It would be hard to overstate how serious my purpose is in this posting: it involves my life-long life-mission. Which is to convey — to as many people as possible — a way of understanding the challenges we face.
(Challenges we face as Americans at this dangerous moment, when we are in danger of losing our Democracy to a Fascist Force, but more particularly as members of the civilization-creating species on this planet, who are in danger of destroying ourselves before we can get our act together. I’ve spent the past thirty years fighting the rising force of Fascism in America, but it is the larger perspective that I’ve always felt is the most valuable contribution I can make.)
I call that “way of understanding” A BETTER HUMAN STORY. And with this posting, I am beginning a series to convey it.
This will begin that series with a sequence of two videos.
The first video invites people --who are finding the present ugly scene in America deeply painful to behold — into a kind of War College background course of study that provides a way of stepping back to a level different from our immediate ugly situation. It is a level to which the rise of Fascism is organically connected, and which illuminates the nature and scope of our battle, which has implications for how it should be fought and won.
The second video begins that “War College” presentation by laying out the foundational idea on which that integrated Big Picture view — that BETTER HUMAN STORY -- is built.
(A week from today, I will introduce this same second video again — in a different way, not with this first video but with text that fleshes out that invitation in some additional ways. And then, in the weeks to come, it will be onward to other pieces of the integrated picture of what’s happened to us, the civilization-creating species on this planet.)
Here’s the invitation, to people who want to keep fighting, but don’t want to focus too much on the overwhelming ugliness in the news of the day, as Fascism attempts to transform our nation:
And this video begins that “War College” expedition into seeing the larger battle — the nature of the forces at work in human civilization, the shape of the battlefield, and what must be accomplished to make a more whole world.
Here’s the written “Description” that accompanies the YouTube video:
Presents the foundational idea of the integrated understanding of what has happened to our species, of the nature of the forces that have driven the way human civilization has developed.
I call that integrated understanding A BETTER HUMAN STORY, and that foundational idea demonstrates why, as soon as our species began inventing its own way of live, humankind was condemned to struggle with a social evolutionary process that we did not choose, but that we could not avoid.
The breakthrough to "Civilization," in other words, unleashed a destructive SYSTEMIC FORCE, that was not a function of our inherent human nature.
This idea -- developed in my prize-winning book THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES -- makes inescapable the (somewhat liberating) idea that "The Ugliness We See in Human History is NOT Human Nature Writ Large."
And a full understanding of the battle in America today — of the transformation of the Republican Party, the rise of Trump and Fascism to great power in America — is impossible without tracing the workings of this destructive systemic force, which inevitably arose as a consequence of humankind’s breakthrough into Civilization.
(Civilization being defined as “those societies created by a creature that has used its unprecedented creative intelligence to extricate itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by taking the unprecedented step of inventing its own way of life.”)
The inevitability of the rise of that destructive force, and its powerful impact on the human world, shows that we are better creatures than we have been taught to regard ourselves as being. (Understanding that can, even by itself, empower us to do better than we're doing.)
The ugliness that besmirch the pages of human history was the INEVITABLE result of the dynamics created when a species steps out of the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life.
Indeed, it is inevitable that "Any creature on any planet anywhere in the cosmos that embarks on the path of civilization will be compelled to trace a historical path as tormented and destructive as that which our species has done on earth over the past ten millennia."
I hope that anyone who would want to know all that — if it were true — will take the time to check it out to see if the logic is as compelling as I’ve found it for more than half a century.