Date: 21 Feb 94  18:45:25
   From: Mike L Oneill
     To: All
Subject: New theory on the evolution of human good & ill-will

From: oneill@world.std.com (Mike L Oneill)
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA

a new theory I've developed on the origins and nature of good and evil. My
dilemma is that to do my theory justice requires much more space than
"netiquette" rightly allows. So I offer a very abreviated sketch here of
my book "The Ambivilent Mutants: The Evolution of Human Good and
Ill-Will". I've begun musical, theatrical and cinematic projects as well
to dramatize my ideas. I'm looking for interested parties on the business
side--agents, publishers, backers etc--*and* creative collaborators. I'm
set to travel the country (and maybe outside the U.S.) if necessary to
work with like minds...

**Interested persons please contact me by phone or postal mail only**

   Synopsis: Every day by conservative estimate 45,000 children die easily
preventable deaths from disease and starvation... as do hundreds of
thousands of adults. Most of us--billions of people--live poorly fed,
clothed, and sheltered. The safe minority of us live in dread of becoming
one of these human sacrifices, and so work stifling, demeaning jobs that
require us to look the other way from our participation in the on-going
cruelty.

   This brute hierarchy predominates Nature and our human condition.
Animals have no choice, but we do. Sadly, we humans don't just allow it,
we arrange it: While all the great religious and economic systems provide
for basic decency in theory, all have boiled down to variations of profit
system, i.e.  brute hierarchy, in practice. The main difference between
them has been the form of profit/privilege deferred to the elite--status,
salt, dollars, slaves, sea shells land, mating rights etc. Elitism has
been agreed to by both master and slave throughout history. When we see a
rich life form like Donald Trump out on the street, there but for the lack
of contacts and craftiness go most of us. Yet most of us, rich, middle and
poor, cling to our fantasy of collective decency as an abused child clings
to it's abusive parent. No wisdom either convincingly accounts for our
spell of ill-willful numbness or offers much more than cosmetic ways to
cure it.

   Our courage and malaise is best explained by secular spiritualism. Good
and ill-will and their spell-casting powers are not just in us; they *are*
us. If we were water, they would be hydrogen and oxygen. How did we get
like this?: The basic nature of life is the survival instinct. This
alertness to self- preservation is the same in all life forms, and has
remained the same since first life appeared on the planet: Plants,
animals, viruses, bacteria, humans-- every kind of life wants to
indefinately expand it's identity. In short: All life wants to grow
forever. The problem is that on earth nothing is forever. Space, life
spans, moods--everything has limited time and boundaries: Every- thing is
a stage; when something comes to an end, it disappears; it decomposes
/recycles into new stages... Life has always resolved this conundrum in
fear or grace. In other words, the survival instinct has always played out
in either fear or grace.

   Evidence:Under a microscope we can observe single cell animal life
forms that are virtually the same as first animal lifes must have been.
When they are threatened, some flail about, trampling anything they can in
their path to escape. This kind of alertness has a different quality to it
than their other activities. It is as distinct as the difference between
the way a worm works the earth and the way it writhes on a hook. It is
survival instinct played out in fear... Yet in order for first lifes to
continue on to the next generation, they divided and died. That is, first
lifes were able to defy their fear and engineer a graceful compromise
between death and their drive for immortality.

   So, like us, even our single celled ancestors had two opposing
identities-- fear and grace--each of which wants to grow for ever. Each
identity deals with the unalterable reality of death/stage loss/recycling
in their own distinct, conflicting ways. Grace is alertness in control;
stage presence-- the capacity to make the best of the moment, then let it
go. Fear is alertness out of control; stage fright--the compulsive
dreading of, or clinging to, the moment. Fear wages a blind, futile
rebellion against the reality of constant stage loss. Grace heroically
invents ever more beautiful ways to deal with constant stage loss and
recurrent stage fright. Every moment from first life to this moment one or
the other rules. So, life has been alternatingly elegant and crazed from
the very start.

