Transcending Human Nature in the 21st century: If the 21st century spells for greater conscience, why do we not see the balance herein planet Earth, tipping the scales to a more mindful and effective accountability — as in the case of criminals {terrorists} irrespective whether they are from a so-called ‘civilised’ or ‘third-world’ temperament?
Why do we not perceive the espousal of both these levels of consciousness {the negatives, and the positives} to realize the ‘oneness’ beyond the tolerance of skin-tones — the so-called rift between what is perceived as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and why the need for this separation when in the comprehension of the constancy of a given state, the embodiment of what may seem negative, and positive is all but illusory — yet it is much needed in all the sciences including theology to metamorphose light ‘energy’ into matter and vice versa? Is humanity, and the rationale of human nature limited to the perceptive-creation between minds shaping the society one radiates when perceived as a civilization? Would the illusory study of energy into matter the perspectives of tomorrow that will, in the end ascend to a mere thought as in the ascension of matter into spirit?
The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth. The invisible shapes of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, and the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. Our own reflections, we might say, are a part of the play of light and its reflections ~ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
Is it human nature to distrust the society it lives in, and hence create quandaries when dealing with the masses, in a never-ending cycle of self-inflicting destruction – political, economically or socially? If so, what roles will society play, in the governance of a social mesh in the 21st century?
Is trust the ultimate antidote when dealing with the 2nd or 3rd node in a social network, and if so, where does it begin and where does the transitional ‘border’ ends? Questions arising to one’s need for ‘attention’, and the transparency quotient as opposed to the need for advocating a trend, product or services, irrespective its social, economic or political agenda calls forthwith the understanding of what human nature is, in the first place.
In spite of all the progress that in the modern civilization has been made in all departments of life, such as commerce, industry, economics, the question remains if we have really progressed.
Would Buddha, Muhammad or even the spirit of Christ’s “Golden Rules” apply to the contemporary agnostic conditionings society has set {veiled} itself into shaping altruistic key-models throughout the primordial hierarchy in localizing urban-evolution, and mindsets playing crucial roles in the momentous developments of tomorrow? Is human nature predominantly inherent in all societies, conscious or otherwise? Do conscious beings react the same way as unconscious beings in the 21st century – do these, those supporting a global conscience for harmony react the very same as capitalists do in their archaic patterns in the ever growing and expanding worlds? IS DNA thought patterns in its evolution synonymous to mindset re-engineering?
Relevant Notes:
{Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me: What Online Social Networking Means for You and Your Business; Penny Power, Founder of Ecademy and author of explains why trust is key to a successful social marketing strategy} Social networks are about building friendships, building trust, getting people to like you, getting people to understand you. If you come into social networks with that sort of very controlling attitude of I’ve got to achieve a sale and you communicate driven by marketing your business and achieving your sale, you put people off. Because that would be no different to moving into a nice little village or town and standing on a bus or in the pub and saying to everyone, let me tell you what I do. I’m brilliant at this. And forgetting that you should just sit at the barstool and one-by-one meet people in your village and build trust over time. Because when you do that, you build advocates. And I would say an advocate of your business is more than ten clients to you as an individual, because somebody who’s going to advocate you becomes very viral. And if you have people liking you inside a social network, your business will grow. It’s like having a virtual sales team that you’re not having to pay. Because they just trust you and they want you to be successful. But you have to have patience. You have to start very carefully and build trust and build friendships. And that’s why they’re fantastic places. Because if you get a lot of people getting on and being very friendly to one another, then you know how to find the answers you need from that network of people. And so you have to remember that social networks are called social for a reason. And business happens, and it happens fantastically once you grasp that.
{Risk Communication in the 21st Century, Ragnar Löfstedt} — During his intervention, Ragnar Löfstedt has given some examples of falling levels of public trust in Europe; Discussed how policy makers have reacted to this; Analysed these reactions. He argued that a new model of regulation id needed, based on the use of the precautionary principle and growth of risk aversion. He then identified and discussed the teething problems this new model faces: Deliberation, transparency, precautionary principle and the role of science.
