ENERGY CONSERVATION
 
A) ENERGY CONSERVATION
 
One important principle in the biology of animals is that virtually all non-volitional animals are hard-wired to conserve energy. The strong tendency to always (in appropriate contexts) conserve energy is selected for by evolutionary pressure. Each, and every individual animal´s food supply is finite. And - it costs energy to acquire energy (in the form of food). No animal, therefore, can afford to waste energy. If an individual animal wastes significant amounts of energy, then it will tend not to survive and pass on its genes to future generations of its species.
 
Here follow a few concrete examples of energy conservation in non-volitional animals.
 
Lions out on the African savannah typically spend upwards of sixteen hours per 24-hour period just lazing – dozing or sleeping in the shade of a tree (or in the dark, if it is nighttime). This behaviour pattern is essential for their survival. If they spent the day romping around in disregard of necessity, then they would run a risk of starving to death. And – for the sake of acquiring food with a minimal expenditure of energy the lion hunts by means of sneaking up on its prey in tall grass – and then, at the very last second before being noticed, charging at the prey in a furious burst of speed. Cheetahs hunt by a similar method. And they also spend most of every 24-hour period lazing or sleeping.
 
Bears are famous for their hibernation in winter. Since bear food is scarce during the winter at temperate and arctic latitudes, the bears cannot hunt or forage for food during the winter. For - the “profit” energy-wise would be too meagre. Energy-wise it pays for bears (the ones that live in temperate and arctic latitudes) to gorge themselves on food during the warm parts of the year, build up a store of fat while food is plentiful – and then live off of the store of fat during the period of hibernation during the winter. Of course, there are many other species of animals as well which also go through the food-impoverished winter with a lower rate of metabolism – for the sake of conserving energy.
 
Well – what about us human beings? Do we tend to conserve energy? We do – but not instinctively. For – we are “rational animals” – and therefore volitional animals. Consequently, we do not have any instincts. We human beings choose to put forth cognitive effort – or not to.
 
Men begin to choose to think or not when their minds begin to form abstract concepts. The mental effort of babies, who are still on the strictly perceptual level, is automatic. But once a baby passes the stage of forming automatic, first-level concepts of perceptual entities, volition begins to “kick in”. Once a baby has formed simple first-level concepts such as “ball”, “doll”, “block”, “rattle” etc. it must proceed further by forming such more abstract concepts as “toy” and “furniture”. When this happens, the baby is faced with the alternative of doing it – if the baby feels the effort is worth it. Or else defaulting on said task - if the baby feels the effort isn´t worth it. The baby must decide whether it values the pleasure of a heightened awareness of reality more than the “pleasure” of cognitive relaxation – i.e. cognitive slacking as I choose to call this phenomenon.
 
The need to choose which value is more important – the pleasure of a heightened awareness of reality or the “pleasure” of cognitive slacking off – faces the child during the entire rest of its childhood. The child must continually make the choice to either put forth mental effort to form more abstract concepts. Or to stop raising its mind upwards on the “ladder of abstraction”.
 
Unfortunately, most children choose at some point before adulthood to begin to prefer cognitive slacking over cognitive effort. When the child makes this momentous choice, it begins to stagnate, intellectually. It stops climbing up the “ladder of abstraction”. The earlier the child makes the choice to become a cognitive slacker – the more concrete-bound it tends to become. And - the lower the level of intelligence the individual ultimately tends to develop.
 
B) WHY THE RESPECTIVE CHOICES?
 
But – not all individuals choose during childhood to become cognitive slackers. A minority of children choose to develop a preference for the state of dis-ease rather than for the state of ease [NOTE 1]. Why does the individual make the one or the other choice?
 
Very young children tend to be eager to learn. They burn with a passionate curiosity. An overwhelming majority of them wish to explore the wonderful realm of reality around them. But – around the age of three or four, when they are beginning to learn somewhat abstract concepts – some of the children begin to “drop out”. For – learning abstract concepts requires quite a significant amount of cognitive effort. Not all children experience the pleasure of an increased awareness of reality as being a greater value than the “pleasure” of mental relaxation. Now a process of “winnowing” begins.
 
As the years of childhood begin to go by more, and more - many children choose to “drop out”. As time goes by more, and more children decide that the effort of raising their consciousness to a higher level of abstraction just isn´t worth it. So – as children grow older and still older – more, and more of them decide that they have developed enough. Successively more, and more children arrest their own development. In fact, I suspect that most children choose to arrest their own development before the age of ten.
 
The pattern is that a very large majority of children choose to become habitual cognitive slackers before, or while in, grade school. And this pattern seems to have held down through the ages. In all societies – in all historical eras – an overwhelming majority of men have chosen to live their lives as cognitive slackers.
 
