Two characters in modern society suggest something dramatic is looming in human kind's not to distant future. One is the media talking head. They are not experts in any sense when it comes to any subject. Violent imagery is always in the sub-text. They don't have political opponents, they have enemies. These enemies should be "taken out" in the next election (often described as a war), "targeted" and "eliminated". Their rhetoric is filled with arrogance, judgment, intolerance, and hate. They talk tough but most, if not armed with a gun, would clearly pose little threat in an actual confrontation. Many couldn't climb a set of stairs without stopping to catch their breath.
The other character is the martial arts expert. Unassuming, tending to quietness, and lethal; truly, absolutely lethal. Yet they dismiss hate, reject it even. Their ethos may be one of combat, but not of judgment, not of intolerance, not of hate.
These are characterizations of characters, chosen and described to accent the extreme two ends of one aspect of human character, the mind set of hate. And it is a mind set, a particular arrangement of the matter / energy making up the human brain. We know that the mind, however it is described, is reflected in the physical properties of the brain. Like any physical characteristic, the mind set of hate can be attributed to heredity and environment. We normally regard emotions as an event in the mind, disassociated with the brain. But I want to avoid that error for a bit. I'm going to take the brain structure, the interaction of neurons and synopsis, the associated chemical and hormone flows that go along with the emotions of hate, and call it the meme of hate. Again, a physical characteristic of the human brain, like color is a physical characteristic of the hair and eyes.
At the one end of the human meme of hate is the media talking heads. At the other end is the martical arts master. I picked these two to separate the meme of hate from the capacity for violence. The media talking head, for all the talk, doesn't really come across as potentially violent. (There are a couple of exceptions.) The martial arts master doesn't project hate at all, but the capacity for violence is potent indeed. Both human but with this dramatic difference in in the meme for hate. Both human, but with remarkably different brains.
Right up to modern times this meme for hate posed no real threat to the survival of the species. In a tribal society battling for limited resources, hating the "other" was useful. They could be maimed, abused, murdered, made slaves, raped, or a whole tribe eliminated all together, babies included. All this without a twinge of conscious or empathy getting in the way. Thus was this characteristic in the brain passed down from generation to generation, evolving, just like the ability to speak and an opposing thumb. Human Species Hate Man thrived. (HSHM)
HSHM now faces many environmental pressures working against his survival. With the invention of weapons of mass destruction the meme for hate isn't nearly as useful. No tribe can be easily eliminated without risking a conflagration that would spell the doom of all tribes. The total collapse of human civilization and the death of the human race is most decidedly counter-productive in an evolutionary sense.
There are other factors at work as well. HSHM has a tendency to kill off its young. Every suicide bomber takes him or her self out of the gene pool. This is a small number of course, but these same are the one most visibly burdened with the meme of hate. They will not be breeding, passing along the genes most likely to form this brain characteristic. They will not be raising the next generation in an environment reinforcing this same brain form.
HSHM dominates the planet. Virtually any war pits the species against itself. Most of the casualties in the tribe of Islam are inflicted by other Muslims. They are killing themselves off, and killing off the DNA that forms that particular brain structure at the same time. Survivors could fall into two camps. Those shaped most by the meme of hate will likely go off to war, responding the only way their brain allows. Many will then be eliminated before they breed as well. Others, less shaped by the meme, have a better chance of surviving. They are less likely to go to war looking for revenge. Instead they have families; weakening the hate meme brain characteristic in the next generation.
In less violent societies the hate meme still works against the survival of the species. Hate is less and less helpful in the working of complex societies, societies which support the continuation of the species. Being around someone whose brain is more deeply formed by the meme of hate gets tiring for those less burdened. For the most part the meme makes for angry loners, people who drift toward the edges of a complex society while looking for a reason to lash out at people they don't know and who have done them no harm. Here in the US school shooters and mass killers carry the meme the strongest. Like the Islamic suicide bomber, these carriers of the meme will not be around to breed, not be around to raise or influence the next generation.
It has to work that way. We now know that the environment forces changes in the basic DNA of life, changes then passed on. The meme of hate works against itself on at least two levels, failing to pass along the genes that build the basic brain structure for hate; and then failing to provide an environment that strengthens the neural pathways to support that same structure.
I have long felt that the species of human is untenable. We can not survive our own tendencies for long. But "we" is HSHM. What if evolution is doing what it always does, eliminating those characteristics that work against the survival of the species? What if the Human Species is already being replaced by one more suited to survival? Perhaps we are about to see the rise of Human Species Non-Hate Man.
Human Species Non-Hate Man (HSN-HM). Members of the family tree of human but lacking the brain characteristics necessary to support the hate meme. They might know the word "hate" but it would be like talking color to the blind or musical notes to the deaf. That is not a particularly good analogy since we normally think of the lack of an ability to grasp something as a liability. In this case though, imagine the hate meme as a birth defect, one that usually causes crippling pain and is often fatal. Human Species Non-Hate Man are born without this defect.
