The right brain is the entropic brain. It sees the whole results of our actions not just the immediate results. That is what makes it more sensitive and caring.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Case of S T Nikos

The Necrophilia Speech

Nikos was getting increasingly political and the secret service men�the Govvy men�were giving him more and more attention. He attracted it because he believed current economic and technological policies were leading the human race towards extinction, and he was utterly disdainful for those who could not see it. Politicians and academics both found it easy to label him as a madman, especially because the consequence of the destruction of the human race was the re-emergence of a reptilian race to succeed us.

Nikos sent me a transcript of another speech he made, this time to a non-scientific audience of green campaigners, with whom Nikos�s credibility was rising. After some preliminaries, it continued.

"The plain fact is that civilised societies and technology are paradoxically incompatible. It is like eating�you have to do it to live, but if you overdo it you die. It is impossible for societies to live and prosper with advanced technology.

"Man + Technology = Extinction.

"Intelligent dinosaurs, the Anthroposaurs, destroyed their world 65 million years ago. And the omens are that we too are heading for extinction.

"At the end of the Cretaceous the vertebrate biomass concentrated into a few highly populous species. Today the same thing is happening. Now, mankind, the new intelligent life form, breeds the few species at the expense of the many. Then, it was the intelligent dinosaur. Genetic variation was narrowed by breeding and environmental destruction until it virtually did not exist. It was literally genocide�without the genes to cope with the slightest stresses, the remaining species died off too. History is repeating itself.

"Why do things tend to repeat themselves? Popper [Karl Popper, the philosopher�Michaela Magi Griffiths] speaks of the propensity that some event will occur. Propensity is probability with intent�it exerts an influence on events as if it were a physical field like an electric or gravitational field. It is reminiscent of Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields. Controversial though they are, these hypotheses imply that when something occurs, it has more chance of happening again. If true, and the Anthroposaurs have already destroyed themselves, we might be locked into an outcome that will be nigh on impossible�might be impossible�to alter. It might be a propensity that extends throughout the universe. It might explain why we have not been visited by extra-solar intelligences. None of them get beyond the stage that we are at!

"If not, why is it so hard to change our behaviour? Where is the will to change it? Where is the mechanism to do it? Do we suffer from the same affliction as the Anthroposaurs and perhaps all intelligent life forms�a self-destructive syndrome that is a sine qua non of intelligence? If the answer is yes we are doomed. Even if we can see the fault in ourselves, we are powerless to change it. I believe we have a legacy from the dinosaurs. It is part of our psyche. We cannot reject it. It is our dinosaur heritage!

"What is this syndrome? Why have warnings of doom had no effect? Why do people not want to know? There have been many prophets of the forthcoming catastrophe but they are not hailed and praised for their forethought�they are ignored or condemned. The human race persists in its willingness to destroy itself and most other higher organisms for selfish economic and ideological reasons, all of them short term.

"There is something strange about the way we perceive things. We are heartbroken at the death of a pet dog but scorn those people who die in their millions in poverty�human beings! And besides the millions who die every year of disease, starvation and suicide, in the last 200 years perhaps 100 million people have died in warfare. Yet we are totally indifferent to it. We are indifferent to the deaths of our own species as well as to others. Why?

"Why are we so perverse? Why are we apathetic about our destruction of the environment and the threats to life we are creating? Why do we allow rapacious industrialists whether of the blue or the red variety to contaminate the earth? Why do we accept the rule of governments that allow them to do it and, through accumulating dangerous armaments and adopting threatening postures, endanger the world in their own way?

"Erich Fromm [the social philosopher�Michaela Magi Griffiths] wrote: the Falangist motto Long live death threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine. In our mechanized, urban societies we have lost the knowledge of our relationships with the rest of the biosphere. Instead we are obsessed with mechanical devices, our cars, TVs, computers and washing machines, and mechanical analysis of the interrelationships between ourselves, our hierarchies, social symbols and selfishness. Not only are we unaware of the stench of death around us, in some unconscious way we revel in it.

"Why do we retain such an obtuse optimism that we revile those who do warn us of the dangers. Why is it so much more virile to accept the status quo rather than criticise it? Why do we do what we are told even when we know it is wrong? Why don’t we recognise our dinosaur heritage?

"There are human characteristics that once were valuable to survival but which, through the speed of the evolution of advanced society, have become so ill-fitted to the needs of technological man that they now threaten us. The key characteristic of modern man, as it would have been for Anthoposaurus, is the remarkable speed at which technological society emerged, creating conditions quite different from those in which instincts evolved.

"It happens in nature. When their migratory instinct switches on, swallows that have had a late brood simply abandon them to die. Two instincts conflict�their parental instinct and their migratory instinct. There is a maladaptation�at one time they could raise a late brood but now they cannot. Darwin thought that such animals could feel no remorse, had no conscience, indeed no memory of their action. The swallows do not even recognise what they are doing. Are we similar?

"So instincts sometimes conflict. When intelligence evolves these conflicts become conscious posing the creature moral dilemmas. It resolves them by inventing rules, laws and morals. With the growth of society the rules themselves condition our behaviour. So far so good. But the original code of ethics, made in primitive societies, might not be forever correct. If we have built on behaviour maladapted for modern conditions, we shall find that our mores, rules, norms and habits�our very ways of thinking�are leading us to disaster instead of giving us guidelines for a better existence.

"Selfishness might be one characteristic that was valuable in some evolutionary contexts but is no longer. Selfishness is not excessive self-love, but indifference to others. Other instincts which developed in evolution to balance against excessive selfishness have failed in our coddled environment. Obsessions seem to overwhelm all other feelings� and so too does obsessive selfishness. Ultimately the obsession destroys even the obsessive. Initially selfish, the behaviour eventually contradicts self regard by being self destructive! It becomes a death wish. Necrophilia! Long live death! And our society depends upon highly specialised people�experts�who have to be obsessive in their field to succeed. Our society selects for obsessiveness. Entrepreneurs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Generals, Scientists�successful people must be obsessive! They must be necrophiles!"

It is easy to see why Nikos was visited by the Govvy Men, the government�s black suited threateners. You can hardly go around saying they are all obsessives and necrophiles and expect them to love you.

But is there yet more to it? The Govvy Men might have regarded Nikos as a dangerous communist or ecologist but usually they are experts at sidelining people like this. Nikos was already sidelined. He was not creating a noticeable stir except perhaps in some fringe conservationist groups. Mostly he was considered�even by those who knew him to be an intelligent and educated man�as a harmless crank. Why did Nikos have to disappear? Why was Albert Bender frightened into submission to their threats?

A man can be a crank, but if he is a crank who has hit upon the truth then he becomes a dangerous man. Nikos considered that the Govvy Men already knew everything that he thought he had discovered. They knew because he was not the first or the only man to have had strange dreams. He was not the first or the only man to have pondered the origins of the oddities in the rocks. He was obviously not the only man to have pondered the significance of UFO sightings. Governments had been buying silence or threatening retaliation when anyone rediscovered their secret. They know the human race is doomed and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it!

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
© Copyright AskWhy! Publications 1997. Quote by all means but credit this source.