Transcending Creators` Trilogy in the Era of Growing Global Idiocrasy

By Benjamin Katz

Humans are endowed with potential evolving great soul and a potential to become nothing at all . . .

Spreading smoke screen over our foolishness is human’s/nation’s specialty and the reason for our constant stumbling over our feet and the reign of Idiocracy now.

There are no exceptional people or nations because of moral alone. The only exceptionalism is attained by pursuing the goals of global sustainability, fairness, and farsighted and wise evolvement beyond sapiens limitations.

This book tries to show how we can rid us of our cursed global Idiocracy by pursuing a long term, viable course for farsighted, wise and sustainable future development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669874768

Benjamin Katz

Born in Israel in 1945, Benjamin Katz fought in two wars and settled in Denmark in 1972. He studied psychology at the University of Copenhagen and has been practicing as a clinical psychologist since 1980, treating more than thirty thousand clients throughout the years. He is the author of twelve books. (See book list including this one. Most of them deal with the urgent need for us to evolve further in the future to survive and prevail.) Two aspects have attracted his attention in the last twenty years: the deteriorating mental and physical state of human beings adjusting to modern life or rejecting it, and the state of the planet that has gone from bad to worse. Once he figured out that the sharp decline of the mental and physical health of so many people is caused by our unhealthy lifestyle, lack of global sustainability, lack of foresight/oversight in global affairs leading to our deteriorating climate and living conditions, he found his mission: to define a new, evolved vision that aims to eliminate these factors. In this vision, he strongly rejects crucial aspects which constitute preconditions to our current well-being, such as modern lifestyle and its excesses, stressors, and crazy trafficking; the deterioration of global ecology due to consumerism, pollution and an unsustainable global economy; and demography and spirituality. Instead of this failed global conduct, he presents sustainable values, practices, global governance, and purposeful efforts to enable us to evolve beyond our mental limitations, shortcomings, and blind spots, which, if not altered, will become our doom.

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Copyright © 2023 by Benjamin Katz.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/19/2023

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

BOOK I

ADOLESCENTS’ BASIC INSIGHTS

Preface

Introduction: The Magic of Teaching Stories

The Meta Story of Humanity Surviving and Evolving Struggle

My Shortcut Life Story

Stories/Comments

BOOK II

GROWN-UPS: KNOWLEDGE DELIGHT

Personal Issues

Social Issues

Political Issues

Religious and Ideological Issues

Global Issues

BOOK III

WISDOM ASPIRANTS: FARSIGHTED LIGHT

What Is the Ultimate Meaning with Advanced Intelligent Life?

Why Are Our Efforts to Pursue Our Ultimate Meaning Being Aborted Time and Again?

Forthcoming Global Disasters

New Necessities, Aspirations, Vision/Mission

Insights in Hebrew

BOOK I

ADOLESCENTS’ BASIC INSIGHTS

Preface

In this book, you—the hopefully receptive brainy reader—are instructed on how to learn to think beyond the mental limitations of ordinary sapiens in your age group and time.

I describe in it bleak political current climate which I consider as Idiocracy. An Idiocracy is a disparaging term for a society run by or made up of idiots (or people perceived as such). A society or group that is controlled by or consists of people of low intelligence.

the people in our current Idiorcarcy deserve whatever they will get

Idiocracy is clearly demonstrated in the standoff in Ukraine war (Vest - Russia), in China-USA and in Israel-Iran conflicts, etc.

People dedicated to military blocks, dominance, and their ideology, willing to fight for them, are plagued by the primitive human idiocy. The advanced humans fight for global cooperation and are evolving by reducing these primitive characteristics.

The urge to win and to possess the right on one’s side, where the dangers of unimaginable global flare-ups loom, is a strong indication of Idiorcarcy.

The eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth policy/mentality/mindset/policy is the base of Idiocracy as they constitute a very primitive, destructive pattern in a nuclear armed world. Only dimwitted politicians and their backers can legitimize such an affront for human intelligence. It is much wiser to defend oneself and deter.

