An Eplanation Better Than 42 (Part 3)

 

Although I seem to be setting up a good guy/bad guy scenario here, it is not my intent to do so.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit disingenuous.  Although our duality as both individual entities and social animals has served us well, with a balance of competition/cooperation, self/social interest and materialism/altruism, we have to evolve our paradigms in order to survive into a twenty second century and beyond.  What this will involve is growing from our current rugged individualism to a new cooperative model based on sharing, cooperation, and an appreciation of the real world bereft of the delusion of metaphysical beings and fulfillment in an afterlife – an appreciation of the fact that this is all there is, all we have is each other, and that the best way to make our own life better is to make everyone else’s life better.

The question for me has always been, what price should we be willing to pay for the perpetuation of the species?  At what point does the individual disappear and the collective assume the primacy of human existence?  In other words, is life as an ant, or bee, or penguin the sort of actualization that awaits?  Because that is what I envisage as necessary for the survival of the species: a differentiation of roles under an umbrella of communal interest.  Only by working together toward a common vision of what will maintain the community can we weather the coming ecological maelstrom.

Competition is the essence of individual survival whereas cooperation is fundamental to the survival of societies.  Rightists tend to exploit the concept of competition because that’s the world in which they live.  We see it in the bidding for contracts, in the competition for employment, in the rat race, in the race up the corporate ladder.  We see it in the concrete jungle which is every bit as deadly as the original tooth and fang infested environment.   Death in the concrete jungle has less finality and the victims shed their life’s blood over decades of insecurity, seeking to fill a hollowness that has been carved inside them by the craving for the unattainable.

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