More love and faith

The primary drivers of society through time are the countervailing pairings^[1] of Control and Love, and Curiosity and Faith.

At this time the dominant West is setting the global tone.  In the economically developed West of the early twenty-first century Control and Curiosity are dominant, and Curiosity is subordinate to Control.  Both have peaked or are about to reach the apogee of their cycles and begin a decline. 

Each of the two needs-pairings has a rational and an irrational aspect.  Rational in the sense of being utilitarian, logical, linear, and promoting personal survival and profit; irrational in the sense of being inefficient, illogical, non-linear, and selfless. 

Words like `irrational', `inefficient', `illogical', and `non-linear' have acquired a strongly negative connotation in contemporary Western society, itself an indication of how dominant the need to control and the need to know have become.  Here the words are used neutrally and non-judgmentally – no preference for any of the four psycho-social needs is indicated, or any ranking implied. 

Love and Faith are irrational and selfless because they move individuals and groups, including societies, off the most logically effective and efficient path to individual gain.  In the extreme, they may lead individuals and societies to destroy themselves.  But they also give human life quality, and emotional meaning.  Faith in particular^[2], that need to transcend, is the most human of all needs, and is probably what distinguishes us qualitatively from all other species. 

The need to Control and Curiosity are rational and tend to be self-centred. 

Control is about the accumulation and exercise of wealth and power^[3].  The need to Control manifests itself through several subordinate needs including the need to possess objects, ideas, and people that enhance our independence and our ability to influence our own destinies.  The need to Control may be felt and satisfied individually or "tribally"^[4].  It is selfish, divisive, and combative.  It leads to competition and confrontation.  In those instances where the need to control does prompt cooperative behaviour it is solely as a means to an end, a marriage of convenience that will dissolve at consummation.  Control has no interest in the ethics that support the need to belong to a wider group, or the need to transcend.  In fact, the first to subvert any such ethical conventions is likely to make the largest personal or tribal gain. 

But the need to Control is as necessary as any of the four drivers.  It underpins all economic behaviour, behaviour that continually seeks to do more with less in order to maximise the resource, the profit, that may be redirected to personal, and tribal or class gain.  Without the need to control, and its subordinate need to possess, we would not seek to continually improve our temporal processes, making them more effective and efficient^[5]. 

An important aspect of the need to control is the need for vengeance.  We guard our integrity zealously; our personal integrity, our familial integrity, and our "tribal" integrity.  A serious breach of our integrity by another provokes a visceral response - an urgent need for vengeance and retribution to reassert control and recover self-esteem.  The need for vengeance is fundamental to the human psyche and cannot be discounted when seeking to manage society towards the indefinite and hopeful survival of humanity^[6]. 

When it has been triggered, the need for vengeance can rapidly overtake all other needs.  These other needs then become purely incidental to the obsessive need for vengeance, a need that can be so strong that it may be passed, and even amplified, from generation to generation. 

Vengeance inevitably sets up a self-perpetuating spiral of escalating antagonism and violence.  No civilised society^[7] can survive and flourish in an environment where vengeance has free rein and it is for that reason that Jesus bade us to love our enemies. 

Perhaps the most fundamental role of any entity that represents the collective interests of a society is to intervene dispassionately in individual spirals of vengeance as early as possible.  Society's most fundamental collective responsibility is to defuse the need for vengeance by providing justice. 

Curiosity, the need to know, is intrusive^[8], secretive, and destructive when control is much stronger than love.  When the Control/Love pairing is balanced, Curiosity tends to be introspective.  The joy of a shared discovery is not felt until Love is in ascendancy. 

Curiosity goaded by Control gives us our technological progress, our continual improvement in productivity, our ever-expanding capacity to influence our physical environment.  We have already identified technological progress^[9] as a critical success factor to attaining our collective mission. 

Love reaches out to others.  It gives, compromises, yields, and seeks consensus.  It is the need to belong that drives the development of ethics, morals, and institutional arrangements which share power.  Love selflessly demands equity for others^[10], yet in doing so, considerably enhances the chances of survival of self, by allowing each of us to leverage off the power of the human collective.  The need for Love also underpins the need to belong to a family or tribe.  It makes us yield to peer group pressure, to group-think, and to group hysteria.  

Faith embraces notions and ideas at the emotional level; religious or ideological notions.  It is inherently anti-intellectual and anti-rational, although almost always uses reason^[11] to erect theological superstructures over the underlying articles of faith.  It is a need that may be satisfied viciously when Control is in ascendancy, and caringly when Love dominates.  The period of the Inquisition was a time when Faith and Control were dominant.   Faith relies heavily on symbolism and `pyramid building' - the investment of enormous human effort and suffering into ventures, including wars that preferably have no logical purpose or practical pay-off. 

Faith is also the primary source of hope^[12].  It is the well-spring of the impossible dream that pushes us out of the ordinary and mediocre far beyond what is efficient, practical, and reasonable.  Our thirst for quality and excellence is a manifestation of faith, of the need to transcend. 

The purpose of Truth in Uncertainty is to help move society out of a state where Control and Curiosity are as dominant as they have been.  Control is necessary and needs to be given plenty of scope to act, but it should yield influence to Love and be subordinated to Curiosity which in its turn should yield some influence to Faith. 

To reduce the risks and pain of natural revolutionary change^[13] we need to act deliberately to centre society; to move it out of the Control-Curiosity corner where society is building up tensions that will otherwise, in time, erupt destructively and send society lurching into another corner, probably that of blind and viciously intolerant faith, the Control-Faith corner, significantly undermining our prospects of long term civilised survival.