Like all animals, humans exploit their environment, but are special in having created the artificial environment of civilisation, which they exploit alongside that of the natural environment.
Both environments are currently being exploited to destruction.
This is insane - indeed, suicidal - but it's what we're doing, for the simple reason that those we look to as authorities on understanding our situation fail to do so. Instead they rationalise it, as they do their ideology of post-racial multiculturalism & DIVERSITY.
What causes the social sciences to rationalise our situation, rather than to understand it?
The current situation is working to their narrow & short-sighted personal advantage, which blinds them to reality. That's why. It's basic #EvolutionaryPsychology.
Tragically, all things evolutionary are spurned by most social scientists, because of associations with Social Darwinism, which has trapped them in a pre-Darwinian dark age, with an understanding of society on a par with medieval astronomers' understanding of astronomy.
It is of paramount importance that social science academics recognise that civilisation/society is an artificial environment which they themselves depend on & thus rationalise, which blinds them to reality, which they are supposed to be authorities on understanding.
Social scientists should be society's eyes, seeing where society is, where it has come from & where it is heading, but they are blind, because they refuse to view human nature & society from an evolutionary perspective.
If Constantine had known anything of jesus's teachings he would called the battle off & sought to negotiate a peaceful settlement with his enemy.
But while on the subject of dreams, I recently had one that made a strong impression on me & which I will now relate.
I awoke from it last Tuesday morning, having spent the night at my sister's place:
Two cars in a chase coming towards me, one trying to overtake the other. As they passed one of them hit & slightly dented my car, a white Fiat Panda. They both pulled up a little further on.
"One aspect of wokeness which is overlooked is that it has no stopping point. There is no norm, value, idea, concept, standard, moral, or theory wokeness will not dissolve." @wokal_distance
A society needs a shared moral authority. Otherwise it will just tear itself apart, which is what America & the West in general are currently doing.
The moral authority of the medieval church was imposed on society, which is what others are now also attempting to do.
The most pernicious of these alternatives is the Orwellian & moral-supremacist ideology of post-racial multiculturalism, DIVERSITY, Inclusion & AntiRacism, which has already come to dominate the West.
#DavidAaronovitch & the media outlets he works for, which includes #TheBBC & @thetimes, have an AGENDA, which they never talk about, at least, not publicly, & I'm pretty sure that if one broached the issue with any of them they would deny it.
Maybe they are not consciously aware of it themselves. I have no way of knowing. Most of what motivates us lies in the subconscious, which censors what it allows to become conscious.
This agenda is the ideology of post-racial multiculturalism, DIVERSITY, Inclusion & #AntiRacism.
It's an ideology that arose in misconceived, #NeverAgain, response to the evils of Nazi ideology of racial purity & supremacy, which it goes to the opposite but equally insane extremes of. It's a self-destructive ideology of White racial self-denial, self-contempt & self-hatred.
This is bizarre, & quite Orwellian that so little is made of it in the media, by politicians or academics, & not just in America, but everywhere in the West.
Why? because they are all terrified of being called RACIST, like the authorities in Telford & other English towns.
Anti-racist ideology has turned the West into an Orwellian nightmare.
If we don't get a grip on this soon, it will destroy our civilisation as surely as climate change will if we fail to get a grip on that too.
Both represent failure on the part of the social sciences.
It is imperative we understand how & why the social sciences are failing us, themselves & society at large, & offer the following two threads as starting points:
I usually agree with much of what #DavidAaronovitch says in his Briefing Room on BBC Radio 4, but not in his latest one on the UK's presumed need for "economic growth".
David is also keen on UK "population growth" through immigration, criticism of which he deems to be RACIST.
If I'm right about David's attitude to economic & population growth being genocidal, which I'm pretty sure I am, it is of no small consequence, because his views are pretty much those of Britain's & the West's ruling elites, in journalism, politics & academia.
Societies have always been dominated by their elites via a strategy of divide & rule, & although they pretend to be, Western "democracies" are no different. It is just more subtle than in earlier times & in non-democratic countries.
Allow me to explain HOW we're divided & ruled:
I think it was #WinstonChurchill who famously said that British democracy was deeply flawed, but better than any other system yet devised, or words to that effect.
I agree with him, but while he saw it as a reason for maintaining the status quo, I do not.
Churchill wanted to maintain the status quo because it served him personally extremely well, as it does many others.
However, the status quo is inherently unjust, inhuman & - most importantly - unsustainable on our finite, vulnerable & overpopulated planet, SpaceshipEarth.