Instincts, Power and Reason

Accumulation is the source of power. The more mass living organisms, as individuals or groups, accumulate, the more powerful they become, the more mass they seek. Apply this to human behavior and you can conclude that greed is the essence of power.

In nature, males achieve dominance through accumulating more weight and hence more strength. The same applies to groups; the bigger a group is, the more powerful it becomes, the more it seeks to expand its territory.

Humans, however, remain the only species that is equipped with an ability that beats this principle, at least in certain situations, and that is because our brains have grown big enough that we outgrew, outsmarted, or at least we like to think so, the vicious, self-promoting gene, postulated by Richard Dawkins. 

Therefore, in essence, one of the things that make us humans is our ability to behave against our instincts (think of the relationship between the new, human, and old, shared by other species, parts of the brain.)

Here is how Dawkins puts it:

“I am a passionate Darwinian who believes that Darwinian natural selection has given us our bodies and our brains, but I also believe that our brains have become big enough that we can rebel against that”.

Dawkins statement can perhaps give us a better insight into whether we should, in our behavior and moral considerations, stick to our instincts, evolutionary instincts, or behave in accordance to reason, human reason. 

But reason can only prevail when buttressed by discipline or the will to power, power over ourselves. This is the essence of the teachings of most religions and primordial philosophies; that is to have control over our instinctive urges, namely anger, desire and the lust for power.




Jan. 4, 2014

تصنيف : English