By Vexen Crabtree 2002 Mar 31
Mankind is capable of the most love, empathy and spirituality due to the abstract nature of advanced thought and highly evolved consciousness.
Abstract Nature of advanced minds
I think we owe pretty much all of our technological and scientific knowledge to the fact that we are able to think in abstract terms. We are able to create symbols, ideas and theories on abstract thought, building up a system of logic and experience based as much on interpretation using symbols and abstract ideas as much as on memorisation alone.
Converting thoughts into text, images, mathematics and diagrams we are able to take the smallest thoughts and odd ideas and mould them into grand schemes and formulas. And frequently, against all the odds, we get it right.
We spend hours studying close relatives on the evolutionary tree, teaching them to do the same. Experiments where we teach animals to use levers, buttons and icons prove successful, but inconclusive. Experiments on apes go further, teaching them to talk to us in symbols and icons. They can tell us about what they want to do that day, using graphics and icons, using abstract thought.
But no animal comes close to matching our ability. I think abstract thought is self promoting. Some abstract thought is necessary as part of any pattern recognition behaviour in animals. All animals have this. I think it is exponential... once abstract thought becomes recursive, the limits of the mind drop away and mathematics and science become possible. Logic becomes overriding in basic abstract thought because abstraction itself is based on relationships and rules.
Abstract communication and empathy
Human Beings are able to communicate in heavily abstract ways. What started out as art and realistic representation, through history, has become intensely abstract communication systems. At some point in history it became such a social advantage to be able to communicate in abstract forms... in writing... that anyone who could not do this were out evolved.
We evolved into a species that can instinctively associate symbols and abstract thought with our inner emotions. We can see death on the TV, and mourn. The pain of others, even represented in pure text, can hurt us. Through time, we have become a species whose emotions are at the control of ideas just as much (and perhaps more) than direct experience.
We are able to control and sway our emotions using the abstract ideas associated with them. We can build ourselves into an anger over text, by using logic to determine that we deserve to be angry. Our emotions and our rational thought have become intertwined. Communication has become the key way to control people's emotions and inner state.
Powerful text can move entire populations of people into action. Using abstract ideas and memes a leader can control and manipulate people's emotions.
We have learned to communicate to each other's emotions via proxy, and there appears to be no limit. We can make each other sexually aroused through text alone. We can feel the full range of emotions as a result of communication. We feel hurt when a loved one scorns us across the Internet, because we "know what it means". Abstract ideas have become associated with our very emotions, the very essence of our being.
It is a victory of empathy that we are able to do this. Abstract thoughts associated with emotion create empathy: An ability to understand how other people are affected by the things you communicate. With increased association between concepts, cause and effect, and your inner emotions you also learn how to empathize with others. You learn how they feel, even if you have never been in their situation, through the powerful use of ideas and words.
Abstract Objectivity
It may seem to be a contradiction, but we use the same abstract modes of thought to represent reality. Without this, we could not understand that our bodies are made of atoms and that our thoughts are electronic pulses. We couldn't understand that radiation can harm us even though we can't see or feel it. Using our abstract maps of reality, we are able to feel safe and secure.
Knowledge becomes essential, and extrapolation becomes an art of survival in both society and the real world. We are able, through abstract thought, to become a radical survivalist species capable of picking up any tool and using it. Abstraction and extrapolation frequently serve us very well. In real life, it is "experience", "materialism" and "knowledge". In emotions, it is "empathy", "understanding" and "compassion".
We find it necessary to make abstractions in order to understand the world. And the same process is intertwined with our very emotions and feelings. Our determination and strength are all fed by our feelings and intellectualism. Our intellectualism and feelings are both, in turn, led on by the way we think in abstract terms.
“It is important to understand that an enormous amount of our human experience is really a response to symbols. [...] This is the peculiarity of human beings: that a symbol can gain a hold on the imagination and cause a more powerful response than the actuality that it represents.”"The Occult" by Colin Wilson (1971)1
Prime Mover
Love is the strongest emotion. Our will to love others, care for them and form long term relationships with them is evolutions biggest tool in the game of securing valid offspring. The longer the dependency of the child on the parent, the more advantageous it is for that species to feel love not only from parent to child, but from parent to parent.
I believe Human Beings are the species most capable of acting in compassionate ways associated with feelings of love. We are also the species that is most extreme when love drives us to hate. I believe that the reason for both of these exists in our ability to think in abstract ways.
We know love is the strongest emotion. A new born can be made to survive with food and water, but parental love is the emotion that is craved most. In healthy individuals, this craving is on behalf of both parents and new born for each other. This is an immensely powerful instinct within us. It is the strongest emotion. But it is still directable, and through abstract thought, we can bring this powerful emotion to bear in new ways.
