World Leadership

Mastriani wrote:
This trait of the "melting pot", (of American nationalism) is actually one of the more vicious pendulum fantasies of social, or as Adlerian so aptly defined, "group" thinking. Although this sociological splintering has been hyped into a fantasy of national strength, when viewed from the logical, critical thinking processes, the alterior becomes more clear.

Magnetman wrote:

I am afraid that I have basic disagreements on this point. First of all your position assumes that the evolution of human development is intrinsically random and that Representatives of all the world's cultures coming together to form a single nation in the New World, is simply circumstantial and was never intended to be employed in any purposeful evolutionary design.

For me that stance reflects the cynical pseudo-intellectualism of modern rationalizations, which tends to latch onto comparatively recent distortions in human behavior, then assumes that it is intrinsic to our base nature - and then extrapolates conclusions from that superficial viewpoint.

The obvious fallacy with this line of reasoning is that it fails to dig down far enough into the basic behavior of prehistoric cultures in order to discover the bedrock of common social purpose that has brought our specie through a 100,000 generations of cultural disciplines, so powerfully and dangerously to the present.

That failure of our scholars is simply because there is no handy written records to study regarding the vast amount of time man invested in pre-literate conscious development. Actual field work is required to know how we behaved back then - and most intellectuals are loath to do make that personal effort. Fossil bones tells us very little. Thus millions of lay people still tend to believe that we began our journey to the present as loutish cavemen, invading each other's territories and bashing in each others skulls.

The basic fact is that if we had been even marginally socially uncooperative from the start we would never have made it through subsequent Ages of development and you and I would not exist.

I did my homework 40 years ago. At that time comparatively uncontaminated pre-literate Stone Age and Bronze Age cultures still existed in Africa. I went to live and study both their social structures and their spiritual beliefs.

Among the San Bushmen in the Kalahari I found that meticulous sharing was the fundamental basis of their culture. As an instance. I gave a small piece of candy to a youngster, expecting him to eat it before the rest of the family arrived back from the hunt. Not so. He kept it until they arrived. Then that tiny piece was passed around twenty people, each taking a tiny bite for themselves.

Meticulous sharing, beyond the natural sharing of motherhood, is what propelled mankind above all other animals. Another revelation for me during that signal moment, was that I realized that no experience is valid, unless it is shared among others, only then does it gain its full flavor. Bushmen instill the sharing ethic in their children as soon as they are weaned. That is the base of human intelligence and unless we continue to instill meticulous haring in our own children before they learn anything else, they will never experience their full social potential.

Among Bronze Age agricultural tribesmen I found that a chore-based work ethic was strictly enforced from about the age of four onwards.

The sharing ethic and the work ethic forms the foundation of human intelligence and serve to define our core values. Courage comes next. This is followed by affection, conscientious craftsmanship, then creative artistry. Only then is intellectual development effectual. For it is then based on natural reality, not on the virtual reality we get from religious scripture and science text books.

Here then, is a basic lesson in the logic of spiritual and social progressions.

Environmental imperatives related to exponential population pressures have forced us to move sequentially from:

1. Animist family group hunter/gatherer cooperatives

2. Shamanist clan group agricultural cooperatives

3. Scriptural national group industrial cooperatives

4. Agnostic international group scientific cooperation.

Our next logical evolutionary step is

5. Ontological global group cooperation as planet managers,

Each Age imposed its own specific social and spiritual disciplines. That evolutionary progression reveals that the need for ever larger cooperatives, with each amalgamation serving to instill core ethics, is a fundamental rule for survival, no matter how much initial Resistance or how many bloody wars we fought against our entry onto each paradigm shift.

America is the most internationally integrated group on the planet, and is therefore at the very forefront of the evolutionary momentum. Generations of inter-marrying has elevated us above the national mentality of most of the rest of the world, where ethnic bigotries continue to make each believe that their culture is superior in some way to the others. In Europe, the English cannot stand the French, or Italian and so on and the sentiments are returned. In Asia, Chinese cannot stand the Koreans and the Koreans cannot stand the Japanese and so on. And the Middle East has come to despise all.

America, despite its superficial domestic distortions, has 14 generations invested in cementing a homogeneous relationship. "It may be far from perfect, but its the best we have." That is no evolutionary accident and that is the leadership force which will and must propel the entire specie into our next Age as a globalized society.

The same old environmental imperative that drives evolutionary development, reacting once again to rising exponential population pressures, is again at work and demands mass change - and has made sure that we have the mechanisms to do so..