People who act repeatedly with bursts of strong negative emotions in relations, which core-like emotional desertion or neglect stems from their childhood, are in fact semi-automatic beings as long as this pattern steers their lives.

Almost the same can be said on the conditioned reaction of politicians who, instead of thinking in alternatives, go for force against force.

Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the hour of the new clarity (Rilke).

As I mean that there is mutuality between the future to come and what we must do to shape it and stop the spreading the mindset of Idiocracy, so we should not just wait, as the future seems to be a murder. We should form it to be much wiser and benign for us . . .

I use here a teaching mode that I have very often and successfully used in my contacts with clients, groups, and other gatherings. I dubbed it as Mindsets Fragmentation/Mental Zetz (blows in Yiddish) to open up their minds to new knowledge, perspectives, and horizons beyond their fixed mind programming. Mindsets fragmentation learning is the process of breaking down the mind’s rigid conditioning/convictions as to sidestep folks’ generalizations, consensus, rigid thinking systems, which is the core problem in most people’s lives and in humanity as well.

There is no rigid, systematic, consensual, contextual, fast order in this book of telling stories and tales, so in the beginning, it may confuse the comfort-zone and security seeking reader.

In this process, I use a lots of zetz (mental blows) to shake the rigid, conviction-prone mind of the reader as to direct his/her mind (breaking away from his mental habitus) to an advanced way of viewing both reality and our ultimate meaning with our lives.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn, wrote Alvin Toffler.

This illiterate is a binary thinker: black-white, good-bad, right-wrong. He is convinced that he has a patent on what is the truth and what is the right way to be human, superseding all other inferior humans.

But there is a catch in this way of thinking; when you are always right, good, and wise and your opponent/enemy is wrong, wicked, and foolish, you become a very dangerous and destructive human.

The ordinary sapiens mind relies very much on replications (rituals, opposite-prone categories, and acquired conventions) on much none reflected imitating models and authorities and on collaborating with powerful entities (be them cartels, gangs, or state organs), while relying too little on being critical, independent thinking, farsighted. This means that we have in our time run into huge global menace (our own destruction) where our collective wisdom and overview can´t keep up with our technological advancement and greed.

Farsighted advanced wisdom beyond sapiens mental limitations

People recommending detachment from reality are escapists. Being present in your time/place and beyond them is the right thing to do.

The trouble with our current humanity is that two big groups deepen its split-up agenda:

1. The opportunistic/greed/comfort/materialistic-prone group

2. The daydreamers group, whose hymn is

Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high

There’s a land that I heard of

Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true.

The group that wishes to evolve away from both groups’ agendas is yet miniscule . . . but it will prevail as it is the one that bears the torch of farsighted wisdom!

Farsighted, advanced wisdom far exceeds the usual wisdom we talk about in our reality as it aims at changing radically both our global long-term focus and the rules governing our collective lives out in the future, putting stress on evolving/upgrading us beyond our mental limitations, thus pursuing our ultimate meaning—to become Creators by our own right.

This farsighted wisdom aims at erasing the magnitude of human short sight/stupidity and ignorance, which result in so much destruction and self-destruction in the human world, while common wisdom is kept down by the immense force of multitudes of ordinary and stupid minds.

By upgrading our mental capacity, it aims at teaching future generations how to behave in the long term to have a life that is affirming, sustainable, and evolving—all life vital challenges that we ignore today.

To encompass its essence, you have to acquire knowledge on the rules of nature, the general history of humanity and human nature, and the influence our nurture and narratives have upon our minds.

I don’t blame people for being bad thinkers. Often, they are not bright enough as to attain all-around contextual thinking. But when some people get angry at me because they only command fragmented thinking—they cannot see the forest but just few trees—and feel undermined in their arguments/convictions, there is no other solution but to keep away from them . . . and they keep away from my writings.

Teaching farsighted wisdom aims at ridding children in the future of the impact of religious/ideological indoctrinations/convictions and of the human hang to become prejudiced toward people and groups of differing ideas and creed.