The best evidence for this is the undeniable fact that through all recorded history a large majority of men have acted as their own destroyers. Very few societies have been characterized by (some at least) respect for reason and liberty. The only major examples were Ancient Greece and, in modern times, the U.S.A. Close to all other societies in human history have been, to varying degrees, barbarous tyrannies.
 
And – in virtually all tyrannies – a large majority of the “common men” were taken in by whatever weird-ass religion or ideology was employed to justify the power-lust of the tyrants. Countless historical examples exist of public executions of heretics and rebels at which large crowds of “common men” gathered and, as far as we can tell, were entertained by the spectacle of heroic individuals being made to suffer a horrible death for their virtues. So – in countless societies, not only the rulers – but also the ruled – have been complicit in those societies´ atrocities.
 
Mankind´s sorry record of tyranny after tyranny after tyranny has resulted not only from the evil of a tiny minority of vicious tyrants and intellectual leaders – but also from the sanction of the countless victims. Ronald Reagan was full of b.s. when he coined that famous phrase “The Moral Majority”. He should have been more perceptive and more honest. He should have coined the twin phrases “The Immoral Majority” - and “The Moral Minority”. Down through the ages only a minority of men have chosen to be sufficiently intelligent so as to not just passively let themselves be victimized.
 
It certainly seems that cognitive slacking has a seductive attractiveness to it. Far more often, than not, men prefer the state of ease/relaxing over the state of focused awareness of reality. There must in reason be some factor which brings about this consistent pattern.
 
Causes the pattern without implying determinism. The fact of free will does not contradict the principle of causality. For free will is in fact a subcategory of causality. The cause of men´s free choices is the motivation for the choice. The choice is free, causality notwithstanding, because the subject chooses which motivation he will be motivated by.
 
Whenever a man (or a child) is faced with the choice to think - said choice is between two alternative motivations. The man/child can choose to focus hard on reality out there for the sake of dealing with reality successfully. Or – the man/child can choose to not focus on reality for the sake of conserving mental energy. The outcome of the choosing is caused by which value (or pseudo-value) the subject chooses to be motivated by – awareness of reality and the potential values available in reality - or the pleasant feeling of taking it easy and conserving mental energy.
 
But – in that case. Why do men choose to pursue the pseudo-value which is the “pleasure” of the state of ease much more often than they choose to pursue the awareness of reality which makes the achievement of genuine values possible? The answer has to do with the simple fact that all volitional organisms are fallible. Young children learn very early, from experience, that putting forth mental effort results in the satisfaction of a heightened awareness of reality. And as time goes by the child which develops in a healthy manner will learn that the major effort required for sustained chains of focused thought will enable it to enjoy successively more, and more major values out there in reality.
 
So – as the child matures, it will in healthy cases learn that more, and more mental effort is “worth it”. If the child´s development is healthy it will develop a mind more, and more inclined by habit, to engage in cognitive effort for the sake of values.
 
But a child´s healthy cognitive development can be short-circuited! Both by external factors and by the child itself. Down through the ages innumerable children have had their cognitive development sabotaged (i.e. “short-circuited”) by other men acting as “comprachicos” [NOTE 2]. And, also, innumerable children have self-sabotaged their cognitive development. Self-sabotage occurs often. Many children give in to the temptation to abandon the marathon race for more, and more awareness of reality because of the simple fact that said race requires such an awful lot of cognitive effort sustained over a long time. Apparently, the reason more men than not give up on thinking at some point in their childhood is that it is easier to do so than to persevere.
 
So – it is in the nature of choosing qua choosing (and choosing is always between thinking and not thinking – for that is the only species of free choice which exists in the universe) – that the choice tends to come down on the side of not thinking rather than thinking. This is just an empirical brute fact without which we cannot explain the broad sweep of human history.
 
C) THE ACHILES HEEL OF VOLITIONAL ORGANISMS
 
The faculty of reason provides all organisms equipped with this faculty with a major advantage in the struggle for survival. But reason has a downside as well as an upside. Rational organisms can err! “Dumb animals” (i.e. the kinds of animals which lack the faculty of reason, and therefore who also lack volition) are determined to act in certain ways in certain contexts. They act instinctively, and therefore automatically. But rational organisms have nada instincts. Rational organisms must choose – and they must choose correctly.
 
The one key choice which rational (and therefore volitional) organisms must make is how much energy to expend on the task of thinking. I hypothesize that all rational/volitional organisms (including eventual sentient aliens in other solar systems) by their nature are so constituted that they tend to underestimate the value of cognitive effort/energy expenditure.
 
