It is time to "go off the deep end" and speculate about our "human condition". First some terms need to be clarified for the context of this essay. "Human evolution" is a very complex idea here and is by no means restricted to Darwinian biological evolution, whatever your current take on that is.
Biological evolution itself is a context dependent process intimately connected to the evolution of the earth system as a whole. The earth system's shapes human and biological evolution as they have come to shape its own evolution.
The most important forms of human evolution are occurring much faster than its biological component and, in particular, the human brain and what it produces as thought has become tightly linked to external sensory stimuli, especially that coming from technology created by humans.
Somewhere in all this is the aspect of human activity we classify as "political". That there are at least two very distinct forms of human political "thinking" has been well established, especially by George Lakoff. RecentlyThe Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist has gone a long way in tying these brain functions to the brain's two hemispheres in an historical context. That sets the stage for a leap which is suggested by the title of this diary. Read on below for a sketch of the idea.
Although these speculations are far from formulated in any scholarly manner, they are based on such work and I'll include our book for background.Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World.
There is no better place than this site to point out that there are two models of the "real" world and that they are very different in many ways. Our book establishes ways in which they are also alike but that is not the issue here. We have to begin by remembering that the "real world" is accessible to anyone only through the perceived sensory inputs they obtain. The hard part to understand is what happens to this sensory input as soon as the signals arrive. The brain processes them and gives them meaning. This is a subjective process. If it were not the "real world" would be much more the same for all of us.
This processing is intimately dependent on the fact that our world makes same sort of sense to us. We have a model that the new information can be related to. That model is so very important in determining what the new information looks like to us and what it is used for in improving our model. This i, necissarliy circular. Not only that but new information that seriously disturbs our model is very hard to deal with. Sometimes things like this are called Cognitive Dissonance
the presence of incongruent relations among cognitions that frequently results in excessive mental stress and discomfort. Ultimately, individuals who hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas and/or values frequently experience cognitive dissonance. This stress and discomfort may also arise within an individual who holds a belief and performs a contradictory action or reaction. For example, an individual is likely to experience dissonance if he or she is addicted to smoking cigarettes and continues to smoke despite believing it is unhealthy.
Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance focuses on how humans strive for internal consistency. When inconsistency (dissonance) is experienced, individuals largely become psychologically distressed. His basic hypotheses are listed below:
"The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance"
"When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance"
which acknowledges the problem being addressed here but by no means includes all of it.
The situation certainly involves beliefs, which are intimately linked to world models, but goes beyond that when we consider the subjective nature of perception.
The concept of "meme" is useful (and dangerous) here because it acknowledges the analogy between these aspects of our thought and biological units of inheritance. The biological model for evolution allows for a new species when mating becaomes bifurcated. No longer do the two kinds of organism exchange genetic material through mating.
The evolution of mind is far more complex and there is no strong analogy between the kind of bifurcation in its evolution and the formation of new biological species. But there IS an analogy. We see it every day. We see the same events in the real world being used by two groups in very different ways to avoid any threat to their world model and to actually strengthen it. We see behavior within the same set of rules being used to produce conflicting results. This is so real and so much in the forefront of our political spectrum that it would be another form of reality denial to say otherwise.
Notice the characteristics of this bifurcation. One set of "facts" is not acknowledged by the other side. There is no need to refute those facts if they do not fit the existing world model. Hence reality has almost no meaning outside of this context.
I will close by warning the reader that we are dealing with issues that are presently beyond the scope of modern cognitive research and therefore have to be dealt with in a new context. They can easily be dismissed if they are expected to conform to existing models just as any dissonant ideas will. On the other hand we live in a world where the bifurcation shows itself many times in important ways every day. So far we have not even begun to know how to deal with it. We have to get beyond the denial stage to do that.