2 July 2024
This scene captures the mystical and grand essence of ancient Greek mythology.
Two tribes at war over territory. The scene shows the intense expressions of fierce combat.
We should understand human behaviour as fundamentally an extension of natural behaviour, whose goals are survival and reproductive success.
Over the course of evolutionary history, repeated episodes of conflict over territory, food and mates - eg the forever wars between lion tribes or between lions and hyenas - create strategies that seek to control and expand territories, because territory provides resources and security. We say this strategy for survival, built up over evolutionary history, is "instinctive".
As animals with a brain however, we think about this and try to understand it.
This scene captures the mystical and grand essence of ancient Greek mythology.Strategies for survival and reproduction get hardwired into our biology as the genetic codes in genes (survival of the fittest through natural selection) and what you might call the shape of our brains (instinct eg language).
These primitive drives are like a wild horse that we humans think we've tamed, but of course we haven't and Freud's id is triumphant. We all know this at some level ... well all of us except our political masters it seems - eg the horrors always happen in the basement in popular films like Hitchcock's Psycho.
It's supposed to be us in charge of the chariot, but instead it is this wild horse that's going to smash us all up unless we do something about it. When people talk about "the death of god" they are talking about life having no purpose beyond these base instincts...it's a kind of nihilism that says life has no purpose, that everything is relative, there are no absolute truths, there is no such thing as an objective morality, nothing to think about here, we are slaves to our existential angst, inequality and exploitation is natural, just get on with it.
Hobbes in "Leviathan" observed that in a state of nature, human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" due to this constant competition for resources.
But we are human and the space above the eye line means we have room to think about why we are here and the threats ro our existence. We come together in communities, we give up some freedom in exchange for protection, we create governance hierarchies and agree to obey the boss, maybe we elect them. We can even as thinking beings make deals with other tribes to quieten the frontier!.
But we don't, the West seems to have lost its way, our leaders have lost the moral compass that we acquired throughout the history of civilization and in its place a paranoid instinct for survival reasserts itself. We've lost our guiding sense of right and wrong and our striving for beauty, truth and justice, we are not interested in suppressing the urges of the id, our primal animal instincts reign supreme.
A way must be found to reassert reason and control, to overcome Mearsheimer's "structural offensive realism". Putin and the global South have given up on the West, they are no longer interested in making defense treaties or financial arrangements, they don't see it as a possibility and anyway they don't trust us anymore, so now it's up to "us".
Who is this "us"? Well, it is "We the People" and this is why populism is at the fore again.
It is for the people to impose behaviour driven by ideals upon our leadership, impose idealistic standards rather than realistic ones, if not through the ballot box, then take to the streets.
Two semi-human tribes sitting down to make a peace deal. The scene conveys a sense of reconciliation and harmony.
