The Deal We’ve Made With Each Other

If we step back from it all and try to view ourselves from the perspective of an outer-space alien anthropologist we see that religions, ideologies, moralities, political parties, the animosities among them, all of it, is downstream from the tribal righteous minds natural selection has given us. Of which we are almost universally oblivious, like fish unaware of water.

So we fight like the cobra and the mongoose, content within our respective realities, secure in the knowledge that our own reality is the actual reality and that theirs is a delusion; safe in our epistemic certainty that our own reasoning is self-evident logic and that theirs is blind dogmatic faith, all along unaware that we are marionettes to the puppet masters of our moral intuitions. 

It’s hate born of ignorance. Reason without knowledge. 

We could, if we wanted to, replace the ignorance with knowledge, and in so doing ameliorate are least some of the hate. 

We know the science behind why all of this happens. And have the infrastructure, in the form of the education system, with which we could disseminate it.

“If” we wanted to. 

But it seems we don’t want to. Maybe because that would require us to be honest with ourselves, and to realize that some of us are in fact wrong, and others right. Some people’s realities are in fact more concurrent with actual reality. 

Nobody wants to risk being wrong. Nobody wants to lose. So we’re happier fighting. In perpetuity. It’s the deal we’ve made with each other.