{Before The Dawn, Nicolas Wade} — What drives us? We see the contradictory impulses of aggression and conciliation. Warfare is a way of life which is universal, a norm in pre-static societies. 30% of adult chimps die of wounds, a Mohave war party expected to loose 30% of its warriors, at Gettysberg the Confederates lost 30% of their numbers. E. O.Wilson writes of “the human pre-disposition for socially approved aggression”. A nuclear family allowed all males to procreate and aggression diminished. Parallel to that is an ability to cooperate with more than family members which led to a cohesive society. Fairness and reciprocity with their associated trust and guilt, led to trade and allowed cities and large urban societies to develop. Defence against freeloaders, who would take advantage of trust, led to religion, Wade believes. Religion is communal, it bonds, it excludes those who cannot be trusted. It too has a wired-in basis. E. O. Wilson believes we have a predisposition to accept truths with a deeper meaning. Language is used to deceive and in religious ritual – so religion and language co-evolved. Wade identifies four glues that hold human society together – reciprocity, language, religion and pair bonding in a family unit. Taken with warfare that is remarkable close to the four “Drives” identified by Lawrence and Nohria in their book “Driven – How human nature shapes our choices” published by Jossey-Bass in 2002: to defend, to bond, to acquire and to learn.
Surviving Human Nature — A civil society is built from many constructive organizations that thrive in local communities. Citizens of the 21st century can be quite sure that top-down solutions will not work and the tendency toward centralized political and economic control will need to be modified or abandoned. The realist will recognize that “social progress” is not a progression of rational responses to problems, proceeding toward some ultimate solution for human deficiencies and aberrations.
The Scientific Fundamentalist — Why is the reductionist worldview the way the world works? It’s very simple. In nature, bigger things are made up of smaller things. Smaller things are not made up of bigger things. So phenomena at a higher level of aggregation {“bigger things”} must be explained by causal mechanisms operative at a lower level of aggregation {“smaller things”}. Humans are made up of genes and cells and proteins. Genes and cells and proteins are not made up of humans. So human behavior {phenomena at the level of humans} must be explained by mechanisms operative at the levels of genes, cells, and proteins. Of course, the behavior of genes, cells, and proteins must be explained at the levels of molecules, elements and, ultimately, elementary particles and, possibly, vibrating strings. Just like turtles, reductionism goes all the way down {but, unlike turtles, it stops at the fundamental constituent in nature, formerly believed to be the atom and currently thought to be the vibrating string}. — Satoshi Kanazawa {The Scientific Fundamentalist} is an evolutionary psychologist, Reader in Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at University College London, and in the Department of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London.
ID Does Not “Require Supernatural Causation” {David K. DeWolf, John G. West, and Casey Luskin, “Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” 68 Montana Law Review 7, 28-30 Spring 2007} — ID as a scientific theory does not attempt to address religious questions about the identity or metaphysical nature of the designer. This has been the consistent view of ID proponents for the last two decades, and Judge Jones was presented with extensive documentation of this fact in amicus briefs filed by the Discovery Institute and FTE, which the text of his opinion seemed to have ignored. Judge Jones also ignored—or misinterpreted—key passages from the Pandas textbook that addressed this issue. For example, the published version of Pandas used in Dover schools explained that ID merely seeks to infer “intelligent causes” and is compatible with a wide variety of religious viewpoints, including pantheism and agnosticism: The idea that life had an intelligent source is hardly unique to Christian fundamentalism. Advocates of design have included Christians and other religious theists, but pantheists, Greek and Enlightenment philosophers and now include many modern scientists who describe themselves as religiously agnostic. Moreover, the concept of design implies absolutely nothing about beliefs normally associated with Christian fundamentalism, such as a young earth, a global flood, or even the existence of the Christian God. All it implies is that life had an intelligent source.
