BROKEN – God, America, and the Republican Party

It is said man descended from the lungfish, whose enormous genome was necessary to store new traits for mapping and navigating a more complex land environment. But God is neither social nor Earth-bound, and His original plan turned out to be wrong. Something happened between lungfish and man, such that the human genome only needed to be 1/14th the size of the lungfish, to achieve everything from nuclear bombs to social media websites.

What happened is external heredity. This is the mechanism by which we do not genetically inherit our survival traits, but learn them from our parents, or from stored records such as maps. By this mechanism every individual can be aware of dangers, and benefit from experiences, which he has never experienced himself. And so our survival traits are not stored in our genes, but originally in our memories, and later in written records. And we have evolved not specific traits, but the ability to pass on and store any traits easily.

The majority of the structure of a cell is for replication, not its organ-specific task. And so too is the majority of the human brain designed for communication and imitation. This is obscured from us by the simple fact that we don’t think about the majority of things we simply imitate, such as the structure of language. If a person had to design all the words and structure himself, of the language he uses every day, it would be a greater undertaking than any individual has conquered in a lifetime. The power of imitation is far greater than that of reason or instinct.

The mind spins like an engine at all times, imitating dance moves it sees on TV, regardless of whether it is going anywhere. There must be some mechanism to sort out which traits are advantageous or self-destructive, without people having to die to prevent having children who imitate them. That mechanism is trusted sources which have survived inheritance or some other refinement mechanism, such as the Bible, and peer-reviewed scientific articles. There are innumerable layers and variations, such as testing sources by shibboleth, where a person who is found to agree with existing beliefs, or displays a certain flag, becomes a credible source for a new belief.

With the evolution of civilization come both new survival traits, and new mechanisms to store those traits. As maritime technologies and population increased, “The New Covenant” displaced “The Old Testament”, and people learned to trade with strangers, rather than murder them as competitors for land resources. But each advance in trait transmission, leads to disaster until accreditation refinement mechanisms catch up. The communist revolutions and the great world wars did not result from a sudden increase in the rebellion of the tribal control instinct against the extended physiocratic order, and the invisible hand. Rather, their timing was a result of new mass communication technology.

The television broadcast of the 1936 Olympics from Germany was considered groundbreaking. But the technology enabled not just the observation of sport, but the propagation of Hitler’s tribal aggression philosophy, which could only then be destroyed by the destruction of Germany itself. War and misery emerged from a time of increased prosperity, and new potential of science and technology. Anytime people are brought together in new ways, whether in cities as a result of the industrial revolution, on radio as a result of Rush Limbaugh’s broadcast, or on college campi, it becomes a breeding ground for destructive mind viruses. Civilization goes into war and upheaval, until new ways evolve to refine the traits people pick up from TV or the Internet.

A few years back my sister, who lived in Manhattan, described the Republican Party to me. She said it is a bunch of parrots who live in an echo chamber on Fox News, where ideas gain credibility only by recitation, and because they resonate with some preexisting belief system, not as a result of any test of their validity. I told her no, you have it completely wrong. Democrats are the natural communicators and reciters, who live in cities and on college campi, and will die on the hill of the most popular nonsense that appeals to their feelings. Republicans are solitary creatures working on tractors out in Iowa, who are more likely to develop ideas as a result of their own logic or traditions, than by imitating the latest fad.

What I did not realize, is the world as I knew it had already given way to a new paradigm, where one-way AM radio broadcasts and aged paper texts, had given way two-way communication in chatrooms and on Twitter. The Republican Party which once stood as a check against the party of mind viruses and mob impulses, had itself become consumed, after people in rural areas became as connected as people in cities. Sensing something was wrong, Republicans themselves flocked to a candidate who promised a return to traditions against the incessant waves of nonsense, to “Make America Great Again”. But it was for naught, as the Republican Party had itself has already been consumed, and was incapable of reflection on what had happened to it.

With the Internet and social media, the external record – beliefs and traits and their imitation – exploded faster than ever before, infinitely greater than the lungfish genome, the Bible, “Mein Kampf”, or anything that could have been broadcast on TV and radio. As a result, civilization has become less effective at governing and regulating itself and its institutions and individual behaviors. There are not sufficient mechanisms to sort out good and bad ideas and traits. Those which catch on are the lowest common denominator, that which resonates with the innate impulses of the greatest number of people.

By the end of it there were no longer two different American political parties with competing sets of values – where one set had survived the tests of survival – but two competing mobs of nonsensical marxists. This is parallel to what Hayek documented in “The Road to Serfdom”, when he saw that competing communists and fascists were essentially similar, with no party defending traditional English liberalism or tolerance. The external record became so large, and the heredity so rapid and unregulated, it overwhelmed any preexisting institutions and core beliefs. Without any refinement, it became basically a gigantic tumor of human impulses.

Having been reduced by lack of filtration to the core of human instincts, in the time of greatest population density, there is no possible outcome but war. Because the instincts of man are designed for war and aggression against his neighbor. And the refinement and transmission mechanisms of traits for restraint and survival, have fallen behind and become obsolete. So there will be war, just as there was war after the industrial revolution, and after the creation of broadcast media. There will be war until a new set of refining mechanisms evolve, for survival traits in an age of mass recording and transmission.

For 200 years those on the left thought those on the right were evil. And those on the right thought those on the left had good intentions, but were misguided. No longer. Now the Republicans are just another impulsive mob which sees its opponents as an evil to be killed, not reasoned with. So America as we knew it is gone and over, and cannot be conserved, even if there was a party or faction made up of people who understood what was going on, and wanted to conserve it. There is no choice but to watch the war come, and see what has emerged after it passes. There will perhaps be some types of censorship, or who even knows.