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Musing on Sydney's news

29 September 2003 The REAL battleground No-one seriously believes a word our politicians say except a few old traditionalists who think we should get behind the government because it is the government. Our elected representatives set up everything to suit themselves and are generally about as straight with us as a dog's hind leg. Then look at the private sector. Shareholders are all. Consumers are being squeezed by cartels and sly deals with governments. CEOs are almost paid the GDP of small nations. Cosy deals with family companies (not mentioning names). Battlers are being bled dry by poker machine and alcohol revenue.

George Pell has just been promoted to Cardinal and it's clear that the Pope has made sure that all Cardinals appointed come from his own conservative faction. I believe the term is "branch stacking". Bright young stars with new ideas that don't blend with the old ideals are ignored. Merit barely exists, drowned in a sea of nepotism. Even our so called spiritual leaders are just politicians of another stripe. It seems like almost everyone's a politician, even if they aren't in politics.

Human and animal nature

It's all about power. Power is primal. Basic. Primitive. Animal. Natural.

It's only natural, isn't it?

Power struggles abound in nature. The strong survive, the weak fall away. Elephant seal bulls compete for mating rights and the females only mate with the guy with the most money ... whoops, I mean strength.

Human nature is just animal nature. We fight and compete. We seek dominance and superiority over the next guy/gal/other. We feather our nests and pay exorbitant sums to do so. We hope to find someone to trust with whom we can bond. We screw like any other animal (calling a spade a spade) and too many of us search for impersonal internet porn. Then we breed - far too much for our own good. We sleep, usually not enough. We eat Macca's and quaff Château Croix Beauséjour.

We behave exactly like any other group of animals - a group of apes, a pride of lions, a flock of birds, a herd of sheep. Just with a little extra sophistry ... on our good days, anyway.

So in the end, that's what we are - just animals. If you don't believe me read Richard Dawkins' brilliant book, The Selfish Gene. Everything we fancy animals do and say is geared towards one objective - the spread of our genes and the spread of our memes (ie. ideas). Even our apparently altruistic behaviour is often veiled behind ulterior motives. We are in the iron grip of the seven deadly sins - anger, pride, greed, lust, sloth, envy and covetousness - and their stories fill our news every day.

There is a struggle going on, as old as your ancient history lessons and beyond.

The difference between humans and animals

Ok, humans have an animal nature, but we have another nature too - a transcendent nature, for want of a better word. A distinctly human nature. What is this nature? It's the difference between humans and other animals. In brief, it's our ability to take a big picture view.

It's in the arena of consciousness - between our animal and transcendent natures - where the real battles of the future will be fought. We can only hope that our higher natures win, and I'll tell you why ...

Here we all are: animals, plants, rocks,liquids and plasma, all entwined in our shared destiny on planet Earth. You could say we are like the cells of one whopping big animal. Let's call this animal planet Earth (and for now, we won't worry too much about what the Earth is a cell of).

We are cells of the Earth - small parts that make up the whole - in much the same way as our brain cells, skin cells, blood cells, fingernail cells, even the humble pubic hair cells. Each has its own unique role to play in this drama (or comedy) called Life. The tricky bit is working out what your role should be. It's easy enough for our cells or the other animals, they just do it. Each animal fights, sleeps, shits, eats, roots (and leaves). No drama.

It's not so easy for us, which is why we are smarter than animals, and yet we play our role on Planet Earth so very much worse than they do.

No other type of creature on Earth, as far we know, can take this global view (although Douglas Adams fans might also include dolphins and white mice). While we have the capability to do this, we rarely do because it's so much easier to just be a dumb animal.

Yet a few well-known bright sparks throughout history have tried to show us how to rise above all this animalistic guff.

They say that a guy named Jesus had a go at making us less animalistic around 2000 years ago. He endorsed the Ten Commandments. What are the Commandments if not a basic blueprint of how to transcend our animal nature? He got nailed to two big pieces of wood and his current followers now play political factional games, distorting his messages to their own primitive ends. Some kill. Buddha tried to open our eyes too, but these days we just use images of him as doorstops - tubby, friendly doorstops and we sometimes kid ourselves that he'll bring us good luck. Some of his followers kill. Apparently Mohammed was thinking in roughly the same way as Jesus and Buddha. It's well publicised how distorted his teachings have become. Think September 11 or ask any Muslim woman with a bunch a crazies throwing stones at her for the heinous crime of adultery. Yup, they kill too.

