Intelligent Life Has Been Marginalized

Yeah, me again. I've been gone, but hopefully not forgotten. I published my last blog post on September 11, 2012 -- more than twenty-one months ago. I needed a break from the quiet hysteria of these modern times. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then, but one thing has remained the same -- the corporate-state has continued to envelop and suffocate our culture, our communities, and our minds. Its relentless push -- carefully guarded by, and promoted through, the commercial media -- is shoving our species toward oblivion. There are great scholars and people of immense intelligence and understanding of this, who are sounding the alarm in a very articulated and profound way. People like Noam Chomsky, for example. Another is Chris Hedges. Professor Chomsky has been a burr under the saddle of the corporate-state for a long time. When he talks, I listen. When he talks to Chris Hedges, I listen even more attentively. Read what Chris Hedges has to share from a recent interview with Professor Chomsky -- the American Socrates.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates of our time.

We live in a bleak moment in human history. And Chomsky begins from this reality. He quoted the late Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century who argued that we probably will never encounter intelligent extraterrestrials because higher life forms render themselves extinct in a relatively short time.

“Mayr argued that the adaptive value of what is called ‘higher intelligence’ is very low,” Chomsky said. “Beetles and bacteria are much more adaptive than humans. We will find out if it is better to be smart than stupid. We may be a biological error, using the 100,000 years which Mayr gives [as] the life expectancy of a species to destroy ourselves and many other life forms on the planet.” 

For the full article from Truthdig, link here. 

For your consideration:

Nothing demonstrates the improbability of the origin of high intelligence better than the millions of ... lineages that failed to achieve it. How many species have existed since the origin of life? ... If there are 30 million living species, and if the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years, then one can postulate that there have been billions, perhaps as many as 50 billion species since the origin of life. Only one of these achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.   --Ernst Mayr, Bioastronomy News, Third Quarter 1995

For your further consideration: The American Dream Redux -- brought to you by your corporatocracy