   Like everyone, I know the confusion well. I was raised in a standard
stew of genuine love and strangeness. My father met my mother in London
during World War II.  He was a 24 year old American bomber pilot, my
mother a 19 year old show girl. A month or so later he was shot down on
his 24th mission over Germany.  He had needed to survive 25 to complete
his tour of duty. No one had made it yet--he was the first in line to
finish.  They were going to bring him back home--to Hollywood, to be
precise.  He was to star in a documentary designed to boost morale for the
war effort. Instead, he spent two years in a POW camp...  When the war
ended, he came straight back to London and married my mother three days
later.

     Then came the hard part.  Alcohol had been the anesthesia of choice
on both side of the family for generations. So for my parents the horror
and romance of war was just an escalation of the already familiar. Peace
time didn't come for them until decades later. I was long gone from home.

   As I say, my family fell within the norm for my generation. We did not
question suffering. We went along with the conventional wisdom which holds
that, while it's natural to fear pain and strain, putting up with them
will always be a necessary evil. Suffering serves a good purpose: It's
part of God's benevolent but mysterious Plan which humans simply cannot
comprehend. The good will outweigh the bad; life is basically decent.

   My personal boyhood fantasies, too, were typical: my father seemed
omnipotent, my mother Queen of all I surveyed.  I was the young Mickey
Mantle.  There were many joys, endless summers, energies, enthusiasms.  I
remember often lying on my back in the fields and jet-streaming with the
sweeping sky above.  But mixed in my earliest memories as well was an
awareness of undefinable dread. I had recurring dreams where a witch would
step out of the wall in my parents' bedroom as I was running to them; in
another, a skull hovered on a low ceiling covered with moths....

   I was in effect out of the family life by age 13, when I was sent away
to private school.  It was essentially Conform School for the
Over-Privileged.  In this insular world the teachers, who were called
"Masters", did their up-most to validate Tradition.

   That year was a very tough time for me. By then I realized that the way
in which I most resembled Mickey Mantle was that I had two lousy knees and
couldn't run well. Other great expectations were falling apart at once.  A
fear of being tainted--of not only lacking what it takes to be well
respected, but of down deep being weird, unworthy, doomed--possessed me
for a time.  Naturally, I kept silent about these feelings... I promised
myself that if I ever felt "normal" again, I would do what I could to
spare others the psychic Siberia I was enduring.

   But, things changed. I had a few successes, enough to bury my dread.  I
promptly forgot my promise as well and resumed pursuing my ideal--I would
do better than normal; I would become one of the cool and fearless elite.
My private myth-making carried on full tilt through college. I graduated
steeped in fantasy, ideally suited for work in the advertising industry.
After a string of sales jobs and a stint at social work, I joined it as a
"head-hunter" in New York City.

    It soon became clear to me why there is so much money in this field:
Ad people are the point men on the profit patrol--and are paid for their
dangerous, dirty work accordingly. There are some magnificent and
informative ads by any standards.  However, most advertising, like bad
erotica, willfully distorts with predatory intent. I wasn't concocting the
new sit-com "That Darn Stalin", brought to you by the popular board game
Trivial Genocide. But I was helping make the practice of human sacrifice
seem okay, even sexy.

   Still... I was finally fulfilling my fantasies. I couldn't resist; I
stayed in it for years. I did so by adopting a new persona: the hip
maverick, mocking the flim-flam with friends in the biz. The biz itself
tolerates, even encourages, such clubby hypocrisy--so long as you are
careful to tout the line of industry worth and integrity to clients and
consumers.

   Inevitably, the run-arounds I was helping to promote came around hard.
As my own ads to myself (" I don't write that crap! You gotta take care of
your family...Besides, I give a lot to charity") began to ring hollow, my
teenage sense of menace revived like a virus. Daily living took on the
helpless feel of a nightmare in which I, the neighbors, the homeless, the
emperors--everyone is publicly naked in winter, craving numbness as we
freeze.  When I was a boy I had thought it was just me. Now I understood
that, with the exception of the members of a few tiny, self-sufficient,
isolated tribes, we are all suffering way too much at our own hands for no
good reason. I had arrived at my mutanous conclusion: Something near the
opposite of wisdom--conventional to cutting edge--is closest to the truth
of things. Most of our enormous suffering is not necessary evil but an
avoidable, tragic waste being caused by evil. Not supernatural, but
natural human malevolence...