Creating Faith — Ogilvy understood that creating faith in customers was not a distant exercise; he would not succeed solely by delivering creatively constructed messages across pages or airwaves to a faceless mass of consumers. There was always a more immediate, more present customer: the clients themselves. This is perhaps the most important reason advertising creativity matter. It inspires the marketer. It encourages the sales force. It provides them, and all the other constituencies in and around the company and the brand, the faith that they will be able to sell the product in to the retailer, close the sales on the dealer’s lot, win new commissions, and better their own lives. Great advertising is their rallying cry, the flag they march under. The mouse click must be matched by their heartbeat. This is the reason no major new advertising campaign ever debuts de novo on broadcast network television, but rather is premiered at the franchisees’ convention, the national dealers’ conference, and the annual sales meeting. The campaign, the ads, are the gospels — the stories that excite and unite the tribes, that spur them to go out and do battle for a higher cause. Done right, an advertising campaign transforms the advertiser itself into an army of true believers. For how can you expect to win new converts, if you, yourself, are not a true believer? The notion that a narrative could be used to drive people toward higher goals is as old as philosophy itself. As Socrates says in concluding the myth of the cave in Plato’s Republic: “Without having seen the Form of Good and having fixed his eye upon it, one will not be able to act wisely, either in public affairs or in private life.”
{“Genetics: Enemy of Evolution” by Lane P. Lester, Ph.D. Creation Research Society Quarterly 31:4} — At the same time that Darwin was claiming that creatures could change into other creatures, Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was showing that even individual characteristics remain constant. While Darwin’s ideas were based on erroneous and untested ideas about inheritance, Mendel’s conclusions were based on careful experimentation. Mendel went largely unappreciated for 35 years, but by the end of the 19th century, other research had so clearly confirmed the principles discovered by his work that evolutionists had to incorporate these principles into their theories. Essentially there are four sources of variation: environment, recombination, mutation, and creation. A combination of these four sources can explain any and all differences between any one creature and another. Environment includes all of the external factors, which influence a creature during its lifetime. For example, one may have darker skin than another simply because he is exposed to more sunshine. Or one may have larger muscles because she exercises more. These environmentally caused variations may have great importance for the individuals, who possess them, but they have no importance to the history of life, because these variations die with their owners; they are not inherited. Charles Darwin believed that variations caused by the environment could be inherited. This fallacy no doubt made it easier for him to believe that one creature could change into another.
{Environmental Sentinels, Debjani Roy, Institute of Self Organising Systems and Biophysics, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India} — The global decline in amphibian populations, and more recently the disturbing number of deformed amphibians, has caused many researchers to believe that they may be early indicators of serious environmental problems. Species have been reported to disappear from Europe, America, Australia, Asia, Africa and elsewhere {Alford et al 2001}. Various factors have been implicated in global amphibian declines. The animals are sensitive to pollution, because they live at the interface of two environments – land and water – and can easily absorb pollutants through the skin. The skin absorbs chemical contaminants from agricultural run-off that results from an indiscriminate use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. Ionizing radiation {UV-B} resulting from ozone layer depletion, acid precipitation and the introduction of exotic competitors and predators are other hazardous factors.
A new species of chytrid fungus has also been implicated in global amphibian decline {Halliday 1998; Rollins-Smith et al 2002}. The fungus may exude a lethal toxin or suffocate frogs by clogging skin pores {Kaiser 1998}. The deleterious effect of pollutants and chemicals have mostly been associated with finding frogs with missing legs, extra legs, misshapen legs, paralyzed legs that stuck out from the body at odd places, legs that were webbed together with extra skin, legs that were fused to the body, and legs that split into two half-way; frogs have also been found with missing eyes and with one external eye, the second eye growing inside the throat {Cohen 2001}. Researchers have discovered that the level of nitrogen-based compounds, which the United States Environment Protection Agency {EPA} found in agricultural areas as a result of using crop fertilizers, is enough to kill some species of amphibians, especially at their more vulnerable larval stages {Blaustein 2001}. When exposed to moderate amounts of nitrates and nitrites, some tadpoles and young frogs reduce their feeding activity, swim less vigorously, experience disequilibrium, develop physical abnormalities, suffer paralysis and eventually die.
Remaking The Human {Engineering Selfhood in the 21st Century} – Lectures by Dr. Nikolas Rose — Martin White Professor of Sociology and Director of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economics and Political Science.