HSN-HM may already walk among us, just as modern humans once walked among the Neanderthal. HSHM is struggling and faltering, but HSN-HM may be ready to step in. HSN-HM may look a lot like HSHM. After all, dress a Neanderthal in modern fashions and walk him through downtown NY and he wouldn't even draw a glance. Hell, a Neanderthal living homeless under a bridge would not draw a look either. There is no reason that people who lack the brain structure for the hate meme should appear any different than those who have it.
Terrorism is an old man's game in which the young are used as cannon fodder. That generation is dying out. In a like fashion the demographics of US media talking heads are shifting older. The next generation isn't nearly as racist, sexist, or homophobic. Maybe their brain structures are just slightly different, less condusive to holding the form of the hate meme. Not all of them, and not all to the same degree; but already different from the generations before them. The generations after them may be more different still, the hate meme unable to fit into their brains at all.
At the moment all of our institutions were built by HSHM. They may not be a good fit to HSN-HM. What will HSN-HM do with religions built on hate? Many religions once held to actual, repeated, human sacrifice. Those religions are dead now, no intellectual basis for their being, no followers. How will Jewish / Christian / Islamic ideology resonate with a people who simply can't hate those who are not Jewish / Christian / Islamic? How does HSN-HM relate to a god requiring blood and sacrifice before It can forgive? How could a person who lacks the ability to hate, worship a god whose main claim is that those non-hating people will be tortured forever? Isn't it likely they will simply abandon the theologies that can have no hold on them?
According to the religious leader's themselves, their biggest challenge is to relate to the next generation. What if that is impossible? What if the next generation has brains that simply can't grasp the tenets of the hate meme? Will not the churches slowly empty? Isn't that happening now?
What kind of economics will work for HSN-HM? Cut throat capitalism? Can capitalism work at all without some element of the hate meme driving the capitalist? Who deliberately loots trillions of dollars from their society without the thought that, at some level, those so looted deserved the economic beating? How does greed work without some touch of hate? Is communism or socialism backed by weapons, police, and storm troopers, likely to work in for HSN-HM? (In a species lacking the hate meme, who will be the storm troopers?)
HSHM stuffs its prisons with the non-violent, the mentally ill, the young; the only intent to punish people in the harshest ways possible. In prisons throughout the world (including those in or sanctioned by the US) brutal, physical, often lethal torture is a regular occurrence. That can't really happen without the influence of the hate meme. A person's very brain has to be shaped in some deep, foundational way, to allow them to take part in torturing another. For HSHM just another day in the life. For HSN-HM an utter impossibility.
What will nation / states and boarders mean to HSN-HM? Who will pick up weapons to kill complete strangers when there is no ability to hate those strangers in the slightest degree? It is easy to make a soldier out of HSHM. Can it be done with HSN-HM? Without soldiers, without armies, without laws written specifically to hurt or take advantage or oppress, of what use are boarders? Government structures built to rule over and control HSHM are useless to HSN-HM.
Every single social structure will be modified, replaced, or abandoned. None of them will fit the needs of the new / replacement generations as HSHM recedes into history. It is odd to think of the human species being replaced by a new human kind that fits the environmental niche better; but we know that must be happening. It is always happening. Human Species Hate Man evolved in an environment that no longer exists. The meme of hate assures the end of the species in this new environment. But environments that support life are never left empty and something new will come along that can make the new environment work. HSN-HM fits and there are clear hints the first of a new kind are already among us.
As the environment shifts even further, more access to weapons, easier and faster travel, the pressures working against HSHM build. Sadly, the species can react only within the confines of its own evolution, its own physical characteristics. For HSHM that means reacting with the hate meme, a species accelerating its own demise. Its numbers shrink as the still evolving HSN-HM numbers grow. At some tipping point the world starts to change. Ever larger numbers of HSN-HM find their way into positions of power and leadership, reforming the society to fit their physical characteristics, their norm of non-hate. As breeding opportunities diminish HSHM's gene pool shrinks even more. Eventually the brain characteristic of the hate meme fades away.
HSHM will have gone the way of the dinosaurs.
So how should a member of HSHM view the coming extinction of our species? Much of the genetic makeup of HSN-HM will be built on that of HSHM. Chimps and humans share around 95% of their DNA code. HSHM and HSN-HM will be much closer, at least to start. The rise of HSN-HM also means that human based intelligence has a much better chance of surviving into the future.
Knowing that we are a species reaching the end of our shelf life (as it were) helps when trying to understand the societies we have built. We are a species whose brains are shaped for and by a meme of hate. What we see around us is who we are, and it is fading away.
