The Evolution of Man Post intellectual awareness
From the Theory of Universal Evolution we understand that humanity began it’s trek to intellectual awareness around fifty thousand years ago with just a few at first conscious of their existence and a gradual build-up over thousands of years until somewhere over a third of humanity was aware. That (slightly more than a third,) is apparently the “tipping point”. We reached that tipping point around seven thousand years ago and suddenly eighty-five percent of us were intellectually aware.
To understand the evolution of man after that moment of world-wide awareness, we have to understand the basics of the structure of man. Everything that happens to the species happens to the individual within the species, just on a different time-scale.
The basic structure of man is this: The first five years is a period when the individual is fully aware of it’s intellectual existence, yet completely unaware of the intellectual existence of anyone else. During the fifth year the individual suddenly becomes aware of the intellectual existence of others. During the eleventh year the individual just as suddenly becomes aware of the future.
The structure of the society is the same. When we became intellectually aware seven thousand years ago, we ‘by and large’ attained the first level of intellectual awareness, the knowledge of “self”. Gradually, over thousands of years, some of us attained the second level of intellectual awareness, the knowledge of “others”.
Then came another tipping point. Some bit more than a third of us attained that level around a thousand years ago and suddenly, all but a few of us were aware of others like us. There are exceptions, pockets of the second level, Greece comes to mind, but the society throughout the planet reached that tipping point somewhere around the start of the renaissance. A good marker for this is “The Decameron”, one of the first books written in the vernacular, and the second book printed by Gutenberg.
Today, our society at large is at another tipping point. More and more individuals have attained the third level, and now, society is rapidly attaining that third level of intellectual awareness, the awareness of the future. This is not to say that our society does not know that there is a future, but knowing it exists and understanding it, being aware of it internally is entirely different. Society at large is becoming aware of the future.
This does not bode well for civilization as we know it. Capitalism is based on a consumer that satisfies it’s immediate needs at the expense of it’s future and a shareholder that is only concerned with it’s immediate increase in wealth. A reasonable society will not be concerned with either of those.
But capitalism, corporatism, is the most regressive part of our society. The corporate mantra is “no one exists but me.” We can see that today, April 2008, when the worst thing that could happen to our very fragile economy is for jobs to be lost, and business laid off eighty thousand employees. No matter what happens, business will increase shareholder return. Tomorrow doesn’t exist.