Introduction to Survivalism: Revitalizing Morality for the next Generation

Morality has gone on vacation.

When will it be back?

My generation is asking questions, about the purpose of religion, about the purpose of morality, about the purpose of our existence, and these are questions that have definitely been asked before, but the fog between us and the answers is also much thicker now than before that’s it taking longer to get to reach the truth.

Eras of post-truth are eras of self-reflection, where we’re forced to step back when we realize something isn’t working, that we’re missing the bigger picture, and seek out a meta-truth. The last time we went through a period like this was following World War One, where the nature of warfare and states at the time gave rise to something so terrible, so unapologetically destructive that it shook our beliefs to the core, stimulating the birth of a tangible system for governing the World Order, and invoking states to fundamentally reformat themselves and their competitive empires.

But, for a sliver of time between the “shake” and the “okay this is what we’re going now”, we wallow around in existentialism, because suddenly everything is thrown into question, and suddenly all of the flaws in our systems our exposed and we have to systematically debug our society.

That’s where we’re at now. We live in an era of post-truth, one far darker, deeper and more impactful than any era that came before it, which in turn means we live in an era of post-morality (and people wonder why the state of the world seems more dire than ever before). We’re at a stage where the rate of our technological advancement (both physical and logical) has greatly outpaced our moral and ethical evolution (just like the last time). I don’t really have to name what technological advancements have outpaced us now; you definitely already know, or you wouldn’t be reading this. Our most complex machines have sent us into a scramble.

Between blind absolutists harkening to models of fundamentally different eras, between the abuse of free speech as a result of unprecedently accessibility and the ability to be anonymous, and the disconnect between the morality of our generation and the previous generations, morality in the 21^st century is a grim state. It doesn’t take much to find morally ambiguous people these days, and we’re more divided than ever, with layers and layers of divisions and ideological conflicts slicing us into smaller and smaller isolations. Ideology has become so entangled with identity that people scream at one another more loudly than they listen closely to one another, and it’s freezing our moral progress and obscuring our paths to the truth more than ever.

Yes, paths. There’s more than one that takes us where we’re going, and which ever path you take is really up to personal preference. The important part is that we’re all heading in the same direction.

So where are we going? What’s the purpose of morality?

Survival.

Morality isn’t just some cute device that we invented to make us feel good about our otherwise meaningless existence, morality is about survival. First, we constructed language as a medium for better communication and cooperation, networking our minds into a greater collective, with the sum of our individual cognition and memory being greater than when we were individual. Then we didn’t have to learn to survive alone anymore, as a subsequent post on my principle of synchronicity will detail. Together, individuals could learn things in parallel and later share important knowledge, decreasing knowledge disparities between our understanding of the world and the world itself. But the first thing our friend Oog the caveman does when we tell him not to look over the cliff is, well, to look over the cliff. So then we constructed religion, as a way of understanding abstract morality, using stories to explain lessons of survival, using the power of empathy (sometimes hypothetical and fictional, sometimes factual and real examples) instead of sympathy. Sympathy would later develop into logic and reasoning and is generally more efficient for sharing larger swathes of data than Empathy. But empathy is far more convincing, and, dare I say it, sophisticated, at least for an individual human. This will also be developed in a subsequent post.

You might be starting to see how this philosophy will develop.

At the other end of this journey, we’ve reached a point in our human evolution from which we are so removed from our origin environment that we’ve lost sight of why the world is the way that it is, of how we got from squirming in the dirt to a massive, sprawling global organism. Part of that, I believe, is because sympathy and science and specialization and technological sophistication has impaired our ability to step back and see the greater picture.

And consequently, we’ve lost our sensitivity to the struggle for survival, namely because our current conditions for survival are incredibly good. We’re no longer scrambling around in the woods, getting mauled by and trying to defend against predators, burning ourselves while building fires, and taking scrapes and bruises while protecting ourselves from greater environmental hazards. Rather, we’ve reached a stage where we’ve more than mastered the needs of water, food and shelter. Back in the day, survival was a very real priority, upfront, in your face priority, with every decision we made, every drop of sweat and blood lost putting us frightfully closer to death. Eventually, we crafted shoes and clothes to minimize the pain in our hands and feet, and the pain stimulation from the natural environment dulled under our new armor.

But, in the same way that cursive writing is dying out with the invention of the keyboard, its hard to maintain a survivalistic perspective when you’re sipping a caramel latté and curled up under a synthetic fur blanket in a climate-controlled room. Your day to day survival has changed, the context of your environment has changed, and it might be now that we’re so numb to the pain that we’ve lost sight of what this is really all about at the end of the day.

Survival.

And now, as painful as it is to say, we have to make what has been implicit and obvious for millennia explicit. In our world of data chaos, we need to consolidate meaning, instead of searching for it in our everyday lives holistically.

Here’s the thing; we have all the tools. We have everything at our disposal to revise older models and give birth to new ones that are more robust than ever before, and the technology to share these models with the world. But I haven’t seen anyone else doing it. I am by-and-large not a professional or qualified by traditional standard to do this, but as someone who thinks wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much about the human condition I guess I’m just going to have to do as your guide.

Also also keep in mind; I’m a human being, which means I’m imperfect. I’m not an absolutist, I’m always growing. That means that I can be wrong from time to time. That means things this philosophy will be revised over time. It’s in its infancy right now, with only the most basic of building blocks, the cornerstones, set in place. But maybe over time maybe it’ll grow into something more.

You may also notice that I don’t use an overabundance of evidence to support my ideology. I will be using some, but not much. That’s because evidence a) takes a lot of time to research and organize, b) is very easy to get distracted and fall down the rabbit hole with and c) pretty much anything is evidence for Survivalism, but only a few compilations of knowledge are really, truly relevant to my arguments and won’t make it seem super convoluted. Most articles will be in response to these texts, but some will be derived from personal experience and musings or build from previous articles. Bold as it may be to say this, I encourage you, the reader, to seek out the evidence that supports this model in your own life, however that may work for you.

Finally, it’s my ideology. I’m not imposing it on anyone. I’m not trying to take away or devalue any other theories. I’m just sharing a personal ideology that I’ve so far found so far to be pretty infallible, or at least, useful in driving my day-to-day life. I can use it in everything, and using it as a base when trying to rationalize something I don’t understand is not only gratifying, but wholly reassuring.

And it’s not like it’s a philosophy that’s ground-breakingly original or revelatory, hell, it’s a philosophy as old as life itself, but we’ve just never been so detached from it to spawn the necessity to put it into words and pen-and-paper logic. But while we’re here, we may as well do exactly that.

Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is power. We are human beings, and we are not perfect knowledge processing machines. That’s just our physical nature. We’re cursed with a large but incredibly imperfect memory and a very limited processing power and speed (relative to what’s available to us now in computers) in an age where there is far more information than we know what to do with and know how to deal with.

And where former moral models may not be as appetizing as before, I find Survivalism to be an extraordinarily powerful, elegant, rational, parsimonious truth. I hope you will too, and I hope you hear what I have to say.