Theme: Agency

MAN’S COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

(another sermon)

What is man’s competitive advantage?

Our body form gave us opportunity to out-maneuver all other creatures on this earth.

Our bipedal body form gave us opportunity to evolve bipedal motion so that could outrun every other creature on this earth.

By outrunning every other creature on this earth our hands were free to develop independently for the single purpose of manipulation.

By developing the ability to manipulate objects, we could make and then carry tools, and tools improved our ability to capture resources as predators, and to increasingly specialize in predation in addition to gathering and scavenging.

For reasons that appear to be an accidental adaptation to disease our brains obtain the opportunity to vastly increase in size, making it possible for increasingly sophisticated thought.

For reasons we are not sure we understand at present other than the obvious utility of it, we developed speech – serialized communication – which gave us the opportunity think and speak in continuously recursive sequential fashion.

For reasons that are obvious, thinking in continuously recursive sequential fashion gave us or improved our ability to proactively plan – permute sequences of future predictions – rather than just respond to impulses and opportunities – just as numbers improve our ability to compare what is beyond our senses.

For reasons that are obvious, this ability to categorize organize plan using language evolve into reason.

For reasons that are obvious, we developed tyranny (upper caste force monopoly for maximum rate of adaptation), the middle class majority: bureaucracy and serfdom for regularity, along with oligarchy and markets for continuous adaptation, and theocracy (lower caste resistance monopoly for resistance to adaptation).

Because these are the dominant male, ascendent male, and female competitive strategies – and the only means of organizing mankind.

And maximizing our ability to adapt and evolve by using aggressive transformation, persistence of state, continuous adaptation, and resistance to change (or at least demand for satisfaction and compromise in exchange for adapting) continues our strategy of maximizing our ability to outmaneuver nature, plant, beast and other groups of humans.