Winged Earth Magazine

Intellect, on a broad scale, is stagnant, despite advances in technology and differences in societies. Japan showed the West the insignificance of its advances by changing its society from a feudal samurai culture to a world superpower in less than fifty years, after the Meiji restoration.

Were the Romans evil oppressors of their neighbors? Or were they simply afraid of terrorism, drugs, the Domino Effect, “weapons of mass destruction” (the catapult perhaps?), or whatever other justification we use for war today? Was Egypt an evil slave nation or just paying slave wages to border jumpers with the threat of deportation? People today can’t believe that Nazi Germany wanted to exterminate the Jews, but I talk to frightened Americans every day that want to exterminate the Muslims. Our world has advanced, we travel faster, live longer, practice a different mainstream religion, kill each other more efficiently, and talk on cell phones, but our minds are the same as they have always been.

The part of us that remains the same has remained the same since the beginnings of evolution. That part is the competitive instinct.
Philosophers of the 19th and early 20th century praised communism as the future of society, a utopia where all people would be equal. It failed because man does not want to be equal. Our oldest and most powerful instinct, the competitive instinct, declares that equal is not satisfactory. Man wants to be superior.

Nietzsche believed that it was a natural tendency for individuals to seek comfort as the end goal, to be what he called the Ultimate Man. This he criticized, and demanded that each person strive to be superior, to be a superman. What Nietzsche didn’t mention is that to be truly comfortable, a person needs to be slightly better than his neighbor. Maybe the Ultimate Man and his neighbor live in similar houses, but he has an extra set of French doors and a Persian rug. Or maybe their houses are comparable, but he is a doctor and nobly aids mankind. Or they do the same kind of work, but he grew up poor and had to work harder to earn his way there. Or he grew up rich and is more cultured. Perhaps their lives are similar, but he belongs to the True Religion and will go to heaven. Or else his neighbor is religious but he is too intellectual to be trapped in a mythological framework.

World peace is unlikely because the end goal of every nation is to dominate. The only way to world peace would be the threat of an alien civilization, because the human race would have aliens to compete against and dominate. Economics has realized the power of the competitive instinct and capitalism remains the only realistic economic system. Sure, socialism works in Europe, but that is only because the member nations act like corporations competing against one another.

One thing that Darwin’s competing humans don’t realize is that the advances that change the world are not the achievements of mankind. These are the achievements of a minority of individuals who step outside of regular scientific or philosophical ideological systems to think independently. The less members of this minority rely on the gifts of society, the greater the potential of their innovations. But the ability to examine reality and to question the prevailing worldviews of society does not necessarily belong to a superior stock of people that can be classified, or to the highest 2% scoring takers of national exams. That last group may be naturally more interested in questioning the world that has been presented to them, but realizing the fallibility of mainstream belief is a universal potentiality.

Intellectually, it is most preferable to remain an island, but one open to external communication. Let’s say that intellectually it is preferable to be like Meiji Japan, who, as a nation, accepted ideas and advancements from others, but refused to live by anyone else’s rules, and thus preserved its own culture/way of thinking. On a personal level, relying on the rest of the world to choose one’s beliefs, in order to co-act with society towards common goals rather than personal goals leads to the problems of competitions within a society. Competitions, it has been shown, may work well to advance the societies and the groups, but to advance the individual, to become Nietzsche’s superman, is a personal quest. In science it seems frightening to contemplate the complete rethinking of the former systems we are entrenched in, especially since the scientific community frowns upon denying “scientific fact”, but that is exactly what people like Aristotle, Newton, Schroedinger, and Niels Bohr did to realize their achievements. A truly advanced human, a superman, works alone. Advancement of mankind has not happened because there haven’t been enough supermen. Mankind has not advanced, but those few extraordinary people have shown us that advancement is a possibility. When the majority of the population can have the logic of an Aristotle, the determination of a Joan of Arc, the wit of an Oscar Wilde, the honor of a George Washington, the objectivity of a Herodotus, or the theoretical prowess of an Einstein, only then can we say that mankind is advanced.