A basic principle or axiom of living organisms as species is the fact of biologically optimal healthy behaviour as the evolutionary norm for the entire species, behaviour which adds to the fecundity of life, incrementally, day by day, week by week, year by year, millennia by millennia. This is not a random outcome.
The River Lee in Cork, Ireland
If I take the human species out of the picture of life on Earth, and consider what is done, what happens across biological life, and ask the question : what is the purpose of life, the answer I get is to nurture more fecundity into the shared environment, adapting to the dynamic changes inherent to the variables of wealth, climate, altitude, topography, soil, geological change, occasional asteroids, water quality and type and many others.
Bacteria do this. Worms do this. Bears do this. Flies do this. Spiders do this. Ants do this. Wolves do this. Elephants do this. Trees do this. Fungi do this. Every living organism does this. Chimpanzees do this. Ducks to this. Ostriches do this. Sea Slugs do this. Coral Reef does this. Forests to this. Grasslands do this. Deserts do this.
What then, is the purpose of another species, the human species, in all of this?
To nurture the shared environment through naturally evolved optimally healthy behaviour.
As mammals, we are formed in the womb, where all our needs are met. We are born vulnerable, and for 18 months minimum all our needs must be met by our family and community. Indeed it is also the case that as we grow, become youth, become adults and then elders, all our needs are met by the behaviour of ourselves and our community, living as we do within the total environment.
We feed on plants and their fruits, we feed on other mammals, on fish, on insects.
The care of children indicates a necessity for empathy and kindness, mastery and robust physical health, psychological balance and intelligent creativity.
The care of adults and elders indicates a necessity for empathy and kindness, mastery and robust physical health, psychological balance and intelligent creativity.
In my view the purpose then is to live well, to nurture one another and our shared environment.
Every behaviour that undermines or impedes this is clearly unhealthy.
The fact that when behaviour that undermines all this is prevalent we suffer deeply, we are distressed, we live in a state of chronic stress that presents as disease or illness. We are not adapted well to being bullied, exploited or enslaved. We may well cope with being forced to endure those conditions, but we are not well adapted to them. This tells me these conditions are counter-evolutionary.
Being a nurturant species demands cognitive kindness as a social norm, a cultural norm, a societal norm.
Our purpose here is to be kind, to be loving, to be robust and this requires psychological and physiological health, for which we are quite well evolved.
The immense variation of our shared world, in terms of geographical variation leads to a rich and diverse expression of our ways of living, adapting to each variation as we walked across this Earth.
None of this ignores the facts of suffering due to loss, accident, environmental disaster and occasional disease and ill health. Our innate sensitivity is imbued with vulnerability.
I do not propose an ideal utopia so much as suggest there is a biologically optimally healthy norm, from which Hierarchy of Wealth as Power culture has always deviated, because inherent to the institutionalisation of a hierarchy of wealth as power is the exploitation of a larger healthy vulnerable population by a smaller violent, hardened psychologically unhealthy population.
Given that this is our purpose, the problem of how we confront the unhealthy behaviour of hierarchies of Wealth and Power can be addressed as a matter of recovery of biologically optimal health behaviours as individuals, families, communities, cultures and as a species.
How do we recover our evolutionary biologically optimal human behavioural dynamic? That is not our purpose, that is our task, our challenge that is the path to returning to our purpose.
Corneilius
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