It aims at making children much more versatile and robust than contemporary megacity children by exposing them for challenging life experiences that will make them both mentally robust and flexible while teaching them to discern between nonsense, trivialities, and banalities on the one hand and the essentials of our life on the other hand.

So to put it straightforwardly, in this book, I try to make you much wiser and farsighted than before you started reflecting over its content.

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Nothing lasts, all dissolve

except if you will evolve,

so you may not decay

or pass for ever away.

(B. K.)

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The ultimate human meaning and must,

is in defying the destiny of animated dust.

Challenging the constraints of life’s Animator,

to evolve and ascend, and become a creator.

(B. K.)

Introduction: The Magic of Teaching Stories

Why can certain stories bring closer people with different life views and make them wiser?

When new ideas are rejected, it can be due to people’s habitual thinking, which often means denial of all new coming information, which challenge their thinking habitus, an automatic reaction to what they have learned by heart through brainwashing. They may be accepted later on if they are facilitated by stories conveying these new ideas in a disguise, thus limiting people’s mental resistance!

A learning process facilitated by these stories generates much less automatic resistance than stating views, opinions, and facts in different debates or encounters. Teaching stories are good at conveying knowledge on human nature, insights on both contemporary and of historical characters/events, and thereby they open up access to wisdom beyond ordinary thinking, current politics, and groupthink values. In this book, these stories serve as new paths finding for you, focusing on the essentials of human life and our urgent need for strategies for our long-term survival and evolvement as transcending species. Usually, we focus on daily events/politics/religion, which are forming often our constrained life views. The tales presented in this book are aimed at preventing the common human curse—one cannot see the forest because of the trees!

When you finish this journey and absorbed its knowledge, I can assure you that you will see clearly both the forest and the trees and have a notion on how both can thrive and evolve!

The Meta Story of Humanity Surviving and Evolving Struggle

If you still do not know why we humans act self-destructively and destructively, the answer is just behind your forehead.

Human nature is conflict filled, creating a suspension between our creative, benign, and constructive intelligence on the one hand and our gross stupidity, greed, and brutality on the other hand.

To put it brutally, we get dumber no doubt about that. Is intelligence globally decreasing? The average rate of decline has been around three IQ points a decade, amounting to the loss of about 13.5 percent in average intelligence between 1975 and 2020. Results from separate studies carried out in seven different countries describe a general loss of intelligence (February 24, 2022).

The reasons for this alarming decline, which becomes more and more visible in our leaders’ decision-making on crucial global challenges and the citizenry passivity, are multiple: Pollution and higher temperatures are proved to affect cognitive capacity. Aging populations, lifestyle ailments, obesity, commercialism of people’s minds, self-focus/narcissism, all kinds of abuse, persistent anxiety/depressions/compulsions, and not the least declining educational system in many countries, leaving many hundreds million people as functional illiterates. Getting dumber is a scary modern affliction that can determine our grandchildren’s future. The script is on the wall! The flare-up of Ukraine war and its insane/idiotic dynamic, the tension between the West and China, and other flash points around the world have shifted us away from our main challenge: stopping climate change and creating sustainable humanity on earth. Alarmed scientists stated in January 2023 that already in the next decade we will surpass the tipping point of 1.5 Celsius grade and so will open up the gates of hell for us. As the average temperatures will rise and the concentration of CO2 will rise, people will become even dumber, as research clearly shows. Being self-destructive to such an extent, it is obvious that we live in and are a part of an era of massive Idiocracy, hence the title of this book and the deep purpose of it: to save us from destroying ourselves by becoming even more dumb!

What is Idiocracy of a civilization? It is the behavior that does make humans dumb, does not resolve self-created critical problems, and does not face head-on new arising challenges and menaces. A civilization is run by Idiocracy when it demonstrates clearly that it does not learn from its own faults!

Yet we don’t seem to grasp the core reason for our attraction for this seemingly death dance as our mind blinds us to see clearly its conflicting nature.

