Reason / Compassion / Greed / Superorganism Rant

Today I was reading about uncontacted tribes of people living in Amazonia. They are constantly running from bulldozers and missionaries. In the past, even minor contact with isolated peoples has proven disastrous as common illness to which we are accustomed burn through the native population which has remained isolated and unexposed; therefore they were unable to develop immunity as children. There are some protection laws set in place by some governments in the region stating that loggers cannot take trees from or move into land that is inhabited by native tribes. So what do the logging companies do? Why, they hire gunmen to go into the rain forest and shoot every last Indian in the area, so the region will no longer be considered "protected" because native people no longer inhabit it. Logical, right. Read more about these tribes here.

I gawked at the evil. We like to think that brutality like this is something of the past, from the Rubber Boom of decades past. It still goes on, but we are distracted by more "important" things, such as the "economic rescue package." That is a whole other entry, that doesn't really have a place in JoySeek.

As long as there is greed, the unchecked urgent feeling of want or need present in the human mind, there will be brutalities carried out on vulnerable people.
I was thinking about the rules of engagement concerned where modern world meets its roots, IE the confrontation between tribal people and the take and process mechanisms of industry. The modern world is a very expensive thing to run. At the rate that semi-conscious "consumers" (a label I resent and yet cannot deny) burn through their resources, demand increases if not multiplies. As we reach farther and farther out away from the city, we creep into the last havens of some of the oldest peoples on the planet. If our "need" wasn't so great, if it didn't take so much to keep the wheels of industry and commerce and consumption creaking along, interactions might be different between these two very different groups of people. One of my thoughts was that because of the immediate instinct to protect what you view as rightfully yours, different groups of people will always conflicts over resources, and the might usually wins. People suffer, people die out or are assimilated and that is just the way it is and has to be. It is an evolutionary thing. But does it really have to be this way? Just because we are animals, does that mean we must act in this careless way to members of our own species? Humans are at a distinct and interesting vantage point in the realm of living beings. We are, undoubtedly animals. Our actions are controlled on a subconcious level by instincts and biological urges that have carried our species through the millenia, the same instincts and biological urges that govern every other living thing on this planet. Our advantage comes in that we have the ability to examine the causes and affects of these instincts, why they are useful but also how they may inhibit us in our search for happiness. Our cerebral capacity for understanding ourselves as "animal" but also "rationalist" put us in an interesting place. This is often overlooked.
Logic is a tricky thing. We are all capable of reason, but it is not innate. Like language, we are not born using it, but we possess the inherited ability to learn to master it.
Some other living beings are capable of foresight. This is evident in the behavior of all sorts of animals from nut-collecting squirells to nest-building and socially complicated apes. This ability to plan for the future has brought us here to this place where we exist as sentiant sky-scraper building, cell phone hacking animals. We alone have the ability to examine the current state of the world and all it's people and to predict the fate of our species. In a way, this extended foresight may be a curse. We can take all the current evidence and surmise that the future does not look bright. Violence looms. We have the intellect to see it, but do we have the power to change it? This cannot be done through appeal to government, or monetary changes or even transitional energy sources. These things may help, but the only way that humans will start using their resources more efficiently is through a population wide change of mind of sorts. If every member of the human species had a personal realization and adopted compassion and lost the need to define themselves as an individual (a little scary there), then things might go differently. But could that ever happen? And what kind of thing would cause that to happen? Rationally speaking it couldn't just happen over night. How many generations of being a global until will it take until we learn to share our toys? It's tough being a superorganism made up of highly individualistic cells.

Thank you for completing my rant. I should be doing Spanish Homework.

Jen