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The illusion of scarcity. How our survival instinct might lead to the end of our survival.

// July 28th, 2011 // Environment, Philosophy

One of the greatest dilemmas for the human mind is that believing we control it makes us feel, in fact, more in control. It gives us “accountability”, everything that happens to us is a result of our choices…

This belief is deeply integrated into our teachings. It starts with the bible and the story of Eden: how the first man and woman ate the forbidden fruit and came to know right from wrong! The education system is structured accordingly, reinforcing the same message that there is a very precise correct answer to every question, and a specific correct behavior for every setting. Your grades, your acceptance, even the love given to you depends on your capability to recognize what is considered to be correct.

Therefore we are trained to believe that the more failures you have in life, lesser are your grades, credits or social status and therefore more you stay “behind”. The more you stay behind the less you are “accepted”, the less you are loved. The less you feel loved the more you fear not to be loved. The more the fear, deeper the pain. Deeper the pain, stronger the anger. Longer the anger, faster the depletion of emotional and physical resources, fear of death and finally domestication…

Domestication of animals is something that hunter gatherers have been doing since 20.000 years, starting during the ice-age. Through the ages they have perfected the techniques and have been able to rule over herds with very little or no effort whatsoever. The key to domestication has always been the exploitation of the survival instinct. Once the animal believes he has no other chances of survival but to yield, it “brakes”, so by means of restriction of freedom, inflicted pain, fear, hunger, and little treats humans ruled over animals. This process has a name in psychology:  “Operant Conditioning” (heard of Pavlov’s dog?)

Operant Conditioning: A process of behavior modification in which a subject is encouraged to behave in a desired manner through positive or negative reinforcement, so that the subject comes to associate the pleasure or displeasure of the reinforcement with the behavior.

Some very twisted mind, down the road successfully tested the same methods on his fellow humans. Our society is running on a curriculum built by a very experienced animal trainer and this is why it works to the perfection:

Many philosophers, psychologists and now scholars of the inner workings of the mind believe that we have two very distinctively separate minds. Our conscious mind and our unconscious mind. Two allegories that I have read in a book recently described this to me with an unprecedented clarity (The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt). One was the Chariot Allegory of Plato where the mind is a chariot trailed by two horses. One of the horses, the white one, is depicted as the moral impulse, or positive passions of our unconscious mind while the other horse (black) represents our irrational passions, appetites or better our ego. The charioteer represents our rational mind, trying to control the chariot and especially the black horse with the help of the white horse. An incredibly insightful addition to this allegory by the author that cracked me up is the presence of a third character, our conscience, represented by the charioteer’s father sitting in the back constantly nagging him of everything he did or was doing wrong.

A more elegant, simpler allegory presented by the author was that our unconscious mind is an elephant, and our rational mind is a little rider on top and that it would be absurd to even think that the rider could lead the elephant by force.

In both allegories and in many cases of laboratory experiment and research it is clear that most of our choices are made by our unconscious mind, the animal. And there is one circuit that shuts everything else down, throws the rider off or barely allows him to grab onto something and ride along: the survival instinct.

And by tapping into this circuit, by building an illusion of scarcity, scarcity of love, scarcity of resources, scarcity of belonging, scarcity of happiness man inflicted man with fear, and that is how man ruled over man.

The animal trainer, is the charioteer that let the white horse loose, left the reins to the black horse and then threw his father to the wolves to sit back and relax…

Led by man with no father (conscience), no white horse (righteousness) and no reins (rationality) humanity is on a crash course with the survival instinct of a bigger being: Mother Nature!

The problem is that now that circuit is shorted and our survival lies in our capability in resolving a paradox (which by definition is a paradox in itself): only by letting go of our fear of death, by accepting it, by shutting down our survival instinct we will be able to survive…

Sadok Kohen
“In truth, without deceit, certain and most veritable”