Gandhi gave it a burl too and was doing ok until some crazy guy shot him. Once he died the Indians - and the rest of the world - conveniently managed to forget just about every lesson he taught us. We're still killing, lying and manipulating.

I don't think it takes a genius IQ to realise that humans are not a perfect or penultimate life form, and that we still have more evolving potential. If we've come this far, why can't we evolve further?

Nor does it take a brain surgeon's intellect to wonder whether we'll survive long enough to keep evolving. We may be cells of the planet Earth but at the moment we're functioning exactly like cancer cells.

A cancer cell grows for its own sake, at the expense of its host. When you look at our effect on the planet it all seems rather familar, doesn't it? Of course, in the end everyone loses because a cancer needs its host in order to survive. If cancer's existence is a divine clue to the overall nature of things the lesson is being well and truly lost on we dopey hominids.

The upshot of all this is that if we don't start becoming less animal and more transcendent we will self-destruct. Global warming. Rising oceans. Disease. Nuclear waste (not to mention bombs). Environmental degradation.

Before you accuse me of being just another greenie doomsayer, I have another theory ...

Like it or not, our future evolutionary path is telepathy

"Excuse me?" I hear you say. "Did I read that correctly?". "Sure, you did," I reply, looking for all the world like an obsessed mad woman. First, we'd best backtrack to something more ... normal. Most of us seem to agree that it's a good idea to communicate as effectively as possible. That way we can act more cooperatively and cohesively. It also makes sense to say that it's desirable to gain a greater understanding of each other. And it's a good idea to have greater empathy and sensitivity towards others. What right thinking person would disagree with any of that?

Telepathy is just taking those concepts to an extra dimension. It's not necessarily metaphysical, spiritual or cosmic. In fact, I think developing telepathy is the only way we dodos are not going to go the way of, well, the dodo.

This is about people developing an extra evolutionary faculty. By way of analogy, let's look at Dr Andrew Parker's theory regarding the development of the eye and what's known as the Cambrian Explosion. It shows the incredible evolutionary advantage of gaining extra faculties. Imagine how much of an advantage it was for the first animals to develop vision!

They say that trilobites may well have been the first animals to develop an eye - the ability to see - and, judging by the huge number of trilobite fossils around, it's clear that they did rather well for themselves.

In the same way, the first human to achieve real telepathy (as opposed to wannnabes with crystal balls) will have just as much of an evolutionary advantage over normal people as those Cambrian trilobites did over their blind prey. For a start, imagine going on a television quiz show and waving your ESP around, or negotiating a deal in the board room, conducting an interview, or going on a date ...

So how are we going to achieve this telepathy, you may ask? Actually, the process has already started. We are already more "wired" to each other than ever before. Think mobile phones. Then think mobile phones with full Internet access, viewing full web pages. Then imagine them implanted and, instead of sending sound waves via the air to our ear and website images to our eyes, imagine them sending signals direct to the nervous system.

The Internet is the closest thing we have to the Jungian collective consciousness - which is allegedly a collection of all the knowledge in the world. Shared knowledge. The hive mind, if you like. The 'Net is a step towards this collective understanding. As a child I used to bury my face into the Encyclopedia Britannica, but the Internet makes it look like a tabloid. To show the first traces of evolutionary advantage the Internet provides, a recent study showed that kids with Internet access do better at school on average than those who don't.

It makes sense that, if you have access to the knowledge of millions of other people, you'll be well placed competitively as compared with your more ... let's say "local" peers.

A more traditional but massively powerful force in the world is the media - newspapers, magazines, television and radio - another tool of collective consciousness. Totalitarian governments like those of Josef Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Robert Mugabe and John Howard have long understood its power and, with the help of powerful friends, they tried to control and/or muzzle it. They used the media as a propaganda tool.

Propaganda is simply an attempt to bludgeon our collective consciousness into something that conforms with a person or a small group of people, who want to force their own views on everyone else. I guess everyone needs a hobby.

In the long term, though, like cheats, totalitarianism regimes never prosper. The collective consciousness it attempts to create is false, forcing its puppets to adopt a fragile mask of compliance. The laziness and inefficiency of workers in Russia and China before communism started wobbling shows that you can't force people to follow you. Half-hearted action carries little power. Totalitarianism is an animal (power-based) way to enforce a transcendent concept so it can't possibly work in the longer term.

