On Man and Reality
Part 5 - Instincts and Yearnings

Forms of Emotional Stimulation
In animals, instinct is seen to be responsible for the appropriate matching of experience, emotion and response. In Humans, more is involved. As Man’s intellectual evolution proceeded and his powers and behavioural options expanded, some forms of instinctive behaviour became dangerous to his wellbeing and survival. To help him to cope with this situation, the evolution of his intellect was paralleled by the evolution of a capacity to over-ride his instinctive urges. He evolved the ability to envision the consequences of his actions and to be emotionally moved by them. I use the word ‘yearning’ to connote Man’s still evolving capacity to be emotionally moved by such abstract considerations. Yearnings evolve in concert with moral judgment and willpower to provide Humans with a means of over-riding instinctive urges.

Yearnings stimulate emotion at a deeper level than instincts. When integrated with moral judgment, a yearning can motivate the human will to over-ride instinctive urges. Because such urges have been an aspect of sentience since the beginning, they are stronger than human yearnings. For this reason, they tend to dominate human behaviour unless moral judgment and yearnings are strongly reinforced by prevailing culture.

While moral judgement and yearnings are subjective, they are shaped by social influences such as upbringing, communal beliefs, tradition and propaganda. For its part, will-power is influenced by such things as lust, coercion and peer pressure. Combined with intellect, the fact that these attributes are moulded by social mores makes civilisation possible to humans, where it lies well beyond the world of other animals.

The Emergence of Institutions
As has been said, the evolution of Man’s intellect increased the importance of communal support for moral judgement and yearnings. The first human institutions, almost certainly evolved to engender such support. Evidence of their influence first enters the fossil record about forty thousand years ago. It suggests that institutionalised beliefs and rituals had become an important aspect of human life.

By harnessing the human yearning to believe in Supernatural Beings in support of behaviour that promotes communal wellbeing and survival, religious institutions would have contributed greatly to tribal cohesion and strength. By so doing, they also would have placed priests and witch-doctors in positions of great authority. When town-based culture began to replace tribal wandering, allowing wealth accumulation to rise in importance, it would have become natural for priests to make the accumulation of wealth one of their institutional rights. This would have led to subtle changes in the values they preached.

Fortified towns, strengthened by religious conviction, would have been well placed to dominate surrounding communities. The temptation to exploit such advantage, naturally would have led to the institutionalisation of the town’s military advantages. Competition between church and state would have ensued and it would have become fairly common for the leadership of both institutions to vest in the town’s most powerful person. With time the person so empowered, naturally would have assumed the rank of God-King, subsequently altering religious tenets to decree that access to the truth lay, not through one’s inner Being but in the pronouncements of the God-King. People, who opposed such a view, would have been seen as posing a threat to the state and therefore deserving of execution.

Thus social mores would have evolved to give the God-King absolute sovereignty. With the passage of time, the wisest and strongest of such sovereigns were to establish Dynasties, some of which enjoyed extraordinary status, wealth and power for centuries.

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One Man's View - Robin A McQueen