ELECTIONS VS PROGRESS

Some behaviorists would claim that identity with a tribe and competitiveness between tribes is hard-wired in the human brain. Certainly the strength of identity with a certain bloodline is a strong one, perhaps the strongest. The tortured quests of many who have been adopted to find genetic parents who essentially abandoned them in infancy speaks to this. 

However, as individuals with intelligence and some control over our minds, we can change behavior. We do not behave mindlessly like our fish ancestors who were internally compelled to swim upstream annually to breed and die. If that were the case, the human population would most likely fit nicely into the planet's overall ecosystem. That is not the case, obviously.

This year's major elections on November 6th, today, have become a colossal team conflict. Perhaps this is evidence of our hard-wired tribalism, but it does not have to rule each of our independent human minds.

The actual state of the U.S. economy under the current Presidency, Congress and Supreme Court is stable. Americans are generally well fed and well housed. Reforms are being slowly approached by the current political regime to improve the national quality of life. These indicators speak to some human progress overall. Add to them the legalization of gay-lesbian unions, consideration of justice for all people regardless of ethnicity, race, psychological or medical problems, etc.. Again, progress is happening slowly. 

Looking at the viciousness of current political debate in the U.S. optimistically means joining the chorus of those who defend violent video games. It could be argued that vicious political contention is a form of healthy spleen-venting, to purge built-up social aggression in the populace. Better nasty Tweets than bricks through store windows and looting, one could argue. 

I often question whether pandering to our baser natures in this way must continue to be a chronic social defense system. Does it actually contribute to progress or impede it? Inevitably, I look to my education in world history for an answer. What I see there is a slow and determined march for human progress against aristocratic domination, mass killings, diseases, natural catastrophes. 

I appreciate Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's theory that the 'divine' in our human brains is that compulsion to move forward. However, I would tend to see that compulsion as a mutation of the compulsion to swim upstream against the current of our same brain's indolence, which would be our ultimate destruction. Our individual human attention has shifted from the external planetary environment to the internal environment of our brains and bodies. Narcissism and individual excellence (genius) are two facets of that same reality among our most innovative human peers. 

My own experiments with meditation and meditative chanting have convinced me that my own development as a human being is an arduous daily process of resisting my own indolence/fear, reformulating my ideas/self-perception and changing my behavior to effectuate my individual progress. This becomes harder by the day, since I have accepted the inevitability of my own impending death. In humorous moments, I quietly chuckle at the understanding of the stereotypical grumpy old person, a personality type I have always found appealing as a caregiver. The grumpy old person is often the independent old person, the old person who is grumpy because he/she chooses to push on despite pain and the inevitability of no net gain. 

How does this relate to today's national elections? I suppose I am trying to share my considered opinion that progress will win out eventually, despite whatever destructive cycles recur as a result of bad tribal choices. The ironically self-anointed Progressives may take back the House of Representatives and smash up the short-term gains in economic and overall social progress of the past two years. They may let in countless caravans of illegal immigrants eventually, as did Europe. They may sacrifice law and order for hand-wringing pity for all perpetrators, except those unfairly accused by neurotic bourgeois women. They may succeed in instituting some of their wacko ideals. 

Impatience in an old brain like mine is natural. I try hard not to enable it. It is related to that slowly closing door, ever closer, which is diminishing the light that is my internal experience of this life. But even my natural vision of that closing door is ahead of me, not behind. Perhaps this is my deep personal evidence of the inevitability of human progress, individual and social, as long as human beings are alive.