3.2.3. The John Lennon hypothesis
The John Lennon hypothesis: In general the global direction, either in terms of hundreds of thousands of years, or in millions of years will likely be like the one described in John Lennon's song "Imagine":
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
Now, why should civilizational beings evolve in this way? Why wouldn't they become more greedy, violent, competitive, etc? Well, the reason is simple: the most simple assumption is that these beings, as individuals, will choose all the directions available. Some of us would choose one, some of us other. Given sufficient individuals and a supportive environment, all the available choices would be tried. However this does mean that they would all be equally successful. First of all choices made on lies or that lead to lies will eventually show themselves less able to lead to successful communities. For a few hundred years, or even many millennia, lies may work very well and grant social cohesion and a functional society. But as time goes by, after hundreds of thousands of years, those of us that escape the lie will eventually find themselves in a situation where their knowledge of a truth will have some advantage. So, in a very long period, communities based on truths will eventually supersede those based on lies.
The fact that truth has an extremely high evolutionary advantage, for it allows to integrate and use the world for our benefit, also implies that cultures that search for truth will eventually spread over other cultures. And that is why John Lennon's music describes so well the future society. A society of beings based on money, on propriety, on illusions, will not be open to the world, will not search for truth. The more we care about gadgets, houses, what people think of us and so on, the less we care about understanding what surrounds us. The more interested we are in getting, in possessing, the less interested we will be in understanding what it is that we are getting. The how to get takes the place of what is this, how does it work? A society like ours, that puts economic growth as its central goal, that induce us to live to buy through tv commercials and public displays of ostentation, will not go far. Education will decline, political leaders will be chosen on the basis on how good they look, and not on the soundness of their policies, in general the society will slowly degrade loosing its sense of direction. But, in time, other cultures will appear, that value understanding, these will grow, and will surpass the old societies. Of course, in this general path towards more and more illuminated cultures (our current highly developed Western societies are after all the result of the Illumination period that took place in the XVII and XVIII centuries) will include pockets (that could take many millennia to be dissolved) of retrogression in which particular cultures will become again engulfed in fear and superstition and highly cruel systems of social control. These dark ages are perhaps inevitable. But they should not obscure the general picture which is towards clarity in every direction, and John Lennon's song, Imagine, describes a part of that clear state of mind.
This does not mean that parallel cultures cannot exist, alongside the main, more illuminated culture, and those other cultures may express very different values, like submission, self-torture, the want to possess and control and/or be possessed and controlled, etc. What we are saying is that the main culture, the one that spreads the most, will be more open to the cosmos, it will be more directed to a global understanding of the universe. The more this happens, the more it will develop. A society based on dogmas and fears, that closes up to the universe, will tend to get fragmented from the main culture, and create an individual culture. Just like there are different kinds of animals so there will be very different kinds of cultures, each one having their own way of living and dealing with the world. If we imagine spiders, lions, pandas, elephants, dolphins, komodo dragons, otters, crabs, praying mantis, snails, sparrows, etc, we see such a rich diversity of states of minds, goals, levels of understanding, etc. Such a diversity will probably also occur at the civilization level, with the main culture fragmenting into many smaller ones, and living in a kind of global ecosystem, with more or less predatory, parasitic, independent, or symbiotic relations. But we expect that the cultural level will also mimic what happens at the physical level regarding the weight that understanding the world brings. Smaller animals like spiders are able to grasp just a very small part of the world. Their goals are very limited and repetitive. Monkeys have a completely different life experience. They have families, kids with very different personalities, relations of love and hatred, they feel, live and think about many things. Compared with them a spider is very small not only in terms of size or weight, but in what it can conceive. The fact that the spider can conceive a much smaller number of things, makes it very limited in the ways it has available to deal with the environment including the other members of her species. In the same way a more broader culture will tend to encompass other cultures, it will be able to deal with them, to understand them, even to manipulate them, while the opposite will not be true. This already happens today, if we look at the relation between anthropologists from western societies and the tribes they study. But the future will probably bring even more gigantic asymmetries.