From the state of the global suspension (global self-created problems and how badly we deal with them), you, my reader, cannot see whether we are progressing or regressing, as it is a very tight war within us and projected out in our world. My contribution to this dramatic meta story on us is showing a way to ensure our long-term survival by becoming cognitively/mentally upgraded/enhanced beyond sapiens current mental limitations.

In this meta story of humanity, we badly need an augmenting of our noble/compassionate and farsighted brain capacities to attain a critical mass of wiser people than current average sapiens today, to make us and our grand journey and mission prevail.

What are the critical problems in our meta story that we must face?

1. Lack of global sustainability, which gets much worse because of our consumption, production, pollution, and populations (eight billion people by November 2022)

2. Averse climate change implying pollution and high temperatures (which dumb us down), rising sea levels (which means mass migration, conflicts, and starvation), and the depletion of fertile soil and the seas/oceans, all with huge future impact on our civilization long-term survival

3. Military conflicts, which can escalate into a nuclear all-out destructive world war (right now, in 2023, we have such looming conflict that can result in nuclear showdown between NATO and Russia)

4. Lack of fair share of resource for the citizens of our civilization. A fair share of resources in return for good behavior as population/pollution/consumption reduction and prevention of wars will stabilize our civilization and will set a new course for it instead of further conflicts, mass starvation, and unmanageable waves of refugees because of poverty, wars, and unhabitable areas.

5. The current human brain capacity because of human nature does not seem to cope well with global problems. Changing human nature, brain capacity, and mindset—mainly their shortsighted, destructive sides—by evolving away from it and thereby opting for a long survival seems to be a must solution.

6. We don’t have much time to waste to save ourselves from ourselves, so therefore we must also invest in to the stars with difficulties. Creating colonies in other planets will give us the needed time respite to secure our survival as transformed wise beings.

This is the meta story of humanity.

My Shortcut Life Story

To really understand who you, humans and humanity, are, you must first understand nature (which is not benign), human nature (which is conflicting and complex), how nurture affects your and other people’s convictions and how the narratives told to us (including history) form our view of the world and humans. Without knowing them well, you may believe and utter much nonsense, but you will be detracted from your efforts.

Fifty thousand clients I had throughout out my career and many other tens of thousands encounters with people taught me this lesson pretty convincingly!

Without understanding nature and humanity, you will invent fanciful stories, myths, spirits, and construct large bureaucracies around them: religions.

But you also need to understand yourself in relation to the above-mentioned phenomena as self-knowledge is the foundation of character and exerting free will . . . yet without life-affirming actions, it is redundant!

Proactive self-knowledge is the noblest goal to aspire for, but it implies knowledge of nature, the real world, without the contamination of fact-free convictions!

Countless humans in our time use much energy on attaining both self-knowledge and self-realization, but if these endeavors do not transform into life-affirming long-term actions for the benefit of man and humanity, it amounts to no more than self-preoccupation.

This is the lesson I learned throughout my life!

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Benjamin as a little child

I learned, too, that no real great change in the human realm can come out of either repeating the same procedure over and over again or by effortless win-win strategy. Every great/fundamental change in the human realm demands protracted, self-sacrificing efforts.

Once, I read about two Jewish delegates who participated in a Zionist congress a long time before Second World War and the foundation of the state of Israel. They started discussing heatedly regarding what was the best solution for the persecuted Jewish people in Europe. The first Jew advocated staying in Europe, cultivating the Jewish culture, identity, and the spoken language, Yiddish.

The second Jew advocated immigrating to Palestine to create a safe haven for the Jews, a Jewish homeland with its specific/local culture and a new language, Hebrew.

As they could not settle their differences, the second Jew said, You take the Jewish culture, lifestyle, and language in the diaspora, and I will take the vision regarding a Jewish homeland with its new culture and language.

Those who learned history know pretty well who of them was the real visionary and which solution prevailed . . . but at what staggering price! This is the nature of great changes—the staggering price!

As human Maj flies throng

We chipper a fancy song

All our lives; one day long.

We make it noisy and strong

for to eternity it must belong,

but alas, it is the wrong song . . .

All these lessons I learned throughout my life!

