Problem-Solving Savages at the Edge of Extinction

All power corrupts, brain power being no exception to this. At some point in our evolution, the human brain became huge.  The tremendous competitive advantages of such a brain would unavoidably lead us to arrogance, as we became increasingly masterful at using this brain less as a reasoning device, and more as a weapon of mass destruction.  We could now do anything we “set our minds to”, with incredible effectiveness and speed.  It was as if we had been handed over a genie in a bottle, with infinite wishes to spend.  The sensation of being in possession of this weapon was addictive.  And to all other 10 million species on this planet who faced certain holocaust, absolutely terrifying.

But the paradox of arrogance is that it eventually impairs the very intelligence giving rise to it.  The more we used our brain arrogantly as a weapon, the more risks we took.  Although we reaped tremendous rewards from these risks, this risk-based reward system created the strong evolutionary pressures which shaped our brain further into a sophisticated, yet highly hazardous, RELD: a Resource Exploitation Logistical Device. 

The RELD was a gadget with a purpose.  It was customized to mine for resources at the most efficient, quick, and devastating scale, exceeding by far any ability of ecosystems to recover.  The RELD was arguably “unnatural”, in the sense that it was an explosive device which would eventually take down much of the ecosystem.  It brought more disorder than order, raising questions about the nature of evolution itself.  The cacophony of human civilisation which would unravel in the coming millennia was, and still is, beyond anything that this planet could handle. The human world became an amplification of all the negatives within an ecosystem: conflict, overcrowding, deceit, mass genocide, starvation, and cannibalism. It was a biological monster that was never meant to happen, yet it did, and here we are today watching an entire planet pay the price for it.

Such was the level of devastation which the RELD could inflict that, many of humanity’s original food sources would soon go extinct one after the other, forcing humans to become flexible omnivores.  Conflict within the species became endemic, as overactive RELDs went to war with each other as they fought over resources.  The RELD’s obsessive need to possess and control food resources led to incredible division within the species, accentuating existing phenotypic, cultural and linguistic differences, and further hardwiring violence into human DNA.  “Survival of the most devious” led to the natural selection of thought patterns and behaviours which would later manifest themselves in more organised societies as greed, power, and deception.

As the flow of power and goods became more complex, an economic system came into existence organically which made use of these psychoses, turning them into skills: it was a so-called “psychonomy” of mutual exploitation which rewarded the worst in us, the most devious and risk-taking qualities.  For this economic system to continue, it became not only socially acceptable but necessary, for humans to systematically use and hate each other.  The evolution of our economic systems therefore became locked into a long path of slavery, colonialism and war, centuries before the great majority of these wars even took place.  Conflict soon extended beyond the scope of resources, food or territory, as tribes formed supremacy theories about each other e.g. on who has the smartest RELD, or the best skin colour.  Doing so gave these tribes the much-needed moral licence to invade “inferior” RELDs more frequently: this time not as a defence tactic, but out of greed. Having a specific, practical reason for war was no longer essential.  Supremacy theories enabled hatred to move into abstract, narrative territory, establishing itself on ideological bases which were much more difficult to eradicate: these ideologies had now become a “life purpose” for these tribes.  They became the ideological fuel behind thousands of years of colonialism and slavery, until a small subset of these narratives was eventually debunked as myth.  While conflict and war may have originated as necessities with an urgent survival objective, they eventually became culture. They became rubber-stamped as identity, as an inextricable part of human existence.  

Although the ruthless efficiency of the RELD enabled humans to reach today’s level of technological sophistication, it would become an existential threat in the long term, having failed to evolve.  This is because even though the technologies the human brain creates continuously evolve, the brain itself barely does.  All our technologies are extractive and exploitative whether they are a spear, a stone hammer, a smartphone or an atomic bomb.  The intensity of their destructiveness over time however is not only progressive, but exponentially accelerational.  It is easy to imagine where this trend can lead.

The RELD never came with a “Do’s” and “Don’ts” instruction manual.  It has the potential to destroy this planet, something we all know by now.  Our brain has little in-built “humanity”, morals, or a conscience.  These are all “nice to have”, complex features which our societies have tried over the millennia to manually program into this device, with sporadic success.  While competitive instincts are genetic, morality is a cultural and emergent trait which requires education, patience, and persistence.  We sure tried.  We even built institutions which were meant to interface with our RELD and integrate these important missing moral elements, making our brain more “whole”.  On paper, love, peace and unity is all there.

But nature easily wins over “nurture”.  RELD-type thinking is our default genetic predisposition, despite culture, society and “learned” morality having tried in vain to convince us otherwise: that we are all meant to be “good”, to love and respect each another as well as nature.  This was a lie we desperately wanted to believe in.  Perhaps if we had known the dark truth, we would have tried much harder to overcome the RELD: to become this “moral” human that we all look up to and aspire to be, to “talk back” to our evil RELD voice every time we hear it in our ears.  Our genes and hormones do not have to dictate absolutely everything, right?