“Dumb animals” instinctively (i.e. automatically) put forth the optimal amount of energy conducive to survival. But rational/volitional organisms must judge and choose which amount of energy expenditure is optimal. And since they are not determined - they can fail to optimize their energy expenditure correctly. The evidence which we have from many millenia of human history suggests that at least our species of rational/volitional organism chooses wrong most of the time. This is just a brute fact.
 
Given the fact that many, many men down through the ages have chosen to act as their own destroyers – we can legitimately raise the question whether reason is an evolutionary dead end! Maybe the faculty of reason is a double-edged sword of such a nature that rational organisms are prone to choosing to drive themselves to extinction? Or at least to condemning themselves to the sad state of being stuck for the duration of their existence in some equivalent of the stone age?
 
Is it conceivable that a majority of the members of mankind can choose to become so utterly corrupt and irrational?
 
Well, yes!
 
After all, we have the evidence of history. Countless societies of men, on all the continents and in all eras, have risen, flourished for a while (if they were lucky) and then, eventually brought about their own collapse. How many civilizations have lasted as long as one thousand years or more? The Roman Empire, Imperial China, pre-Meiji Restoration Japan – and that is just about it! Three civilizations. Just three. And all three were vicious tyrannies the whole time that they existed anyway. Not very encouraging for those of us who value human life and flourishing!
 
According to Ayn Rand the basic cause of the social and political nature of societies was always the philosophy (i.e. fundamental view of reality) which dominated them. The reason for which close to every society in mankind´s history was a vicious tyranny was that down through the ages a vast majority of mankind´s intellectual leaders (i.e. the philosophers and the founders of religions) came up with irrational fundamental views of reality.
 
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Existentialism, Pragmatism – the list encompasses countless hundreds of crazy-ass basic views of reality. In all of mankind´s history only two, just two, geniuses have, so far, turned up and blessed their fellow men with a philosophy which was at least close to being consistently rational – Aristotle in Ancient Greece and Ayn Rand in twentieth century U.S.A.
 
In Ayn Rand´s view the relative rationality and liberty of Ancient Greece and today´s West was/is due to the influence of Aristotle. And the survival of reason and liberty in the future will depend on whether the philosophy of Objectivism wins influence in the West before the West collapses back into a new Dark Ages.
 
I agree with Ayn Rand.
 
Except on one point. Ayn Rand seemed to believe that the “masses” of mankind, i.e. the “common men”, couldn´t help it when they fell for the crazy-ass philosophies and religions which have plagued mankind for millenia - and which have caused the multitude of tyrannies of history. It seems that Ayn Rand perceived the masses of mankind as being mere helpless victims of the countless irrational intellectual trends of mankind. “They couldn´t help it!” seems to have been Ayn Rand´s take on the masses of mankind down through the ages.
 
I have, in a sense, more respect for the “common men” of humanity than Ayn Rand seemed to have had. For - I say that “They can, and could, help it! They are, and were, not helpless! It is their own frigging fault that they almost always wind up suffering! They could have seen through the vicious falsehoods of the vast majority of mankind´s intellectual traditions - if only they had chosen to try hard enough.” For – I believe that intelligence (assuming a physically undamaged brain) is brought about by volition!
 
As far as I can tell - from having read close to everything which has been published of Ayn Rand´s writings – Ayn Rand held that “men of modest ability” just happened, by random chance, to be that way. Apparently, Ayn Rand believed that most men just happen to be born with brains which only suffice to provide them with a modest level of intelligence. And – such men, Ayn Rand seemed to believe, are incapable of thinking critically about abstract philosophical issues. In other words - the masses are doomed by dint of heredity to intellectual helplessness.
 
Therefore, Ayn Rand never blamed the modern-day American John Does and Joe Sixpacks for the fact that they continue to take the bait offered them by the establishment intellectuals - instead of seeking out and embracing the better ideas offered by Objectivism. “It isn´t their fault!” Ayn Rand (and most of her current followers) seemed/seem to believe.
 
As for Ayn Rand´s intellectual heir and main protégé, Leonard Peikoff – he has stated that the professional philosophers held an almost insurmountable advantage over “regular folks”. In and of the fact that philosophy is their profession - whereas the rest of humanity are philosophical amateurs.
 
D) THE MOTORS AND THE BALLAST OF HISTORY
 
Me – I blame those “common men” who neglect to search for better ideas – and who therefore continue to take the bait of the modern nihilistic intellectuals, or of the old-fashioned religious intellectuals. Since I have more respect for the common men of mankind than Ayn Rand did – I also wind up feeling much more contempt for them than she did - when they default on the responsibility of safeguarding their own interests!
 