Me and the Olympiad

When I was a teenager, I got the delusional idea of training myself in my kibbutz to the Olympiad. On the winding dust road in the fields, I trained to be a great runner for 800–1,500 meters.

I trained whenever I had some spare time—and spare time was a luxury as we have endless practical and social obligations and chores—yet I excelled all right on the local and regional levels, but no longer could my legs, lungs, and lack of professional training bring me. I dropped the idea of the Olympiad, but the competitive, ambitious, to the stars aspiring child/warrior who tries to become better and better in whatever he has talent and invests energy in became my life companion.

Fortunately, this attitude generated in me a life-affirming direction like helping and enlightening people as a private person, a psychologist, and a writer/visionary.

When I studied psychology back in the ’70s, I was assigned at the age of almost thirty years to work in open psychiatric department in Ashkelon, Israel. There I did experience many episodes that could have made me think that there was something special about me—the human vanity tempts us ceaselessly—but instead taught me the important lesson of being compatible, accommodating, and unprejudiced. I experienced a psychotic man in the ward who saw me—the newcomer—as a kind of messiah with the right formula to open heaven up and release him from his sufferings. Of all the staff, he chose me to deliver him. In another occasion, one patient became extremely violent in a group session, knocking down two nurses and breaking the nose of one psychiatrist and kicking another one down. He did not touch me, although I was very close to him. I stood there so close to him, but he did not hit me. When we overpowered him and he got his injection and shortly after fell asleep, I was asked the reason why he did not hit me. I assumed it was sheer luck or because he did not have enough time to put me in his paranoid human gallery. When he woke up the other day, I went to him and asked him for the reason. He told me that I was protected by a glowing green aura. Something similar happened with another extremely paranoid man who tried to strangulate my friend in the ward, assuming that he was a Nazi collaborator. I talked him out of harming my poor friend, who was in a state of chock.

One day, I heard terrible shrieks and sobbing from a room. I went in, and there was a young female patient jumping on her bed, warning me that a lion was hiding under her bed.

I told her to wait a minute, crawled under her bed, fetched the lion, brought it to the toilet, and flushed it away.

Done, I said to her. She started laughing violently, being relieved of the mortal danger in this manner.

So what really happened there and in other occasions of similar character? The suffering people just felt that I was on their side, and even in their psychotic state, they did not attack me but others. This was the point and had nothing to do with grandiose or omnipotent ideas on myself as a savior of them or humanity.

Now, in the social media as in Facebook, I identify not so few people who truly believe that by working on themselves as to become all loving, spiritual, and compassionate, they can change our world for the better. Their attitude reminds me of the above-mentioned psychiatric department, where everything from miracles to great change of collective human mindsets could be achieved by a magic potion or formula.

----

The motivation was to get as good as I could, yet the purpose was to help/enlighten/inspire as well as I could.

This became my mission . . . and looking just back on most of the comrades I grew up with and shared the same life experiences many years ago, I don´t really understand what had happened to them and to me. They lack vitality, fighting spirit, and inspirational goals, while I am ablaze. I just thought that maybe I was granted a gift preparing for more than sixty years ago for an allusive Olympiad!

Because of my work with lots of people, my extensive knowledge of human history and human psych history and my observations of global trends and affairs leading currently (2024) to global dissolving and chaotic tendencies, I decided to propose a way out of our self-defeating course. Is it humble endeavor? Not at all! It is hell daring, but it is badly needed in a time of collective mental ennui, denial, passivity, and . . . after me—the deluge.

Its most formidable opponent is what most people are best at—talking highly on their ideals and conduct. What they are worst at is living up to them.

The idea of designing a global vision became clear to me at around 1998 as I got bolder and less sensitive to what other people think of my ideas. I became attuned with the statement, No matter what people say against you, do what you have got to do!

In my mind, I lived in a farsighted, wise, and sustainable global community, while physically I lived in technological advanced age; but, mentally, it was a dumb -primitive fractured humanity.

I started to work on my vision at around 2000. Its focus was/is to save humanity of its own vices by altering it to be better, more benign, wiser, and farsighted through reducing sapiens fatal mental limitations.

