Humans naturally lack the compassion of other animals and are more gullible. These ubiquitous inclinations go a long way in explaining our way of life, and why our self-extinction is assured.
Elephants are empathic and compassionate animals with meritocratic leadership. They console one other over perceived losses. Elephants are disturbed when they see others in trouble and act to help. Recently, several elephants drowned in a Thai national park trying to save a 3-year-old calf from drowning. A mother went after her drowning daughter. Others followed when the mother signaled her distress.
By contrast, humans suffer a sense of “diffusion of responsibility.” An individual may be compassionately inclined if alone (and a single other in distress). The more people in a group, the less any single person is compassionately inclined to assist. This bystander effect is innate, as it can also be seen in healthy young children who are naturally helpful.
That capitalism produces suffering through the dynamic amplification of inequities is irrefutable (despite apologists who find lame excuses, such as lack of effort for poverty – ignoring lack of opportunity). Yet outrage against the inherent moral deficit of capitalism is lacking by dint of diffusion: no one is responsible.
Many only feel empathy for the poor when personally confronted with an individual who may be helped. A group of impoverished, such as the homeless huddled together, is more likely to stir contempt than compassion.
The weak-minded Collective too easily succumb to negative emotional assessments, such as fear and hate, and surrender the positive impulses that emanate from empathy, most poignantly compassion. In doing so, these cretins often mistake emotional weakness for strength.
Along with situational compassion, lame excuses and muddled thinking are so common among the Collective as to be a defining characteristic. The link between these elements is an inborn tendency toward abstract conceptualization devoid of proper connectivity. Rationalization – shuttling mental symbols so they are arranged as one likes – comes too easy for humanity’s own self-interest.
Further, people are inclined to believe: to mistake the symbolic constructs in their minds for actuality; to fail to carefully discern between facts (experienced events) and mental fabrications which exceed sensible inference. All religions – including modern science (with its matterist assumption) and belief in capitalism as morally neutral – typify innate illogic by failure of conceptual discrimination.
Belief is a rationalization to satisfy a deep-felt need: against fear and its soft-boiled cousin, uncertainty. Deistic religions are both a mental mortality ritual (resolving fear of death) and salve of morality (resolving immediate injustice for a final moral judgment).
The religion of capitalism is nothing more than ironic mental sloth: to be believe that humans are too stupid to organize themselves and so must rely upon economic anarchy. If capitalists are correct, then humanity deserves the self-extinction that it is dishing out for itself.
Science is a religion against the uncertainty that accompanies incomprehension. Fact accumulation fails to explain anything. Inference is necessary, and ultimately relies upon a reality construct – theorization which has as its foundation an assumption about the dis/congruence between perceived Nature and fundamental reality.
To settle into the right theory – energyism – is an admission that only the outlines of reality may be discerned, and that any sense of certainty is self-delusion. Spiritual realization imbues not only the intuition of the proper reality construct, but also an inherent mysticism simply because our minds are weak. No matter how much we learn, the detailed dynamics of Nature are beyond ken. Only physical outcomes and the flairs of imperceptible forces may we discern.
Another relevant weakness of the human mind is the inability to suss dynamics. Our minds are object-oriented; part of the misdirection our minds make to keep us spiritually unenlightened. Compared to corvids and rodents (among other animals), we have trouble solving problems of process, fail to grasp temporal mechanics, and underappreciate the probabilities and severities of consequences.
For this mental inadequacy we get the feeble substitute of insensible optimism. We believe we are collectively smart enough to solve whatever problems we face. The self-generated global climate change that is gathering pace is pointedly proving otherwise. The roots of our own demise lie with a poverty of compassion and a surfeit of undeserved self-confidence.
Sources:
Ishi Nobu, Spokes 5: The Echoes of the Mind, BookBaby (2019).
Ishi Nobu, Spokes 6: The Fruits of Civilization, BookBaby (2019).