What is “Survival?”
Sometimes modern life causes us to forget the basis for all our motivations - to truly flourish and prosper, not just scrape by.
It has been a grueling week for me here at Scott Free Thinking and the workload certainly shows no sign of letting up with the introduction of new SFT merchandise coming up soon in time for Christmas along with launching new community features here on the website, discussion forums being the first. Today, I want to introduce an important governing principle behind Long Term Survival. It is the almost elusive question: what really is survival?
If you frequent this website, then chances are you are either familiar with, or about to be familiar with, what I call “Long Term Survival Theory.” Long Term Survival Theory, as we should know, is essentially an argument for proposing our life purpose and by extension of our life purpose making a statement about what our overall daily routine should be. While I plan to get into the full details of the entire argument in great detail in my book, it is important to examine a specific portion of the Long Term Survival argument: the definition for survival.
In my summary-post on the topic of Long Term Survival, I say this about survival:
When considering the rest of the big picture, we actually have three goals for the survival of each of ourselves as individuals and it lies with ensuring the survival of our entire species. We must:
1. Survive. And when I say survive, I am referring to it in the traditional sense of the word because by the end of this article I will change the definition of the word ‘survive’ to mean how we survive in the long term over millions, billions, or trillions of years.
2. Replicate. We should replicate but replication lies in more than our DNA. One of the primary driving factors behind DNA replication, or human reproduction, is our ideologies and behaviors. Biologist Richar Dawkins coined a term for these known as “memes” similar to the genetic term “genes.” Replication lies not just in our biology but in our memetics as well.
3. Empower. Empowerment is the third and final step in the basics of the Long Term Survival Model. Essentially, empowerment is the ability to enable others in the population to perform the same tasks in steps 1 and 2 – to survive and replicate. In its most common form, empowerment is teaching.
What we have to understand is that while you can be alive as an individual, that is entirely different from surviving as a member of the human species. If all human beings were to do was subsist off the bare minimum requirements for staying alive then they would eventually become extinct. Probability theory, if it has any validity at all, shows us that natural disasters strike our planet every so many millions of years. Therefore, without the technological progress that we have made to aid in our scientific understanding of the truths behind the universe we have little hope of surviving as a species.
It can also be established through other arguments that the individual precedes the collective. Because this is the case, this means that as an individual of the collective, that is, a single member of the entire human species, you have a role to play in the species’ survival over the course of future generations. If nothing else, a great deal of our future survival relies on our ability to both predict and counteract natural disasters from making our species go extinct.
In essence, it can be said that we should not just survive as individuals of the greater whole: we should thrive. While I am all for people speaking out about their modesty and humble nature – it does no good to say that you should surrender all of your material wealth to aid the poor if the poor will do nothing with that material wealth. At the least, the intelligent course of action to take with available funds for charity would be to keep sufficient funds or resources for yourself to prosper, not just stay alive, and then invest the remaining material wealth into ventures that will create more material wealth.
Overall, the national and global markets do not reflect long term survival at the time of this writing. If they did, we would see a lot less money going into irrational ventures. While the world operates off of capitalism, many people who obtain fairly high fortunes often choose bad investments that either do not make a return or, if they do make a return, they make a return off the irrationality of others. It is a sad truth of market dynamics and chances are high that this aspect of capitalism will not fade any time soon.
However, the more important concept to be understood is what to do with wealth as an individual. What creates actual power and true independence? Some people would say “money.” The majority of our money is devalued the instant it is paid to us in our current central banking system. Even if we were to abolish all central banking and deficit-based credit systems, we would still encounter a major problem with money: money can be put into channels in which other people have means of production and when the funds are exhausted you are powerless. Having means of production is actually a real measurement of true power, so long as those means of production are secured.
It comes back to the basics of high school level economics: land, labor, capital. Land especially. Not just any land: those who own land that have self-sustaining ecologies that exist within habitable climates of the world are those who hold the greatest influence over the long term survival of the species. In truth, if you can understand how to fulfill a market need by using your own resources from your own land, then that is the greatest possible asset you could have. Yet, what is the modern trend?
The modern trend is for people to move off the farms, into the cities. The cities originally paid out higher wages but now we have seen much of the industrial economy move overseas here in the United States. The result: an entire slew of people who, over multiple generations, have lost the knowledge of how to be self-sufficient.
We no longer really have good working knowledge of what local plants are edible. Heck, most of us probably figure that when it comes to the local animals, we’d better not even try – besides the local legalities preventing the matter, common sense tells us that animals in our local area have probably been eating all kinds of junk and contaminants that would be harmful to us humans.
What we need is a brand new generation of farmers, technicians, mechanics, engineers, and scientists. We need people who also adopt multiple different disciplines. The education industry (not the public education system of today) would be able to provide efficient and effective methods for getting people through technical programs that would give them quick, practical, usable skills without having to go through a parade of different useless courses that are required at most current colleges and universities for the purposes of making someone a ‘well rounded’ individual.
Many would agree: a well rounded individual is an individual who is adaptive and contains a variety of practical, useful skills. Let me be clear: there is no reason to downplay the importance of history, more general mathematics (like unit circle functions from pre-calculus), or classical English literature. But we have to be honest… technical schools could churn out things like psychiatrists, computer programmers, agricultural specialists, and many more experts without them having to jump through the hoops of learning their general studies.
Universities could really be the higher level of educational aspiration. As it is, they are already facing their potential doom thanks to the internet and the power of online education.
I am going off on a bit of a tangent here, though, and I should get back to the question: survival… What is survival? We know that when it comes to your practical use as an individual within the entire species of humanity, there are two basic functions you hold power over that affect the rest of the species: 1) your physical being, comprised of your biology and specifically your DNA and 2) your ideologies, belief systems, and to what degree those ideologies affect the lives of others. For example, if you’re a communist and you become elected to political office through a democratic system: that is going to have vast repercussions on the voters who put you into power. If you’re an authoritarian type of manager who then becomes the CEO of a large company, that will have huge sweeping effects on the employees.
Likewise, if you stand on the opposing end of such viewpoints, especially when you get into a position of power, you can make huge tidal waves. Conversely, this principle applies to situations in which you may not ever guess there are repercussions. For instance, the simple act of saying “hello” to strangers you do not know in a hallway can have a measurable effect. This is due to the connected nature of everything but it points to the basis for which people can thrive (and by thriving, they are surviving).
So, survival is the application of science, rationality, empiricism, and logic. These are certainly not new ideas, nor are they particularly mind blowing or innovative. The definition of survival, then, still remains simple. The bottom line that we must understand is that survival is more than just staying alive, it is enabling others to actualize beyond their subsistence (have more beyond their basic needs). This is not to be confused with non-discriminatory charity or ideas that defy rationality, reciprocity, and mutual exchange. Rather, this is a principle which can be understood in terms of how creating workable systems and methodologies can empower entire populations to overcome their obstacles to staying alive into the future.
It may sound overly simple to some! Let me warn many who would think such a thing: understanding this as a governing principle, no matter how simple it may appear, is not trivial. This is perhaps one of the most critical concepts to understand about both yourself and humanity as a species. By considering the idea that survival must eventually coincide with warmth and comfortability, love, compassion, and even many different forms of wealth – one gives rise to the idea that humanity’s logically driven purpose is to prosper, to flourish, not to scrape by.
It’s time for us to become survivors. Real survivors.