I ran into lots of verbal resistance from both down-to-earth realists (the old city walls guards) and the spiritual enlightened people who could resolve humanity problems through their positive energies.

Positive thinking without a shred of realism was already very popular and full of pretense and show-off. I shrugged off the critics and went on my task.

Gradually, I came to focus on four major goals in my life:

1. To become useful to my community and my close human proximity, to help/direct people to regain their life direction and energies

2. To keep being inspiring for people and be inspired by people, their ideas, deeds, and aspirations

3. To design a viable long-term global vision/mission for a new advanced humanity as I saw humanity getting into a spiral of self-destruction while denying it. The ultimate meaning of intelligent advanced life for me is our further evolvement and mastering of our potentials to form our future as a better/wiser journey, free of self-destructiveness for the sake of the new generations . . .

4. To spread the word that this vision does and may become useful in the future for a lost humanity in its own created darkness

The first three goals I have achieved, and the last one I am struggling to achieve as long as I live by spreading the word over the hills and everywhere.

I designed a vision/mission beyond our time/nature without illusion of win-win progress toward it. I know it would be bloody, harsh, and tearful, but it might save us from our self-defeating follies, I believe. And thus a circle in my life has been completed: I was born because of a vision regarding a new homeland for a persecuted people (the Jews), and I am leaving behind me a vision that may save our self-destructive humanity—on the verge of strangulating itself—because of our inherent contrasts/nature.

I hope to become—after my death—one of the cofounders of a global movement that will draw to it many engaged and bright people in the coming centuries to fight against our global pervasive, self-destructive folly.

I am compatible with most people I talk to/with, but many are not compatible with me/my mind, but how can they?

They can’t be partly because I am not a slave of greed, consumerism, happiness availability as commodity, show-off as a lifestyle, and of the mass bullshit propaganda telling us that we are unique per se. And partly they can´t be compatible with me as I profess for an evolving vision beyond sapiens limitations. Most of them are dead scared of this idea.

Yet, when life condition on earth will worsen furthermore than today (2024), people will start listening to my words and thus become compatible with my ideas/vision!

They will realize that fighting climate change without being globally sustainable is a daydream, which we can only rid ourselves of by evolving further beyond sapiens mental limitations, which are the core reasons for this terrible state we are in.

I know that circumstances/sheer necessities will help people come together to give us a new real chance beyond our inbuilt limitations.

This is my shortened life story!

Stories/Comments

Fire-food might have given us our sapiens brains?

Our predecessors ate raw meat, just like every other carnivore and omnivore on the planet. But those predecessors were very likely not anatomically modern humans—related, to be sure, but not quite the same as us.

Modern evidence suggests that our ancestors figured out how to make fire a very long time ago. Mastery of fire is generally accepted to have been widespread 125,000 years ago, before the Cognitive Revolution. At least some humans knew how to make fire 200,000 years ago, and some evidence is argued to prove that they had it over a million years ago.

The argument, in essence, is that control of fire allowed our forebears to develop in ways that were previously impossible. The ability to cook food (both meat and other foods) both protects from disease and parasites and makes a lot more nutrients and calories available for use.

One of the enduring mysteries of human evolution is the human brain. It seems obvious to us that it’s useful for survival since we’ve spent centuries dunking over every other lifeform on the planet. But as our brains were developing, it’s not at all obvious that they’d be an evolutionary advantage. Human brains are huge resource hogs; they’re 1–2 percent of our body mass but consume 20–25 percent of the calories and oxygen that we use. In a natural survival-based environment, that seems like a ludicrous waste for minor advantages. Our big brains mean less skull thickness and more weight on our necks, which makes us more vulnerable. They make it harder to pass through the birth canal, which is why human babies are born so early and helpless compared to most other mammals. If you were on the savannah fifty thousand years ago, you might be shocked that such misshapen creatures could even survive.

