AN ALTERNATIVE RATIONALE FOR HUMANIST IDEALISM

a human being not in a state of acceptance

The human species evolved through blind processes of procreation and survival. This fact makes competitive struggle instinctive in the human brain and cultures. Within a capitalistic economic system, the survival instincts are summarized in the word, greed. Capitalism will usually favor those with the best instincts for greed in the evolutionary struggle for survival and apportions rewards roughly according to the genetic gifts and the upbringing that each human is endowed with. Some humans are extremely lucky in the genes and nurture that their parents give to them. Others receive poor inheritances.

human in a state of acceptance

If humanity cannot evolve beyond greed, many humans will forever labor in the service of other humans gifted with the genes and/or nurture better suited for competitive success. Conflict is guaranteed, and human history is full of examples of domination by the more aggressively gifted over those more passively inclined. The meek have never and will never inherit the earth. Fortunately, because the human being is a social animal and must function within a social framework, the human species has evolved an acute altruistic instinct by which our species navigates social relationships. Altruism might be an adaption that brings peace to Planet Earth.

If it ever becomes a fact that humanity’s survival rates are increased in a global culture in which no one has too much while others have not enough, the human species might achieve global harmony. If altruism achieves better survival rates, the human species will evolve more peacefully and finally escape what seems like an eternal animal competition for survival. Will the more aggressive among us realize (i.e. verbalize) that they must surrender certain privileges in order to live in a more peaceful world? Will the meek realize they must have/take certain privileges in order to live on a more just globe? Who knows if a peacefully just human culture can be achieved? Thousands of years of religion have not achieved it. Will a thousand years of scientific knowledge through neuroscience and biology help humanity achieve a more peaceful coexistence?

In the meantime, all an individual member of humanity has for its peace of mind is a psychobiological state of mind and body that can be characterized by the term acceptance. Biologically, acceptance is present in an individual when that human is free of psychic pain and physical threats to its existence. At those moments of acceptance, the individual human does not feel the need to take from others either as a beggar or as a capitalist. Paradoxically, at those moments, each is psychically dependent upon the other for the fulfillment of its survival needs. In that mutual state of being, perhaps global peace is a possibility.