Pat, calling everyone stupid again, states:
>It is the competition between groups that has guided evolution; and if we
>think that intelligence applied to societal problems is
>helpful, how can anyone of even moderate intelligence condemn the
> >mechanism of group selection as irrational.
Unconstrained competition threatens our survival. Cooperation
can only aid in our survival. The overall tendency is towards an
increasing amount of cooperation & intercommunication within our species. At
the same time, more and more constraints are placed
on competition to avoid dysfunction.
Perhaps a strange but appropriate example of the increase of this
bee-hive behaviour is the recent popularity of "voyeur" shows such
as Survivor (people put on an island to fend for themselves) or
U8TV (people stuck in an apartment and forced to room with each
other). This is an example of increased constraints on competition
(allowed only within the forum of TV and following certain rules
of conduct dictated by a reinforceable legal code that gets more
complicated by the day).
Since nationalism is a purely competitive behaviour, it's inferior
as a survival strategy for our species, if not for the people it
strives to "protect". In our budding global society, nationalism is
becoming outdated. At the same time, there is a bit of resistence,
although irrelevant in the grander scheme of things, against this
direction our species is heading in.
The episodes concerning the Enterprise and Borg on Star Trek are
not just mindless stories about pretend battles of aliens in deep
space. Underneath the plot, this human-vs-Borg opposition
underlines our common fear of what we will become (our far-future
being represented by the Borg) and our fear in the erosion of what
it means to be human (that is, emotional, individual,
self-conflicting, competitive and self-destructive).
In the end, however, resistance truely is futile.
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