longer-term trends within cultural evolution; let us “read between the lines”, so to speak, and look forward to the same extent, at least, that we look back.
I’ll do my best to assist.
I do, after all, claim to be after the re-evaluation of all values!
In fact, I thought of a good alternative for that phrase the other day in light of important advances in psychological theory since Nietzsche wrote it: The re-organization of the subconscious. It’s not perfect, but it shines new light on old things.
Agreed. Assuming the establishment doesn’t succeed in taking over the internet, as it stands now, the internet is basically the final frontier, the last vestige of freedom and genuine competition, unless some other major technological development occurs. The global elite pretty much owns and controls everything, everything has been consolidated (whether by coercion or consent) except information. This means that if someone is able to pose a challenge to the establishment, it will likely happen online, with an idea. The question is, what idea, and who will be the originator? As it stands, here, now, this is the wild west. Perhaps, in the end, there can be only one, or none. Evolution, if it continues to happen at all, will be an evolution of consciousness.
And what is this but “will to power” itself, this “consolidation” at the hands of “the establishment”? Do “the people”, the common man, or the mass of them, have the right to not have a “global elite own and control everything”? This right must not be assumed! It must not. Rather it must be created, willed, for it is certainly not given, not by any means a foregone conclusion or “ethical imperative”. This whole mentality of “you and I vs. the elites” does nothing but further cement the impotency and ineffectiveness of the powerless.
I did not mean to imply that war is becoming obsolete; far from it. War is becoming sublimated to new realms, new subtler terrains. In fact, in this sense war is becoming more important, more ubiquitous, more necessary if by war we understand conflict, struggle, winners and losers, and a submission to newly constructed sociopolitical/economic architectures of control, repression and distribution of resournces, freedom, technology, information, life. Man must earn a right to keep and secure for himself a “free internet”, i.e. a free sphere of public unrestricted access to information. From what I see the internet is generally used for, however, it does not seem to me that man is doing much to earn or make the case for this right.
Essentially, there is no elite and no egalitarianism, only individuals. The elite and the people are both abstractions, illusions, individuals within each group could betray the group at any time, and do. This vague thing called the elite, seems to be succeeding, but it is always changing, as individuals come into it and go outof it. There is nothing inherently wrong about the elite succeeding, like Thrasymachus said, morality/right belongs to the strong, and naturally/objectively speaking, it should belong to the strong individual/party. Fundamentally, I’m not for either the masses or the elite, I’m for myself, and secondly, my comrades. Despite the abstractions, this is the level the war is being fought on, alliances change, especially alliances to abstractions, like the people or the elite, or ideologies- communism, fascism, but what remains is love of oneself, and ones blood kin. I don’t identify much with the masses or with the current elite, I identify with myself, and loosely with a new elite, an elite to come, one that may challenge the old elite.
You continue to argue against what I have not said. That you exist is the beginning of anything else for you. If uou deny that as a right, I can kill you without qualms. I’m not presenting the world-negation views of religion and philosophy as necessarily negative. They are one way of seeing what is, a way that includes Christianity and some Eastern religions. I’m just saying that that outlook does not produce personal ethical behavior. I don’t negate the world, just views that do so. Read Zarathustra.
You are entirely missing the point. What you are in fact arguing for is the need for a socially-institutionalized system of individual rights, “right to life”, right to be secure in one’s person. That is an entirely separate argument from “Do we have the right to exist”? This right is entirely created by society, by man, as the law. There is nothing of this “right” anywhere in nature, or anywhere else in the universe other than within the mind of man. No other life operates by “rights” for or against anything. None of what you are actually (or what you mistakenly think you are) arguing has anything to do with Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Nietzsche didn’t give a shit about your legally-institutionalized “right to life”, nor did Nietzche think any living thing, anywhere, has some sort of “right to exist”. What the fuck else has a right to exist, other than man, and only by virtue of his own social-moralistic fabrications? “That you are born is your right to exist…” I mean, jesus christ… where do you even come up with this stuff? Certainly not from Nietzsche.