   Back to tracing the new version of evolution: In the desperate race
between fear and grace, each side of Life's nature is evident every step
of the way: When nerve cells and brains evolved, fear used them to invent
the perception of pain. Pain's original purpose was strictly to warn of
the danger fear had previously created: There was no original danger,
pain, or sin--just original fear which invented them ... Grace used nerves
to create the perception of pleasure.

   From the point of the evolvement of pleasure and pain on, fear has
predominated animal and human life... so far! I think fear took the lead
because it had the distinct advantage of being able to co-opt grace's
invention of pleasure and combine it with pain. Ask anyone addicted to
anything. Grace, on the other hand, has no use for pain. So Because of
fear's advantage, the animal world became brute hierarchy-- the jumble of
fear, pain, grace and pleasure in which fear and pain predominate. Amongst
the primates, privilege for the elite took priority over sharing for all.
Elitism ruled because, again, it made use of both pleasure and pain: The
dominant males and feamales commanded the most and best pleasures of sex,
food, and deference by threatening pain, or the strain of banishment, to
the underlings in their group. For safety's sake the underlings learned to
defer to the dominants. Deprivation became politically necessary
suffering.

   Grace--symbiosis and group and family sharing--had it's strong second
place in primate life. However, sharing was restricted to a monkey's
immediate group, and under strong pressure even these group bonds of grace
usually broke down. When food was scarce, low echelon group memebers--the
very young and the very old especially--had to fend for themselves. When a
chimpanzee group was attacked by a strong force of lions, dominant male
protectors ran for cover, mothers abandoned infants: it became every
monkey for himself.

   It was within these harsh circumstances that the next big step in the
evolution of human nature took place: Primate brains developed
consciousness.  My guess is we gained consciousness via the process of
natural selection-- the most observant, adaptable and brutal monkeys
survived most often. Gradually the quality of alertness in their graceful
and fearful opportunism evolved into consciousness. However, our new
consciousness carried within it "conscience", which put our new minds
under severe strain: When we were unconscious monkeys, we could kill,have
sex, steal, or flee whenever we wanted without guilt. We were unaware of
the suffering to others.

   But now we knew... and our sense of order was shattered. We were now
obliged to drastically curb and modify our fear nature which had enabled
us to compete and thrive, and provided predictability, miserable though it
often was. We had to, without any model, become something brand new to the
planet (and probably the Universe): animals with ethics! Imagine the
pressures on the first humans. The uncertainties of life, the certainty of
death, the realization we had half a mind to murder--two identities and
one had to go: These are hard facts to discover and deal with for animals
already strongly possessed by fear.

   Amazingly, our ancestors at times produced from the combination of fear
and grace the good-will to identify fear and fight it. We actually learned
to share outside our immediate, cultural, and national groups--even
outside our species! However, at other times we couldn't face the strain
of fighting fear. At these times we identified with fear and pain, and
invented our fantasy of immunity: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em--become
the agent, or silent partner, of fear and pain and they won't harm you as
much as they would otherwise. The "agents" were the aggressive
inflictors--the Hitlers. The "silent partners"  were the followers and the
ones who looked the other way. Then as now, the silent partners
constituted the majority of the population.  We wanted safety, not
trouble, as we maneuvered for our chance to rule...  Both the good and
ill-willed ways of dealing with the dilemmas of consciounes were repeated,
observed, taught; thoroughly inter-bred and imprinted. Over time they each
have evolved into instincts with which we are all by now born.

  Now, either I'm guilty of twice projecting my own inner workings (first
onto humanity, then onto Life itself) or much of our living--alternative
to traditional--is based on fear-driven false orders. If I'm right, then
we are obliged
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