Tim Knowles
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

You are so right. In the beginning those that cooperated survived and those that did not died. There was a positive incentive toward cooperation.

Later cooperating groups became adversarial but some balance was maintained because violence mostly hurt everyone. While the positive incentive toward cooperation was diminished it was not eliminated.

Narratives around God reinforced cooperation with punishments for selfish behavior and rewards for cooperative behavior. The Gods died or were greatly diminished and even the religious were often hypocritical and did not walk the path to God.

As soon as “Greed is Good” became accepted a perverse incentive was created. Along with Greed, the idea that life was a “Zero Sum Game” added to the perverse incentives and on top of that everything became relative. Absolute values were abandoned in favor of comparative values. You could be satisfied with being good enough, better than others.

The failure of the value set based on the “zero sum game greed is good relativism” is obvious in general unhappiness in its practitioners and the decimation of the environment with existential implications.

Even more sad is the reduction in the numbers of the happy poor. For much of history most people were poor but not miserable. They were happy with their lot of hard work and deprivation but they had friends and family, they had the rewards and celebration of seeing their hard work produce goodness and when things were bad they shared what they had and comforted each other.

Now there is only transient happiness because of relativism you are always deprived compared to someone else. The reward of get that next prize barely last beyond the next product release. At one time this was acknowledged as the “rat race” or the “hamster wheel” of human existence.

We need to recapture the belief that we exist for some higher calling. We each have a responsibility and a need to (you won’t be happy or feel fulfilled unless) make the world (universe) a better place.

Evil is when you enjoy, greed, pride, hate, gluttony, envy, laziness……

Goodness is when you enjoy, charity, humility, love, temperance, respect, industry……

God or no God we need to recapture the ethic of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Cardinal Virtues. Are you virtuous or have you ever been virtuous? Just because we are all sinners does not mean we can’t make the world a better place. May we find virtue by recognizing our mistakes, repent, make amends and move forward all the wiser.

It would save the planet and we would be much happier.

TEK

    Tim Knowles

    Written by

    Worked in our nations space programs for more than 35 years