Species Love
There is a species wide love that originates and thrives on empathy. This isn't true love, but "empathy love", a love that drives a species to look after its own members. A love that is equivalent to pure pride. It is a natural and healthy emotion, the will to look after your own species, and it is unnatural to suppress this emotion. To want what is bad for the species, in terms of the natural state of Human emotion, is a dysfunction.
Using abstract thought and logic, politics is the result of this feeling. No-one can agree on what is best... but the instinct is there to try. The instinct is in all of us to use what we have, in whatever society we have, and try to make our own clique successful, for the good of man. Much of religion and politics all claim to know and strife for what is best for everyone. People are drawn to these things with determination and emotion. But frequently the feeling that you are doing the right thing can be misguided due to shortcomings in our knowledge, due to shortcomings, therefore, of the same abstract thought processes that drive us into these organized bodied of religion and politics. The key underlying emotion and will is still empathy and love, but through association and abstraction these come to mean varying things to all individuals.
Love
We can come to love people in new ways. Through communication and extrapolation we can come to love a person who we have never seen before. We can come to trust them with our hearts and emotions because whilst swapping abstract ideas and communicating in abstract ways, you come to associate that person with all that is good about people. The medium of communication in advanced civilisation is wide and varied.
It can be based on text alone via the Internet or love letters, it can be by phone conversation, video and multiple combinations and variations of all those things. All these things are based on abstract communication and ideas... we are frequently creating our own image of the other person. And sometimes we get it right.
It is possible to feel the deepest love for someone through abstract communication, just like you can empathize with people who you have never met. Because our abstract communication of ideas has become associated with our very hearts and minds emotions and intellect. Philosophy and abstract modes of thought can change the very way we think about love in the same way abstraction of communication and ideas change how we communicate and develop emotionally.
Love is still, in adult life, our prime long term motivation. It drives us, even when we are not aware of it. It drives us to make ourselves successful, appealing. It makes us want to be good natured so that others like us, so that we can form long term relationships. It drives us to be part of society, to find groups that accept us.
Abstract thought allows us to take things to extremes. We can feel love for people who we have never seen based on their personality and communication alone. The communication medium is irrelevant. Due to our increasing capacity for empathy, we feel that others love us in return and feel we are in touch with their emotions. This is based on the feelings we have towards them, based on our own abstract thought and these are all in turn all based on our assumptions on the relationship between what is real and what is abstract.
“It is possible to create an abstract personality, based on abstract thought processes, like politics and religion, but based around a concept or idea. Frequently, the conclusion we feel when we do this is that we are looking at God himself.Our need for unconditional love, our abstract philosophical minds and the way our very emotions and world view are led by our abstract representations of what we think is real can conspire to create in our minds an abstract source of love. Something we want and need since youth, and something that can frequently be lacking. The all-loving abstract god, the all-knowing and all-powerful being that we create in our minds matches all of those abstract ideas we attribute with our parents while young.
Loving
This parental figure that gives us pure love, that we yearn for; when we were looked after and unconditionally loved... that figure is sometimes not there in our lives, or in most people's lives, that figure quickly fades away leaving only a memory. Searching for it, we can find such a figure in philosophy. Abstract thought and ideas lead us to believe, through projection, that an all loving over-looker is there for us.All-Knowing
Abstract thoughts brings with it the most essential element of doubt. Where we learn not to assume we know everything and that we can always learn more. We want to learn everything, to get everything right. And we presume that this is possible. We are aiming and striving to be like an omniscient being that we can only imagine exists. However... our imagination can quietly be abstracted into things we think are real.Combined with our need for unconditional love, even in an abstract sense, an Ultimate can form in our minds. Something we want, yearn for and desire with all our emotion. Through our amazing capacity for love and empathy, both driven by our ability to think abstractly, we are able to feel such a being is there for us.
Our very emotions and feelings, our determination and emotional well being are based on our ability to associate emotions with abstract thought. Our emotions and feelings can become associated with abstract symbols of love that do not necessarily represent something that really exists. God can become a requirement in our hearts and minds, whether or not it exists.
This, it seems, is the most natural course of behaviour for species whose emotions are caught up with abstraction. For a species where love, controlling our emotions and minds, can be associated with symbols and ideas we are capable of putting our emotional stability on a concept, an idea.”
Atheism;
All though many people do indeed follow the path I have laid out above, many do not feel that way. Plain and simple atheism has always occurred in many cultures. Many people have an automatic stop that confines love to empathy, and not projection to God. Different cultures cultivate different world views, so that many societies (e.g., England, much of Europe, Russia, and other highly atheistic countries) abstractions of love remain geared towards people rather than god figures. But such cultures have been rare, and even within those cultures many extrapolate that god exists for varied reasons.
