GRRR!
The Cumulative Rage of Neanderthal
on the Verge of Extinction

by Chardo Blue Plains

1. Toward a Taxonomy of Consciousness
Perhaps the time has come to speak of the possible emergence of psychic species.

2. A Universe of Infinite Possibilities
As the rich soil of the earth throws up 10,000 livings things, so the rich flux of time throws up 10,000 cultures.

3. Scientific Regret
Scientists lament their inability, because of time factors, to observe the development of new species.

4. Evolutionary Skids?
Having over eons got to self-conscious us, the cosmos surely has not suddenly applied the evolutionary brakes. We can see-- though we hardly know how to think or talk about it-- evidence of the evolution of consciousness (how different the reaction of a cat to a bird and the reaction of a human to a bird).

5. Scientific Irony
What if, what if, what if evolution continues under (or actually, behind) our very noses? What if the bizarre, confused, tortuous, meandering trail of human activity which we call "history" is a dense veil thrown over the questing behavior of still-evolving consciousness?

6. Change vs. Stasis
Emerging consciousness comes into a threatening, violent, dangerous, complicated world. It first seeks control. Gaining some control, it then seeks stability. Gaining some stability, it seeks stasis. "I've got money and power. I don't want anything to change."

7. Self-deception
But we are products of a universe where stasis does not exist. Our billion-year-old roots, our DNA is a finely wrought product of a trillion organisms faced daily, hourly, minutely with incessant change. We wake, finally, become self-conscious, and after a few thousand years, some of us settle in, clinging to the hard-won illusion of money, power, stability, comfort. Some of us don blinders, refusing to see the foundation of shifting sand on which all mansions are built, and resenting mightily the irritating blandishments of the unblindered.

8. Rage
Those with such limited, artificial views become irrationally, incomprehendingly enraged by those learning new ways for consciousness to be in a universe of incessant change. "NO!" they yell, "Your suggestions for change in the social order are a threat to all we have worked so hard to create and acquire!"

9. Dead-end?
Do these persons, whom we call "conservatives," represent an evolutionary dead-end? By all evidence, it would seem so. So great is their fear, so powerful their rage, that all that ancient adaptive DNA developed for dealing with incessant change is over-ridden. Unless the universe unexpectedly changes into a benign, predictable environment, their behavior is ultimately self-defeating. Their expedient sense of entitlement, their king-of-the-hill attitude (Ozymandias!), while a short-term threat to the rest of us, is in the larger perspective no more than the tantrum of a spoiled, frightened child.

10. Arabesques
The curlicues of evolution have brought us to a place of approaching empathy. What we are seeing played out before our very eyes is the development of a new species, beyond hoarded wealth, of shared suffering and the empowerment of hope. Species? Indeed. The overwhelming hormonal urge will be for the fearful to avoid breeding with the empathic, and for the empathic to breed only with their own kind.

END

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