>Understanding Human Ignorance< >>>>> Chapter Seven >>>>> Apocalypse 2019

Ironically, given associations with anti-intellectual and irrational forms of religion, including but not exclusively comprised of Christian Protestant sects, events of common occurrence in the way humanity lives circa 2019 plausibly augur a secular holocaust.

 

In the United States, life in 2019 describes a populace that is intellectually, spiritually, and ethically unhinged:

 

Processes unfold in the United States that belie the shallowest understanding of why people do what they do:

 

Belief in free will is dominant, therefore presenting a society in which even exalted philosophers and commentators espouse a doctrine that has no grounding in scientific truth.  Physicists know that there is no such cognitive capacity for free will.  The manifold experiments from behaviorist psychologists strongly argue against such a facile notion.  Close inspection of the actual findings from studies and experiments of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists reveal locations in the brain where certain kinds of information are processed and behavior originates.  Observations of the way that people sort through information in cognitive processes also strongly suggest that human behavior is grounded in genetic and biological factors present at birth or shortly thereafter, and even more in the experiences of particular individuals.  Nothing in the work of neuroscientists or cognitive psychologists describes behavior generated by freewill actors:

 

Genetic inheritance and biological disposition, together with the operant factors of positive reinforcement (rewards), punishment (aversive experiences) and negative reinforcement (cessation of aversive experiences) determine human behavior.  People make decisions based on likely production of desired rewards, with better and worse decisions defined by life experiences that impel a person to seek higher level benefit or lower level gratification.  This process of decision making is conducted in the absence of free will;  rather, the process ensues based on the given person’s biogenetic disposition and operant conditioning.

 

And yet when a mass murder occurs in the United States the general assessment and outcry describes an evil figure making bad choices.  Murderers, thieves, rapists, drive-by shooters, child molesters, spouse abusers, and sexual predators are sentenced for the bad choices that they purportedly made, with the assumption that they could have made other decisions.  People are punitively assessed prison sentences for having made bad choices when they exercised no such options:  They have done the only thing that they could do, given the inducements of biogenetic and operant factors either inherited or acquired close to birth, or recorded in their life experience.

 

If humanity understood the foundations of human behavior, humankind would endeavor to understand its nature genuinely and then set about doing every possible to create healthy and clear-thinking adults ever more likely to give birth to human beings who enter the world with propensities for socially constructive behavior.  Humankind would then expend great intellectual and physical effort designing a human environment and protecting natural environment that will determine personally and socially beneficial behavior.

 

Instead, the tendency is to leave much up to the illusion of human choice, as if exhortation to just do the right thing could ever be effective either in creating a context for constructive human action or correcting those behaviors that undermine the creation of socially and personally rewarding life conditions.

 

Thus do we have so many people intellectually, spiritually, and ethically adrift as to spend their one earthly sojourn mired in opioid stupor.  We have people shortening their lives with alcohol and bad food.  We have a bevy of men discovered culpable for abominable treatment of women.  We have people in positions of organized religious leadership found guilty of abusing children such as those beckoned forth for gentle and loving counsel by the moral exemplar of whom these abusers profess adherence.  We have nature’s bounty so ill-used as to send forth hurricanes in unprecedented patterns, as to melt ice once seemingly inviolately glacial, as to alter seasonal patterns affecting ecosystems and thus the presence and existence of manifold creatures that had assumed their places in these environments for centuries and even millennia.

 

So do we also witness human conduct suggesting spiritual and ethical unmooring in less dramatic but just as pernicious ways.  Humankind covets material success but has little notion of how to utilize monetary gain for personal or human good.  Houses palatial and diminutive are filled with things but souls are empty.  Long days are spent in toil for material acquisition, only to find one’s body with liquor in hand and escapist television in view.  Many people believe in nothing worthwhile and either explicitly or tacitly say so.  Whether believing, hoping to believe, or pretending to believe, other people seek to preserve their egos for eternity with false notions of salvation, rather than projecting immortality via ethical behavior and tangible evidence of life well-lived according to the most profound inclinations of history’s great religious teachers:

 

Most people live and die amidst lost opportunity, false assumptions, and illusory goals.

 

As Malcolm X would say with the searing stare of an incisive intellect and unwavering ethicist:

 

“As you can see, there’s a contradiction here.”

 

But there is hope to be found in the creation of those conditions productive of more intellectually, spiritually, and ethically moored people.             

 

Secular apocalypse looms but can be forestalled.

 

Women and those liberated only in the course of the last five decades will lead the way.

 

Benefit will accrue to us all.