Problem-Solving Savages at the Edge of Extinction

All power corrupts, brain power being no exception to this. The tremendous competitive advantages of the human brain would undoubtedly lead to arrogance, as we became increasingly adept at using our brain less as a reasoning device, and more as a weapon of mass destruction.  The effectiveness and speed of what we could do was addictive.  And to all other 10 million species on this planet, terrifying.

But the paradox of arrogance is that it eventually impairs the very intelligence which gave rise to it in the first place.  The more we used our brain as a weapon, the more risks we took.  At the same time, the stronger the evolutionary pressures became which shaped it into a sophisticated 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 terrifying scale, exceeding by far any ability of ecosystems to recover.  The RELD was arguably unnatural.  Such was the level of devastation it inflicted that, many of humanity’s original food sources soon went 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 over and over in the fight for 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. 

In plain words, humans began to hate each other.  The hatred soon extended beyond food or territory, as tribes formed supremacy theories on who has the smartest RELD, or the best skin colour. These narratives gave them the much-needed licence to invade “inferior” RELDs, and became the ideological fuel behind thousands of years of colonialism and slavery, before some of these narratives were eventually debunked as myths.

Although the ruthless efficiency of the RELD allowed humans to reach the level of technological sophistication they enjoy today, it would become an existential threat in the long term, both for humans and the planet.  At the end of the day, the RELD today is still the same gadget it was for primitive humans: even though the technologies it creates continuously evolve, all these technologies have the same purpose whether they are a spear, a stone hammer, a smartphone or an atomic bomb: to extract resources, without any ethical considerations.  The latter were simply never in the instruction manual. 

They still aren’t.  The RELD has the potential to destroy the planet, something that we all know by now.  Our brain has little in-built “humanity”, morals, or a conscience.  These are all “nice to have”, much more complex features which our societies have tried over the millennia to 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 to learn.  We sure tried.  We even built institutions which were meant to interface and integrate these important missing moral elements into our RELD, making our brain more “whole”. 

But nature easily wins over nurture.  RELD-type intelligence is our default genetic predisposition, as much as culture, society and “learned” morality have tried to convince us otherwise: that we are all meant to be “good”, to love and respect each another and nature.  This was a lie, of course.  But perhaps if we all knew the dark truth, we would have tried much harder to overcome it: to really try our best to become this “moral” human that we all look up to and aspire to be.  Our genes don’t have to dictate absolutely everything, and this is something we have proved in many other facets of our species.

This inner struggle we constantly face is the reason why we suffer from 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 laws and institutions hardly prevent the RELD from asserting itself and corrupting even the most sacred of these institutions. Intention always suffers in the murderous hands of convenience and personal gain.  Although we can readily come up with thousands of ethical innovations, suggestions, visions and solutions, we are hopelessly incapable of implementing them in the way that they were originally envisioned.  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 planet. 

Avoiding the difficult dilemmas and sacrifices that come with a more conscious, compassionate existence, we always seem to return to technological solutions by default: placing all our faith in the rational, 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 making quick fixes and solving isolated problems, but when it comes to existential polycrises, it is guaranteed to not only fail to solve them, but often 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 where they are stepping or what they may be walking themselves into.  We are currently 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 that we like to call “uniquely human”.  Narratives of human supremacy desperately tried 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 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 it has always been: to prevent their erratic moral compass from being constantly molested by their compulsion for extraction, exploitation and destruction.  Because of this compulsion, our framing of environmental problems is always distorted to fit our inadequate 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 organisation and operating principles emulate capitalist ventures.

The biggest cognitive error of a growth-based economy is that it is 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. 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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