EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 MORALITY

After reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and related works, I’m coming to the understanding that what we view as moral standards are not based on spirituality or philosophical thought. Rather, they are based on some 200,000 years of reciprocal agreements that help society avoid some of the destructive tendencies created by evolutionary psychology. This includes particularly those tendencies emerging from the instincts to protect the tribe, or group, against other tribes or groups.

This was a hard intellectual pill for me to swallow.

But it explains a lot of things, particularly those concerning how America has become so divided in recent years.

There would seem to be nothing to be gained by such divisiveness as we currently experience other than triggers within our genomes that spark when the tribe is threatened. In the field of mechanics, there are systems that operate contrary to established laws of physics. For example, a current should flow between two identical capacitators. Therefore, when energized the system runs smoothly. In reality, no two capacitators or totally identical, so this anomaly is used to start and stop the system.

Our genomic map has currents that should flow except that primordial triggers can activate when perceived danger occurs.

We don’t regress as much as we revert to systems that meet our archaic mechanisms.

It goes a long way in explaining the Donald Trump syndrome.