This inner struggle we constantly face with our evil doppelganger is the reason why we suffer so much contradiction: so much discrepancy between what we want to do, what we say we will do, and what we actually end up doing. Our social laws hardly prevent the RELD from asserting itself every time, corrupting even the most sacred of our institutions. Intention always suffers in the murderous hands of convenience and personal gain.  We can readily come up with thousands of ethical innovations, suggestions, visions and solutions, but we always fail to implement them in the way they were originally envisioned, every single time. The RELD always finds new ways to get the upper hand, often masquerading as wisdom, parading irresistible technological gadgets in front of us which promise to bring us a world with more happiness, more humanity, and ironically, less violence.  But just like the RELD, these technologies are mere tools, not solutions.  Technology has no heart, no conscience, no morals, and it can’t love anything but itself.  When a society has blindly placed its trust in technology hoping that it will compensate for its moral deficits, it has already surrendered its obligations towards its people and its planet. 

Avoiding the difficult dilemmas and sacrifices that come with a more conscious, compassionate existence, we tend to place our faith in the transactional and problem-solving aspects of our intelligence, hoping that they alone, will save us.  But these aspects of our brain are as emotionally inert as a rock.  Our scientific disciplines suffer from a permanent RELD take-over, refusing to integrate rational and emotional intelligence in the search for knowledge.  Technology may be great at quick fixes and isolated problems, but when it comes to existential polycrises it is guaranteed to make them worse.  Existential crises are extremely complex and multi-faceted, requiring both rational and emotional intelligence.  

Rather than using its brain power to carefully navigate the thousands of moving parts, nail-biting dilemmas and daunting trade-offs which our existential polycrisis involves, this civilisation has decided without much thought to take the simplistic RELD option: short term profit through temporary technological “fads”, much like a fool following a dollar bill taped on a piece of string, all the while paying no attention what they may be walking themselves into.  We are living the worst possible dystopian version of Earth.  Had even a small part of our brain been re-allocated from resource exploitation to carefully weighing benefits vs. consequences of our profit-motivated decisions, this planet and civilisation would look nothing like the living nightmare that they are today.

We have overestimated our capacity for genuine wisdom, assuming that our advanced brainpower automatically imparts us with all of the soft qualities we like to call “uniquely human”.  Narratives of human supremacy tried desperately over the millennia to conceal our savage nature, rather than accept it, understand it, and address it.  As part of this war on our “inner savageness”, we discarded all reminders of our past and our connections to nature, therefore losing much of our capacity for retrospection, consciousness, spirituality and empathy which would have helped us change course from our murderous journey.  It is the greatest irony in this journey that, the very denial of our “savageness” was in fact what ushered in a long period of cognitive and spiritual devolution which appears to have no stopping point.

It is time to accept that the human brain evolved primarily as a ruthless calculation device: measuring, assessing, and optimising its extraction capabilities.  We are neither better, more compassionate, or “moral” than other species.  We just happen to be tremendously more efficient, by many orders of magnitude.  Yet although we excel at circus tasks, mathematical problems, imagining and building things, we still lack introspective self-awareness: understanding our deeper motivations, their repercussions, the hyperbole of our actions and even our blind ignorance towards our own self-destruction.

The struggle of human societies remains the same: to prevent their erratic moral compass from being constantly molested by their compulsion for extraction, exploitation and self-destruction.  Because of this compulsion, our framing of environmental problems has always been distorted to fit our poor solutions, rather than the other way round.  The climate crisis for example, has been framed as an environment issue and a technology issue, when it is actually a crisis of the human consciousness and psyche.  This criminally negligent misdiagnosis, reframing and distortion of major existential crises into simple practical problems to be solved by technology, demonstrates how superficial and corrupted our very approach to problem-solving is.  We are trying to solve the disasters of capitalism with more capitalism.  This has never worked, and it never will.  The very desire to profit out of these solutions, to “create jobs” and prosperity through Green New Deals, only demonstrates the level of delusion and persistent lack of any seriousness in dealing with a problem which is of apocalyptic proportions.  We simply don’t seem to “get” it.  More evidence to this is that the RELD’s one-track approach of growth and expansion has infiltrated environmental movements. There are thousands of “environmental” organisations who are nothing but shopfronts for extractive capitalism in the form of renewable technology.  Their very organisational structure and operating principles emulate corporate capitalist ventures.

The biggest cognitive error of a growth-based economy is that it becomes so focused on the benefits of solutions that it ignores their downsides, while at the same time completely minimizing and misdiagnosing the original problem. We should be focusing on problems, before thinking of the solutions. We should be going through a stage of negativity, depression, and hopelessness first, before we can come up with solutions.  Our inability to connect with the seriousness of our existential predicaments is down to our inability to connect with ourselves, to realise that these problems did not happen to us.  They exist because of us.

The human brain is a beautiful yet frightening machine. At the mercy of the RELD, we are like three-year-old children who have been handed machine guns. It is time to educate ourselves on our own cognitive biases and ruthlessly address them, instead of preparing future humans to become efficient working machines in a collapsing world. We can try to rise above the RELD if we recognise it, call it for what it is and respond to it with counterarguments every time it tries to take full control.  This is the greatest challenge of our civilisation.  Only if we fortify our conscious intellect, our Infinity State, can we begin to humbly steer away from this self-destructive course.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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