Bad to the Bone

 

Some people are born bad. They’re weak and inferior in their biology and genetics. Moral goodness and ability to civilize aren’t simply a matter of will or individual choice. These capacities are partially inherent and inborn.

Some people tend not to work hard, smart, and slick. Like children and animals, they also can’t much delay gratification, for long-term pleasures and benefits. Others naturally work too hard and delay gratification too much. They don’t know how to enjoy themselves or life very well.

Some people by nature tend to beg, borrow, and steal. They’re inclined to also commit crime and violence. Others tend to mindlessly slave away without purpose or profit. They don't treat themselves very well.

Ultimately, some individuals, families, communities, societies, ethnicities, and races are naturally evil. Compared to their rivals, they’re inherently weak and inferior. To prevent such people from overly harming themselves or others they need an especially strong, strict, clear, simple moral code.

Dark Matter

 

Maybe scientists are going about the search for dark matter all wrong. Instead of just looking for matter which neither emits nor reflects light (or photons) – but which evidently does exert a (positive) gravitational force and possesses dark energy – maybe they should try to make it. Perhaps they should take a look at the 36 or so known particles – such as quarks, gluons, and neutrinos – and then attempt to combine them in some novel way. This might yield a recipe for darkness. And if physicists can create a pure anti-photonic glob of something, Occam’s razor suggests that this is the most likely form of it in the cosmos. So scientists can focus most of their sensing devices on that.

Once dark matter is manufactured, its nature should provide all kinds of clues as to what dark energy is too. Of course, scientists might want to try to create dark energy before dark matter, or concoct them simultaneously. Scientists might also search for some kind of mathematical formula or physics equation to suggest how dark matter or energy might exist in theory. This could help in the struggle to create dark matter and thence find it in our galaxy and universe.

Of course, it may simply be that dark matter is black holes. That alone would explain the too-rapid revolution of stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. And maybe some of the black holes consist of anti-matter or even some version of "right-handed" matter. Partially repulsive black holes of this type may explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.

The Early History of Irrationality

 

Humans have almost certainly thought, spoken, and acted irrationally since they essentially reached their current biological state, around 60,000 years ago in eastern Africa. Irrational belief and activity were likely common phenomena then. Even high-order animals occasionally think and behave irrationally. So superstition – or arbitrary, false conclusions about cause and effect – is evidently a standard human error. Mythical stories and explanations of various types were very probably typical for the tribal people of that era.

But when human beings changed their lifestyle and started to live together permanently in large cities around 5,300 years ago in Sumaria, and 200 years later in Egypt, they no doubt compared and contrasted the many irrational beliefs and myths that they all had. The intellectually and esthetically best probably soon came to dominate. The poor and weak ones were deliberately forgotten. Very likely the most wise and entertaining mythological tales were improved, elaborated on, and spread wide.

Soon enough there were superhumans, supernatural powers, magical creatures, and gods all over the place. They performed miracles of goodness, badness, and strangeness. And these fanciful entities engaged in all kinds of mischief – to educate and amuse us. Irrational nonsense was institutionalized and gained a prominent place in the culture of the West.

Meanwhile, nation-states and elaborate mythology or polytheism also emerged in India around 2500 B.C. and in China around 1800 B.C.

But 2,600 years ago, reason was discovered and invented in Greece. With it came science to explain the physical and natural world, along with philosophy to explain the intellectual and human world. The old Greek mythologies involving Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and the like were radically changed. They were made more simple and yet more profound. The primitive irrationality and superstition of mythology was updated and improved to the sophisticated irrationality and superstition of religion.

The newly-invented monotheism – however fraudulent and absurd – could at least somewhat stand up to science and philosophy. Reason didn’t immediately extinguish this belief-system, high-level irrationality, and destroyer of man. However false and evil the new phenomenon was, it didn’t succumb to the powerful intellectual and cultural forces of rational observation and analysis.

This was almost certainly the result of the preachers and cultists brazenly promising an "afterlife" and "immortality in paradise" to their followers. The Greeks created a variety of such "mystery cults" starting around 2,500 years ago. Many were based in Eleusis – about 20 miles from Athens and the first "Jerusalem".

However openly irrational and nonsensical, these "mysteries" were often exalted by Greek intellectuals, playwrights, and others of social and political prominence. And this way of thinking, so to speak, quickly made its way to Greece’s closest advanced neighbor, Persia. The Persians used it to invent Zarathustraism, the world’s first fairly elaborate and well-thought-out monotheism or religion.

A century or so later came Plato. His ideas made their way to another advanced culture on the border of an expanding Greece: Judea. The thinkers of that nation combined traditional Hebrew mythology, independent new-style monotheism, Zarathustraism, and Platonism to create Judaism. This irrational idea-system was the first truly sophisticated religion.

The Hebrew nation’s powerful belief-system eradicated all other competing polytheistic and mythological gods in their area. The Jewish religion with their one omnipotent god was magnificent. Or at least as close to magnificent as something so devastatingly irrational, harmful, poisonous, and evil can be.

But all the foregoing, important history and interpretation needs to be established thru scholarship and historical research. It needs to be verified with original sources and careful citations.

And I’m a cultural analyst – not a scholar. So someone else needs to do it!