As the abstract ways in which our species thinks becomes more intellectual, love will find many ways to express itself. Many atheists feel that with the continual advancement of knowledge hand in hand with abstract thought, the extrapolation of love and its association of emotions with ideas that might not make sense will become unnatural. God is, I believe, frequently one such expression and symbol of love. Whether or not it exists and in what form it could possibly exist is a completely different discussion though!
Self worship
Some are led to believe that, as cultures differ in their interpretation of what God is, every individual differs too. Subjectivism tells us that this is true. Everyone views God different, as our minds to not perceive anything perfectly.
The conclusion can be drawn that we create a God we need according to the wants of our hearts and minds. Some people believe this God really exists as a separate consciousness to themselves. These are theists. Some people believe that no such god exists, and feel no need to project its existence. These are atheists. There is a third category, however, that is a combination of the two.
In my related page "Masters Of Existence: Subjectivism and Self Worship in Satanism" I write that due to subjectivism, everything we see and feel is a result of our own projection and imagination and develop it into the idea that the self is the creative God. Every individual is a god, and some individuals do not accept this and think that the god they need is external to themselves.
“wor-ship (wûr'shìp) n.
1. a. Reverent love and devotion for a deity or sacred object.
b. The ceremonies or prayer by which this love is expressed.
2. Ardent devotion; adoration; his worship of fame.”
What is sacred? My life is sacred. What is worshipped? The reality I observe is worshipped, as it is my creation. Who is God? I am god. "Masters Of Existence: Subjectivism and Self Worship in Satanism" by Vexen Crabtree (1999)
This belief is very self-help, empowering, motivational but not everyone can accept the terminology.
Links:
Unfortunately, our ability for abstract thought does not just lead us to good things. Frequently, our emotions and feelings can be misguided. Our mental health can be damaged, and then our capacity for object orientated materialism can become dangerous and destructive.
Our ability to associate concepts with emotion that leads to politics and religion is also our biggest downfall. All too frequently what we feel is good is not what other people feel is good. What we think we are doing for love of mankind is never that simple. We never know the full truth. Our associations between love and action are never entirely correct.
But most frequently it is a failure of empathy over abstraction. It is a failure of our compassion that frequently leads us to misunderstand and hate. If we could understand better the mechanisms by which we come to think of things as "good" and "evil" or by which different cultures have different morals systems... then we could eliminate some misunderstanding and hatred.
With abstract thought comes defiant ignorance. Stupidity used to be a lack of abstraction. Now stupidity has become, in a species entirely based on abstract thoughts and their effect on our emotions, a source of evil. Lack of humility and lack of doubt leads to evil.
Abstract thought can lead us to think we are right, and all others are wrong. When we do that we are committing a sin of stupidity. Complacency, ignorance and lack of empathy all conspire against us. Without the single most dogmatically important intellectual admission of doubt, our ability for abstraction takes us further from empathy and closer to stupidity and hatred.
If we cannot admit that sometimes even our most treasured assumptions and abstract associations with love may actually be wrong, then we are going down that path to segregation, oppression and social injustice based on errors of abstract emotional projection and a failure of empathy.
The more distant cultures are, the more this will occur. When we cannot admit that our innermost feelings may be wrong, that this process of abstraction leads the essence of our emotions down paths that are not associated with reality, but ideology, then we are backtracking and failing.
We are able to overcome our prejudice about foreign behaviour. Hopefully our combined species empathy will increases and will allow us to accept that everyone comes to associate different things with love, be it an association with a god-concept, with Gaia, or with Humanity. In all cases love still exists as the most powerful emotion and the element that is most frequently the hidden driving force behind our life, desires, societal cohesion and even intellectualism.
"It is a victory of empathy that we are able to do this. Abstract thoughts associated with emotion create empathy: An ability to understand how other people are affected by the things you communicate. With increased association between concepts, cause and effect, and your inner emotions you also learn how to empathize with others. You learn how they feel, even if you have never been in their situation, through the powerful use of ideas and words." [From earlier in this essay]
I believe the Internet is our saviour. I believe computers are rapidly increasing our ability to think in abstract ways. I believe that the Internet is a melting pot of culture and belief, that over time we will all come to understand each other better and more fully through empathy and abstract, projected emotions. The Internet allows people to communicate, miscommunicate and learn how different and amazingly diverse we all are. Our ability for abstract thought combined with this ultimate communication medium that connects all people in all cultures can create empathy and tolerance like never before!
By Vexen Crabtree 2002 Mar 31
Crabtree, Vexen
"The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind: How Other Peoples' Experience Contradict Our Own Beliefs" (2002). Accessed 2009 Nov 24.
"The Experience of God" (2002). Accessed 2009 Nov 24.
"Western Culture: Trash, Popular and Elite" (2006). Accessed 2009 Nov 24.
Wilson, Colin
"The Occult" (1971). First published Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, London, 1971. Quotes from 1976 edition, Granada Publishing Limited.