A five-part national lecture series exploring the ethical, philosophical and social implications of the new sciences of genomics, neuropsychology and nanotechnology — Part One: Engineering Selfhood in the 21st Century: Are we on the verge of an age when we can re-engineer the human being according to our own designs? Will nature no longer set the limits on the kinds of minds, bodies and persons we can become? This lecture will consider the implications of the ways we govern ourselves, and the new dilemmas of rights and obligations that confront us in light of advances in the new sciences of genomics, neuroscience and biomedicine.
Trust, 21st Century, and Beyond.
- Dr. Rainer Baumgart {Technology and Development, Secunet, GmbH} — Reliability refers not only to the trustworthiness of a person or technical system. Although reliability represents no measurable or provable attribute, it is also a requirement demanded by users, associates, and system applications personnel. As with trustworthiness, the reliability of technical systems and their components are tested through experience and evaluation, in which the most important evaluation is the user’s acceptance.
- Dr. Lutz Becker, Consultant in eBusiness and eMedia — Principle Trust – Notes regarding a Problem of the Networked World. The Internet’s effect on business and society can be easily summarized: Nothing is like it used to be! Obviously, a lack of trust affects e-commerce. Mistrust and confusion have replaced faith in an accepted social system. Trust derives from the interplay of various factors, in which individual factors, social psychology, communication, and technology are all involved. Rationality, however, does not necessarily play a role in the trust process. Thus it would be an error to approach the problem of trust through means based only on technology.
- Prof. Dr. Gerold Behrens, & Dr. Maria Neumeier, Professor, Marketing, University of Wuppertal — The Formation of, and the Impact on Trust: Since complete information exchange between partners is not possible in a business transaction; trust must bridge the information gap. We will show how trust is built and utilized in marketing and how the cognitive processes influencing trust came about. According to the latest research in neurology, social-psychological evaluation is located in a certain area of the brain. Here, emotion, specialized knowledge, and information regarding the past and future come together to bring about the process called “trust.” Marketing takes advantage of this research in order to influence a consumer’s trust in a product.
Manifesting The Divine Pattern In Life — The creation of Eve out of Adam is a symbolic account of the Universal Pattern where the masculine and feminine elements separate by virtue of the continual interaction of the paradoxical opposites of Creation. Once this is understood, then the merging of these opposites back together within oneself will eventually bring about our own return to Eden — or the return of the prodigal son to the Kingdom of Origination. Men and women who have developed themselves, and possess a true ‘spiritual’ vision, understand the connectedness of all of Creation — and perceive that from the One Source of Being, all has emanated. Creation means from within Himself, brought forth all there ever was, is, and will be. Each level of Creation is the result of the higher level giving birth from within itself to a more divided level of reality. The more we move out into the lower levels of Creation, the more the Divine Powers are divided into lesser powers and states of being. The gods and goddesses that we associate with Greek and Roman Mythology present the manner in which these divided powers manifest themselves throughout all of Creation, and especially within our own body-mind. That when the division is overcome, and everything is brought into oneness, we begin to move within the essence of our True Source of Being, and the prodigal son returns home to the Kingdom — this return is the main focus of all genuine religious philosophies the world over.
What this means is that in their divided state where men and women are opposite polarities one to the other, even within themselves they are again divided in the manifestation of a left and right testis/ovaries, cerebral hemispheres of the brain, sides of the heart, lungs, kidneys and other organs of the body, two arms, legs, two eyes, ears, nostrils and even nipples on the breasts. Thus, even within the polarity, is the polarity itself again divided male and female {right and left, upper and lower) in accordance with the Divine Pattern of Creation.
While this may appear to be meaningless to the average person, what it conveys is that the mind itself is subject to these same states of division that is manifested in the body/vessel in which we presently dwell. In view of the fact that the Soul is neither male nor female, and the sexual organs of man in relation to woman are in fact One — and yet divided across the two genders — the sex organs themselves are a divided polarity in relation to the brain and higher centers of mind. If, therefore, the sex organs of man and woman represent “One”, and within the woman her half is further divided into positive and negative, and the same is true with respect to the testis of the man, then we have four separate functioning polarities that must be merged into an un-separate entity across the spectrum of two physical bodies. Thus, the man and woman must not only each overcome their own divided polarities of male and female, but they must then overcome the divided polarities that exist between the two physical bodies in which they inhabit.
