Скачать или смотреть Embarking on the Path of Civilization Condemns a Creature to the Destructive Reign of Power

Presents the foundational idea of the integrated understanding of what has happened to our species, of the nature of the forces that have driven the way human civilization has developed.

I call that integrated understanding A BETTER HUMAN STORY, and that foundational idea demonstrates why, as soon as our species began inventing its own way of live, humankind was condemned to struggle with a social evolutionary process that we did not choose, but that we could not avoid.

The breakthrough to "Civilization," in other words, unleashed a destructive SYSTEMIC FORCE, that was not a function of our inherent human nature.

This idea -- developed in my prize-winning book THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES -- makes inescapable the (somewhat liberating) idea that "The Ugliness We See in Human History is NOT Human Nature Writ Large."

And a full understanding of the battle in America today — of the transformation of the Republican Party, the rise of Trump and Fascism to great power in America — is impossible without tracing the workings of this destructive systemic force, which inevitably arose as a consequence of humankind’s breakthrough into Civilization.

(Civilization being defined as “those societies created by a creature that has used its unprecedented creative intelligence to extricate itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by taking the unprecedented step of inventing its own way of life.”)

The inevitability of the rise of that destructive force, and its powerful impact on the human world, shows that we are better creatures than we have been taught to regard ourselves as being. (Understanding that can, even by itself, empower us to do better than we're doing.)

The ugliness that besmirch the pages of human history was the INEVITABLE result of the dynamics created when a species steps out of the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life.

Indeed, it is inevitable that "Any creature on any planet anywhere in the cosmos that embarks on the path of civilization will be compelled to trace a historical path as tormented and destructive as that which our species has done on earth over the past ten millennia."

I hope that anyone who would want to know all that — if it were true — will take the time to check it out to see if the logic is as compelling as I’ve found it for more than half a century.