How it will probably happen

Clearly the key to our development of real telepathy - that is, our next evolutionary step to ensure our long term success as a species - is technology. Already Professor Kevin Warwick [or see news article] has developed an implant (in the arm) that facilitates telepathy on a very basic level, but only with another with the same chip implanted.

Eventually this process will become more subtle and sophisticated. In time someone will invent a chip that doesn't need a reciprocal implant in order to read their minds.

Imagine what will happen then.

First the military will buy it and guard it jealously, looking for ways to exploit it in espionage work. Then people with those military secrets will retire or be bought out and sell their knowledge to multinationals.

Microsoft will then produce their own brand of implant - let's call it MS BrainTalk - which will naturally only be compatible with other MS BrainTalk chips, no doubt hoping to squeeze out Apple's IBrain chips. Then you can expect some clever mavericks to create an open source emulator plugin for other chips (perhaps it will be BraiGnome?), which will allow chips of one platform to communicate those on other platforms. Microsoft will take them to court but will get pinged for anti-competitive behaviour.

After some messing around, generic telepathy chips will be hot in the marketplace, but only the rich will be able to afford them, hoping it will make them even more dominant, and will help them impress their friends with their incredible general knowledge at swish dinner parties.

Yes, there'll be the usual dross. The usual animalistic power plays. No surprise there.

At this point it gets scary. It's possible that telepathy will be used to erode our rights and invade our privacy. Big Brother. Thankfully Big Brothers always fall away in the end because the holding of power has always gone in cycles throughout history.

At some stage things will settle down and telepathy implants become commonplace and affordable (in non-third world countries), just like television, PCs, broadband, DVD burners and so on. Huge numbers of people - effectively cyborgs - will be able to read others' minds.

In biological terms the competitive advantage of telepathic cyborgs over natural people will be as great as our current advantage over other animals, or the trilobite over its sightless prey in the Cambrian era. The seamless coordination, cooperation and shared intelligence the new, evolved human cyborgs will enjoy will give them complete dominance - if they choose, which of course they will.

Think it sounds awful to have others read your innermost thoughts, do you?

Everyone does.

Yes, there are some big ethical issues here, foremost amongst them being privacy. But what is privacy? I mean, what is it, really? The biggest issue with privacy is power - its balance and imbalance. We don't like the Government and big companies knowing all our private stuff because we we know almost nothing about them, apart from the scraps of information they choose to throw to us. Without their reciprocal transparency, they have no right to our private information. The equation must be equal.

And that's exactly the point of telepathy, none of us will be able to hide ... anything. At first there'll be imbalances. There'll be firewalls all over the place, and the people with the toughest firewalls (ie. the richest) will enjoy a big advantage. In other words, it will be situation normal.

But in time - perhaps quite a long time, we will all be open books - all of us. Barring catastrophe, one day the human world will move closer to being a level playing field.

Once we can all see into each others' lives I expect we will be relieved to find out that everyone else has their own little quirks, hangups, kinks, phobias, paranoias, secret agendas, delusions, dumb ideas and all sorts of other embarrassing stuff floating around their psyche, just as we do. Once we accept that, none of that nonsense will matter any more and we'll be able to concentrate on more sensible thoughts.

But if you have self-centred thoughts, then no-one's going to want to know you. Ubiquitous telepathy would force us to drop our conceits and pretensions. We'd have to come clean. Play it straight.

Competitive strategies will be seen as outmoded, a primitive way of doing things. Cooperation will be the only way we'll be able to get ahead.

If you seek to manipulate, exploit, cheat, lie (or mislead, as is the media euphemism of the moment) you will end up being marginalised. No-one will want to know you. If you're true in your purpose then you will prosper. The good guys will win, the bad guys will lose out. Nice in theory, anyway.

Why are the strains of Imagine competing with the Cabaret's Tomorrow Belongs to Me running through my head? The prospects are both beautiful and frightening.

If all this really worries you, don't be too alarmed (just alert). We may well be looking at a hundred, if not hundreds of years, before all this happens and it's more than possible that cockroaches will have inherited the nuclear wasteland our animal natures will have left behind by then ...

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