And the process around that is still the topic of debate and discussion, but it’s very likely that we couldn’t have survived in the first place if we hadn’t figured out how to make fire and cook our food. Our ability to do that meant we could get more calories from a given food source, use fewer biological resources on getting sick or fighting disease, and develop more quickly and healthily.

In other words, if our raw-meat-eating ancestors hadn’t figured out how to cook food, it’s likely they never would have become us.

Flee-freeze-fight reactions are ingrained in our brains/minds

Long time ago, I saw an anthropological movie on bushmen in Africa who were following some gazelles to tire them and then hunt them down. At twilight, they had exhausted one animal and killed it. As night came, they agreed to share the animal between them early in the morning. In the morning, a violent scene unfolded. Some six furious bushmen stood aiming their spears against one of their fellows. It turned out that in the night, he had parted and stolen some meat from their animal and hid it from them. Now, he stood five to seven meters away from the furious men who threatened him with their lethal weapons. What was he supposed to do? He could not explain his theft, he could not fight them with any fair chance of surviving, and neither could he escape from them. So there he was supposed to feel paralysis, but instead he jumped up and down in a seemingly aimless manner. Yet this behavior made sense to those who could read this specific context. He jumped like this because not being able to attack or escape, he built up in his body immense tension and energy and had to get rid of it in this bodily manner.

A Westerner might have pleaded for his life, for mercy, or might cry or cover his head, feeling the same intolerable tension building up in him.

This bushman demonstrated an ancient bodily reaction for being caught up in an impossible situation, where the fight-freeze-flight response is activated. The flight-freeze-fight response has followed us all the way through our evolution because it was needed, because our ancestors faced all the time mortal dangers. This is a very essential innate mechanism in all animals, and it functions to enhance the survival chances of an organism. Since the natural environment is either you eat or be eaten, animals have adapted to choose either fight, freeze, or flight.

In humans, the fight-freeze-flight response has become more complex because of our complex social and cultural organization and modern life.

Human feelings of hurt, pride, shame, humiliation, weakness, or worthlessness and our interpretations of situations keep our fight-freeze-flight circuit busy to this day, often out of context and without obvious justification.

This response to danger and threat often triggers in modern humans diffuse anxiety and stress, resignation, and anger without clear address and proper outlet, which can result in inflammatory and anti-immune reactions and even depressions.

About elephants and humans

Here’s one of the most profound short stories I’ve ever read. The author of it is unknown, but its message is of utmost importance.

As my friend was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at any time, break away from the ropes they were tied to, but for some reason, they did not. My friend saw a trainer nearby and asked why these beautiful, magnificent animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away.

Well, he said, when they are very young and much smaller, we use the same size of rope to tie them, and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free. My friend was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds, but because they believed they couldn’t, they were stuck right where they were.

Like the elephants, how many of us go through life hanging on to a belief that we cannot do something simply because we failed at it once before? How many of us are being held back by old, outdated beliefs that no longer serve us? How many of us have avoided trying something new because of a limiting belief? Worse, how many of us are being held back by someone else’s limiting beliefs?

People don´t see the forest, focusing on its trees!

The world is in big trouble (2024), and it will intensify, but the time for a new paradigm has not come yet. I count on that as global sufferings grow and intensify, humanity will become more receptive to new ideas from the middle of this century. The USA invaded five countries in this century alone, and nobody made it into a first priority. We should negotiate with Russia on a settlement and restore global cooperation before the world becomes too divisive. It is in our own interest to do so and stop this double moral blubber. BRICS become bigger and bigger, and the power center of the world moves toward multipolar world. It is unavoidable, and therefore restoring dialogue with Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—all these countries can potentially in the future destroy America—is a must. Global cooperation is the forest; the rest is small trees. So why not try to cooperate with them instead of moralizing all the time to no avail on misdeeds USA/NATO/the West have committed themselves?

A well-meant forest advice to them would sound as follows:

1. USA should focus on direct negotiations with Russia and China to find a compromise to diffuse this global dangerous situation.

2. The West should stop talking about its exceptionalism, because it is both stupid and false. It is a materialistic, privileged/polluting political systems. The moralizing in it sounds very hollow, and nobody