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The Clint Eastwood Conundrum

We think of ourselves as rugged individuals, cocky Clint

Eastwood-like characters capable of making up our own minds, no

matter what kind of group pressures might torpedo the less inde-

pendent thoughts of people around us. Eric Fromm, the psychoanalytic

guru of the '60s, turned the idea that the individual can control his own

universe into a rabidly popular notion. Fromm told us that needing

other people was a character flaw, a mark of immaturity. Possessiveness

in a romantic relationship was an illness. Jealousy was a character stain

of the highest magnitude.  A mature individual was one who could drift

through this world in the self-contained manner of an interstellar

transport, manufacturing its own oxygen and food.  That rare healthy

soul, Fromm wished us to believe, had an indestructible sense of his

own worth.  As a consequence, he had no need for the admiration and

reassurance that only the weak simper after.

 Fromm was trapped by a scientific fallacy that has become

mainstream dogma.  Current evolutionary theory, as promoted by

scientists like Harvard's E.O. Wilson and the University of Washington's

David Barash, says that only the competition between individuals

counts--the concept is called "individual selection."  Social groups may

glare and posture, threaten, connive and occasionally battle to a grim

and bloody death, but none of this really matters. The dogma of the

moment declares emphatically that the creature struggling alone, or

occasionally helping out a relative, is the only one whose efforts drive

the engines of evolution.

However, the accepted view requires a closer look.  Among

humans,  groups have all too often been the prime movers. It is their

competition which has driven us on the inexorable track toward higher

degrees of order.

This is one key to the Lucifer Principle.

10

10

The Clint Eastwood Conundrum

We think of ourselves as rugged individuals, cocky Clint

Eastwood-like characters capable of making up our own minds, no

matter what kind of group pressures might torpedo the less inde-

pendent thoughts of people around us. Eric Fromm, the psychoanalytic

guru of the '60s, turned the idea that the individual can control his own

universe into a rabidly popular notion. Fromm told us that needing

other people was a character flaw, a mark of immaturity. Possessiveness

in a romantic relationship was an illness. Jealousy was a character stain

of the highest magnitude.  A mature individual was one who could drift

through this world in the self-contained manner of an interstellar

transport, manufacturing its own oxygen and food.  That rare healthy

soul, Fromm wished us to believe, had an indestructible sense of his

own worth.  As a consequence, he had no need for the admiration and

reassurance that only the weak simper after.

 Fromm was trapped by a scientific fallacy that has become

mainstream dogma.  Current evolutionary theory, as promoted by

scientists like Harvard's E.O. Wilson and the University of Washington's

David Barash, says that only the competition between individuals

counts--the concept is called "individual selection."  Social groups may

glare and posture, threaten, connive and occasionally battle to a grim

and bloody death, but none of this really matters. The dogma of the

moment declares emphatically that the creature struggling alone, or

occasionally helping out a relative, is the only one whose efforts drive

the engines of evolution.

However, the accepted view requires a closer look.  Among

humans,  groups have all too often been the prime movers. It is their

competition which has driven us on the inexorable track toward higher

degrees of order.

This is one key to the Lucifer Principle.