Scientific Unity

I would even go further and say: Scientific collectivism. What I mean to say is that a world view based on the realization that we humans are social creatures, is more in line with actual reality than a world view based on the notion that we're individuals first and foremost.

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You know all the sayings and proverbs that point in the direction of this reality, like "no man is an island" or "many hands make light work"; in all of human recorded history we've been aware of the fact that we operate as a social group, and that the size of this group has been growing to the level of nations and even several international or global institutions. We know therefore that the problems of modernity can not be solved by individuals or individual nations; climate change, pollution and even the globalized economy can not be managed without international cooperation, that's just the time we live in. And there may even come a time, in a far future, that we'll have to cooperate as planets if and when we spread out into the great unknown of interstellar space.

The biggest problem that I can see with the current state of humanity is that, although we all know it is true that all real progress, all real growth can be established only by this cooperation on large scales (the tribal social group, on account of its small scale, wouldn't have accomplished anything at all), we don't act on that truth; we still live in a system that siphons all the wealth generated by the many in the hands of the few. Embedded so deeply in our current dogma is the deification of the individual, that many of us think it's normal that Jeff Bezos owns 150 billion dollar, hen it's clear to anyone with a functional brain that he himself could never generate that much wealth.

The ideology we commonly identify as "free market capitalism" is at its base irrational. Economists can unabashedly claim that the free market capitalist economy is efficient, in the face of unprecedented inequalities in wealth, as well as distribution of necessary goods and services. Most of capitalism's internal contradictions are rooted in the fundamental denial of the nature of the human species I've just described. We need each other, but we've been raised to compete with each other in a race where victory means survival or living a decent life. We are social creatures, we live in societies and all the wealth we've ever created has been created together, by cooperating. But because we've denied this simple truth throughout all of recorded history, we now actually have to fear our modern international institutions; they too are designed to benefit just a few individuals, they can't help it. Survival of the fittest, they call it, and they want you to believe that it's true that survival of the individual is evolution's main purpose, in so far we can even speak of a "purpose". That's not true though, just like so much else in this irrational system; survival of the species is what's at stake here, it's what has always been at stake.

Okay, that was a prelude to the interview I want to share with you today, dear reader. It's a twenty minute discussion with the science fiction writer I discussed in yesterday's post about Foundation. Isaac Asimov talks about his mission to at least try to convert people to rationality, and to discourage people to simply believe things on faith, without evidence or logic to back that belief up. Just to go back to his Foundation trilogy, in it Asimov discusses how entire populations can be controlled with religion, which has happened in our collective history as well; I would even say that capitalism and free markets are our current world religion. He also discusses how science and rationality have the potential of bringing people of many different backgrounds together; there's no Japanese science versus Egyptian science... Really, I think it's a lovely interview from a time when we had time left to regularly engage in these deeper discussions about the "human condition". I hope you like it too!

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