The Default Setting Is Love

By Thomas Dexter Kerr

Book Overview

Poems and a preface tracing the love that bends the long arc of history toward intelligence.

The culture of freedom, democracy and human rights is the heart of the revolution of our era creating an advanced civilization, more intelligent, moral and beautiful.
This reality is beyond the vision of modern philosophy based on the false premise that the default setting is hate because humans are fundamentally separate and evolved to compete against one another. But we aren't and we didn't.
It's an exciting and hopeful time to be alive.

A better world is being chosen by all kinds of people whose lives are enhanced when they're allowed, enabled, inspired to make more decisions in their lives. People thinking more is good, right and beautiful because our thoughts and feelings evolved to mix together in the living thinking system that is all minds connected, talents not concentrated but dispersed, every person incompetent on their own, each and every one needed to add variety to the whole, creating a category leap in intelligence, grace and power far beyond what could evolve to exist in any one beast, completely dependent on everyone getting along, intelligence and morality joined in a common endeavor. The information system created as people mingle thoughts and feelings with those of others evolved to be the most intelligent entity ever to exist.
Our collective intelligence was our primary means of survival so it was that which evolution made ever sharper. The details of how individuals think were shaped by the enormous force of their effect on our most important tool and weapon, the human information system. Many of the talents that make people so intelligent together are useless in isolation, essential when combined with others. Impractical musicians, nonathletic priests, groveling politicians help bring disparate folks together. Mechanics fix things, clumsy scientists invent, cooks devise food, athletes run and hunt, shoppers gather, some who can memorize, memorialize the past. Fearless and timid, quick and slow, passive and aggressive, skillful and clumsy, female and male, serious and frivolous, analytical and intuitive, speculative and methodical, mathematical or musical or not, all are found in every group across the globe. The mix found everywhere today exists because it is the combination that proved to be most intelligent. At every evolutionary step the result was the most efficient, creative and intelligent combination, bound together as it had to be by countless varieties of love in a package of glorious shining beauty.
The challenge of our era is finding thousands of ways in complicated large scale modern life of unleashing human intelligence and nurturing our heritage with a clear-eyed recognition of it. Modern peace and prosperity has resulted from the ever closer alignment of social organization with ways people by nature maximize intelligence. Systems that allow people to think more in daily life are well known. Democracies empower people to choose governments. Markets are people deciding what should be made and done. Systems of rules that apply to all help keep things open and honest, protecting the endeavors of those less powerful. Support for ability to think comes from family and neighbors, schools, hospitals, books and internet. Enormous dividends result from getting it right. But decentralizing decision-making is never easy because it means ever greater complexity and the empowering of inconvenient people. The best path forward is illuminated by realizing that people thinking more is good, right and beautiful and humans by nature want to do so. Democracy, including ever more people in decision making, is active, alive and intelligent and deserves respect for it. Freedom works, intelligence is beautiful because the default setting is love. Together our destiny is to wonder and speculate, create and explore, seek truth and solve the riddles of the universe.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1505229073
• ISBN13: 9781505229073
• Release Date: September 2014
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"