The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Mankind

Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999

When we have gone, will anyone recognize the signs of us in the rocks?

The Existence Theorem is: Societies can prosper with advanced technology. Our fate is to falsify it! If intelligent dinosaurs, anthroposaurs, destroyed their world 65 million years ago and we too are heading for extinction, history is repeating itself—the Existence Theorem is bunk! Professor Norman Dixon thinks so. He writes:

Man + Technology = Extinction

If the Existence Theorem is true, mankind must change. Yet where is the will to? Do we suffer from the affliction of the anthroposaurs and perhaps all intelligent life forms—a self-destructive syndrome that is a sine qua non of intelligence? A syndrome to which its victims are blind. Many have prophesied the coming catastrophe but no one hails them for their forethought—they are ignored or condemned. Have we a legacy from the dinosaurs? A dinosaur heritage?

In our mechanized, urban societies we have lost our psychic link with the rest of the biosphere. We are selfish and obsessed with dead things: material possessions and mechanical devices, cars, TVs, computers and washing machines, and conform mechanically with our hierarchies and rituals. We unaware of the stench of death around us and even revel in it. We are necrophiles. Fromm warned us ’Long live death’ has become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to machines.

Have some human qualities, once valuable to survival, become so ill-fitted to the needs of technological man that they now threaten us? The speed at which technological society emerged created conditions quite different from those in which instincts evolved. Selfishness might once have had survival value but has no longer. Its natural restraints fail to operate adequately in our coddled environment—selfishness has become obsessive. Obsessions overwhelm all other drives and ultimately become destructive. Selfishness now contradicts self regard by being self destructive! It has become a death wish. Yet our society rewards the selfish, the obsessive. How else would we come by entrepreneurs, politicians, generals, scientists? We have a very odd civilization indeed! Through maladaptation we have become necrophiles—and the most necrophilous of all are our leaders.

The left brain is generally responsible for rational thinking and the right brain for intuitive. Until about 3000 years ago social rules of behaviour emerged from the right brain which processed one’s experience and returned its findings as dreams thought to be from the gods. Formal societies, writing and eventually technology eschewed intuition and replaced it by the left brain directives of priests and politicians. In the modern world the rational side overwhelms the intuitive side. Witness the hostility of orthodox thinkers to original thinkers. Yet intuition is more likely to give advanced warning of impending problems. Reason cannot accept that anything is wrong until the full chain of logic is evident. Try to question experts or warn politicians, express right brain values and out come the establishment assassins.

The left brain thrives on detail rather than seeing the whole. It ignores the mass in favour of self, even when self is part of the mass and inevitably must suffer with it—obsessive selfishness! We demand ever higher standards of living even though continuous economic growth must destroy the planet and us with it. Today’s industrialist or politician cannot be squeamish about pollution, a few broken animals or people. Left brain logic demands more efficiency, higher productivity, less interference. Yet it is the left hemisphere that is truly illogical—it will kill us all. The left brain analyzes in academic detail the tiger’s fur, tail, muscles, camouflage, claws and teeth. It debates endlessly about their functions and importance. But it cannot see the whole animal licking its lips! Only the right brain sees the whole tiger and the danger it poses!

The syndrome might be more deeply seated. The reptilian (R-)complex in the forebrain is present in all vertebrates above the reptiles but not in amphibians or fish. It may be the source of behaviour which is irrational and inappropriate in technological society—aggression, territoriality, social hierarchy and ritual. Worse! Are we are set in primitive behaviour patterns because the R-complex has taken control of the left brain like some mad hacker’s computer virus? Is the left brain controlled by our most primeval instincts? Has our intuition all the while been trying to warn us? The right brain is mute and can only give images, mystical impressions and dreams. Nightmares, monsters, apparitions, hauntings and the menagerie of paranormal creatures that loom out of the night, might be right brain warnings of a threat from something intangible... because it is within. Subliminal awareness of UFO abductions could be the right brain’s way of saying that a real monster is indeed abducting us—inside our heads! Will it destroy us as it did the dinosaurs?

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.

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