A Picture Of The Future (October 5, 2001)

 

 

 

IDEALISM AND REALISM

How do you create a tolerant community if the other guy believes in intolerance? How do you achieve a cooperative relationship if the other guy doesn’t want to cooperate?

These questions will always arise, as long as human nature is what it is. There will always be someone with a thirst to build an empire and rule the world. Is it naïve to wish for world peace, like those earnest Miss America contestants do every year?

What would indeed be naïve would be to ignore human nature, or to pretend that it’s something it’s not. Any plan for a peaceful future must be - and can be – both idealistic in its vision and realistic in its portrayal of human nature.

Theories of universal cooperation, “peace and love,” have been sneered at for their block-headed insistence that given the “right” environment people will not want to compete to rise to the top of the pack. Communism is despised both for its theory and its practice, and for good reason: it has been used as a club to support the world’s most corrupt and vicious tyrannies. But the theory of communism itself is ill-conceived in its fundamental assumptions, because it believes it can change human behavior. It assumes that  it can enforce cooperation by removing the rewards and motivations for competition.

The truth is that some people – many people – find it thrilling to live a high-stakes, competitive life, whether on the concert stage or basketball court, whether in international politics, the halls of academia, or on Wall Street. The “killer competitive spirit,” “going for the jugular” “winning against all odds” – these phrases are not the by-products of capitalism, as popular leftist rhetoric would have us believe. They are expressions of a deep desire in humans to excel, to beat out the competition, to be the top dog. Any idealistic political theory that does not take this into account is ignoring a basic aspect of what it means to be a member of our species.

Human beings like to compete, and even more to win. The driving motive behind this desire is sex. Why? Because the winner’s reward is sexual dominance: high school football heroes get prom queens, Hollywood producers get hordes of young blondes. Emperors get thousands - even tens of thousands - of concubines. 

This was as true in ancient times as it is today, and is mirrored in every other animal species on our planet.  

Winners get not only the best women, but the most women. 

Nobody likes this (except the winners.) But everybody knows that this is the way things are in real life. 

Is it fair? No. But trying to impose fairness on human mating behavior by taking away the rewards of competition is like trying to get rid of hunger by taking away food. Outlawing competition will never destroy the urge to compete. It will only give rise to illegal and violent means to achieve the same thing: privileged “mating rights.”

Men will continue to compete, as long as women prefer men that win. If all else is equal a woman will choose a winner over a loser – whether he’s the best in sports, or math, leadership, or rock and roll; whether he’s the funniest guy in the neighborhood, or the baddest biker in the pack. And as long as women keep choosing competitors, we will keep making babies with the genes for competing.  In the same way that we’ll keep passing on genes for noses that grow forward instead of bent at a right angle, or strong chins instead of weak ones.

Humans are a species of competitors. 

So the question is how do we conceive of a peaceable future while allowing for the competitive instincts of human nature. How can we be both idealistic in envisioning a world without poverty or the ruthless greed that causes it; and at the same time realistic in envisioning a world that allows for expression of the human need to compete and win?

POWER WITHOUT GREED

There is a misconception that power must be bad – every one of us is too familiar with abuses of power in little and big ways. But the word "power" is confused with “power over,” power used to exploit and tyrannize, for greed and selfish gain.  This is a misunderstanding. Power itself is not inherently evil. Power is a tool, like a hammer, used to break a man’s head, or build him a house. Power can be a tool for great good in the world.

Given the instinct in the animal world to compete for power, how can we reconfigure society so that power is rewarded, but not greed?

Greed is not inherent in our species, nor is it observed in other animals. The greedy stockpiling of wealth has not been a feature of human societies for very long at all, in fact it was non-existent before the advent of agriculture, only 10,000 years ago. Considering that we’ve been here in our current bodies and minds for at least 100,000 years, by some measures even 2.6 million years, 10,000 years since the advent of agriculture is not even half of one percent of that time. Through all those endless eons prior to agriculture, human societies bestowed power without the accompaniment of wealth.

Even since agriculture there have been examples of great towers of human achievement, universally respected giants of human history, accorded the highest status and power, yet without the accompaniment of wealth: Mahatma Gandhi, Siddhartha Buddha, Albert Einstein, Frederic Douglas, Martin Luther, Johannes Gutenberg, Marie Curie, Harry Truman, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Andre Sakharov, Nelson Mandela, James Madison, Theodore Dostoevsky, J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Louis Pasteur, Galileo, Martin Luther King Jr.

Power and wealth are not synonymous.

BRILLIANT POLITICIANS

Like our primate cousins, we are social animals. As with other primates, a key feature of our social behavior is a truly marvelous talent for forming alliances - in other words, our political skills. We are highly skilled “managers” of other human beings, especially adept at making friends. The degree to which a person rises in power is a direct reflection of how many friends he or she has made and how savvy he or she is as a “politician.”

Ridley, in a discussion about male behavior, says,

“Like men, chimps do not rise entirely on brute strength. They use cunning, and above all they form alliances. The tribal warfare between groups of chimps is both a cause and a consequence of the male tendency to build alliances. In Jane Goodall’s studies the males of one chimp group were well aware when they were outnumbered by the males of another group and deliberately sought opportunities to single out individual males from the enemy. The bigger and more cohesive the male alliance, the more effective it was.”

We must create a civilization that will encourage our natural instinct to compete by assigning the highest status and greatest power to those who use their leadership and alliance-building skills to solve huge humanitarian problems – in medicine, education, cooperation in a diverse world community, and travel to other planets. We must channel our brilliant political skills to reward power that is used for good, and to devalue and discredit power that is used for greed.

The question we must answer then, is how, without money, do we award those who excel in sports, the arts, and science? What are the incentives that would confer status on accomplishment, but no status on the accumulation of wealth?

THE END OF THE ERA OF GREED

The answers will be found in the underlying motivations for competition and the ultimate prize – sex. Wealth has only been a means to that end. As one of the richest men in the world, Aristotle Onassis, has said,

“All the money in the world would mean nothing if there were no women.”

Women like “top dogs.” Women will continue to choose the “best” men. The best men will continue to win both the best - and the most - women.

The greedy amassing of huge fortunes is not necessary to win the grand prize of the “best” and most women. 

Neither is it necessary for achieving power, status, or respect. 

We have mistakenly seen wealth as an endpoint, when wealth is only a means to an end. Wealth has won power, respect and status … and status has won reproductive opportunity. We have inserted wealth into the picture when it hasn’t needed to be there – and by so doing we’ve made the greedy accumulation of wealth a requirement for winning. Greed is valued because wealth is valued. But power, respect and status can be achieved without wealth or greed as necessary prerequisites.

Human civilization has wandered off on a strange and misguided tangent, beginning 10,000 years ago. And despite the endless parade of exploitations, oppressions, inhumanities and wasted lives, we have continued to flourish, and to produce magnificent achievements. We have persisted. We are a remarkable species.

The long and crooked road we have taken has led us here – to this turning-point moment in history - where we are forced by circumstance to face the inextricability of our situation. Sex is the contest, wealth is the problem, power is the answer. Greed and the destruction it causes must be tackled head-on, with courage,  and with a clear vision of a brilliant and advanced civilization of our future.