A Warm Loving Hand or His Fist
If there is a God, He has done no more than set the laws by which natural forces abide. He does not directly intervene to favor or eliminate certain individuals or species.
The laws of genetics, biology, physiology, physics, chemistry, ecology, economics, and psychology are the embodiment of the hands of God.
It is through the laws of natural selection that we humans may perceive the warm and loving hand of our Creator—-or His fist.
V.T. Mawhinney
8/4/83
A Self-Defeating Culture
Saying and doing things that make us feel loving, caring, compassionate, noble, and needed can frequently be damaging to all concerned. The following four propositions will clarify my meaning.
1. The parent who goes too far in loving, protecting, and “doing” for their child is likely to rear an individual who is, self-centered, anxious, fearful, dependent, helpless and addicted to damaging sources of pleasure.
2. The nation that provides its irresponsibly unemployed, uneducated, destitute, and overly fertile citizens with free money, food, child care, transportation, communication, housing, medical care, and entertainment will raise a rapidly increasing percent of the population who are as described in proposition # 1.
3. Those nations that over-protect other cultures by spending their own resources to save them from the pain of famines, plagues, overpopulation, and bad self-management will retard the development of those cultures and increase their long-range suffering. All cultures must learn to respond independently to the immediate conditions that threaten them or they will perish. To over-protect cultures from the consequences of their own actions has the same predictable effects as the over-protection of children, as discussed in proposition # 1.
4. Cultures live in a Darwinian, naturally selecting, world as do individual organisms and species of organisms. The feel-good concept of a “world culture” must accommodate that fact. Cultures that are currently “fit” (in the evolutionary sense) can destroy themselves by squandering their own precious and dwindling resources to teach other cultures to also be helplessly blind to the immediate contingencies of their own survival.
The clearest single prototype of all four of these levels of maladaptive and self-defeating behavior is us: The United States of America.
Such a cultural organism, without change, will suffer a decline in its health and viability.
V. Thomas Mawhinney, 10/15/92
Reviewed and Edited: 11/08/09
Few things are either all good or all bad–they are often both. A strength often masks a weakness. A mountainous strength causes an abyss elsewhere.
One is reminded of the physical law that for every force, there is an equivalent and opposite force. Could this law manifest itself in the psychology of individuals and groups of individuals?
In individual affairs, the logician is often poor at matters of the heart. Those who are ruled by their emotions are frequently impaired by their illogical approaches to problems.
Perhaps this same difficulty can be seen in the methods of modern social sciences.
The “true” social scientist must refrain from taking or advocating action until the action is totally analyzed, its consequences completely understood, and it is tested in conditions which successively approximate the real world.
Social science, which is so strong at leisurely analysis , is frozen in the face of a demand for rapid adaptation. Like the once exquisite dinosaur, social science is presently mired in its own methodological tar pit.
Clearly, it is time to consider what it is we think we have learned after one-hundred years of analysis; it is time to integrate this information into a logical whole; and it is time to quickly make the best social adaptations available at this point in our evolution.
Let us beware of too much analysis and too much cautious vacillation. Individuals who over-indulge in these cognitive modes are frequently diagnosed as suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I believe the same diagnosis can be made of societies that behave in similarly incompetent and self-defeating ways.
The first concrete fact to remember is that individual species that cannot manage to rear healthy and effective children to adulthood will not survive.
The second concrete fact to remember is that individual societies that cannot manage to rear healthy and effective children to adulthood will not survive.
The forces of natural selection that determine the evolution and life-span of America will watch, but they will not wait.
V. T. Mawhinney
1989
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Cultural Survival Skills 