Today an abundance of Objectivist literature is widely available in the Western countries. If only the common men would bother to look for books with better ideas then they would find the Objectivist literature! It is therefore no longer an innocent error of knowledge when men in the West fail to discover and embrace the philosophy of Objectivism. Errors of that magnitude are not made innocently!
 
The philosophers (and the founders of the religions) of mankind are the motors of history. Their fundamental ideas shape mankind´s cultures. They deserve the lion´s share of the blame for mankind´s long-lasting and widespread misery. But the “common men” of mankind, i.e. the majority of the members of the masses - i.e. the second-handers, the “ballast” of mankind as Ayn Rand aptly called them – they are co-guilty with their intellectual leaders! For – their passivity enables the reign of evil foisted on mankind by the intellectual leaders. They also deserve some (a lesser share, to be sure) of the blame. We should “blame the victims” (to some significant extent)!
 
Cognitive passivity is downright immoral. The cognitively passive majority of mankind is co-guilty for the victories of evil in human history. Men can be morally guilty by dint of sins of omission as well as by sins of commission! Evil cannot win without the sanction of the victims. The members of the “ballast” of mankind are co-responsible with the intellectual leaders for the reign of barbarism down through the ages.
 
Today Objectivism exists. But that may very well turn out not to be enough. Objectivism was introduced into America in a major way already way back in 1957 – with the publication of Atlas Shrugged. Yet still today, almost seventy years later, America is still going to the dogs! Reason only “works” when the individuals being addressed choose to exercise said faculty. If a sufficiently massive majority of mankind chooses not to think – then, but of course, Objectivism will fail. And it won´t be the fault of the Moral Minority (i.e. the Objectivists)!
 
Sure, Objectivism has spread rapidly throughout the entire Western world. But only to a small minority of mankind. The Immoral Majority, in America and everywhere else, seems deaf and blind. There is therefore a major risk that the world will collapse back into a return of the dark ages. If it does there might not be a second Industrial Revolution. For – most of the low-hanging fruit of the raw materials on which an industrial revolution depends have already been used up. A second Industrial Revolution might not be physically possible to get off the ground.
 
So – maybe mankind will become doomed to exist in the future in a perpetual neolithic era – or else even go literally extinct. Maybe the rational organism is by its nature an evolutionary dead end! Reason is indubitably an enormous value to the survival of all species which possess said faculty. But only if the members of said species choose to make use of said faculty correctly! Aristotle´s definition of man was not really accurate. Man is not the “rational animal”! He is the “potentially rational animal”. And – what if the overwhelming members of the species – for whatever reason - choose to let their faculty of reason go to waste? What if they choose not to think? Don´t scoff. Free will is free will. The choice can go either way. Rational organisms are not determined to flourish!
 
Here is an interesting thought to ponder:
 
Could my thoughts above on rational/volitional organisms and the principle of energy conservation hold the key to explaining the Fermi Paradox [NOTE 3]? Could it be that the Milky Way right now is littered with the remains of many hundreds or many thousands of civilizations – on planets on which sentient aliens developed, reached the stage of industrial civilization – and promptly drove themselves either extinct or into a perpetual stone age?
 
NOTE 1 The 19th century American pragmatist philosopher William James held that human consciousness, when awake, has basically two alternative states – the “state of ease” and the “state of dis-ease”. A man´s consciousness is in the “state of ease” when he is not thinking much about anything, i.e. when his mind is just relaxing/resting/drifting. And - a man´s consciousness is in the “state of dis-ease” when he is putting forth cognitive effort, i.e. when he is engaged in some serious thinking. James held that men should prefer the “state of ease” over the “state of dis-ease”. According to James a man should only get off his butt and do some serious thinking when an emergency of some kind arises. And the purpose of said thinking should be to deal with the emergency at hand - so that the man can promptly return to the “pleasant” state of cognitive slacking (the “state of ease”) – which according to James should be every man´s normal state.
 
NOTE 2 See Ayn Rand´s essay The Comprachicos in the essay collection Return of the Primitive (edited by Peter Schwartz). See also Chapter One of my book Bad Philosophy as a Cause of Psychosis.
 
NOTE 3 The Fermi Paradox amounts to the rhetorical question: “Where the heck are all the aliens?” Enrico Fermi was puzzled by the paradox that we humans have not yet heard from a single frigging alien civilization anywhere else in the entire universe. Even though we know that the universe is incomprehensively vast and, allegedly, is almost fifteen billion years old. It seems intuitive that there must be countless advanced alien civilizations out there in the cosmos. So why, oh why, have they not made themselves heard yet?
 
Well, my speculation is that it might be because rational organisms are an evolutionary dead end. Maybe rational organisms – once they evolve into existence – don´t last for long!