Superorganic Terminus
What will we become? How and why must we become it? For centuries, science has progressed by resisting every form of teleology: in every case, philosophical presumptions concerning form, function, and final cause have been wrong. And not merely wrong, but an error so blinding and profound as to preclude all other visions. Every wish obscures a fear: nowhere have we obscured more than the question of human nature, its origin, and its destiny. Nowhere does the 21st century human being wish more earnestly than with its wish to belong to a harmonious, nonviolent, blameless supersociety.
These errors are themselves a symptom of that future: my discovery is that the self-deception, hypocrisy, and even the confusion of modernity is no mere artifact but a sign of precisely that which we are becoming. Since the Axial Age it's been commonplace to blame the past for every error, ignorance, and lack of science. No one has yet attempted to trace delusion and hypocrisy to the animal we are becoming: contrary to our vanity, this path we're on has been tread many times before. The path is the superorganic terminus: it has a demonstrable character, it can be investigated. While no one knows our final destiny, my discovery is that it is possible to trace every psychological and spiritual account of the human condition in terms of this biological transformation - in terms of this entangled situ, the maladaptive trough in which this most complicated and self-deceptive of creatures finds himself. In spite of all our wishes to the contrary, we are still animal. The more we deny it, the more we look like a certain kind of animal. The more we posture and make pretense to a morality of harmlessness, cooperation, and compassion, the more we look like a very specific class of animal. Nature's bosom cannot be escaped so easily.
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