I was watching the final part of Andrew Marr's "History of the World" last night, its been an interesting series tracking the progress of Homo-sapiens from when we first emerged from Africa to the present day. In many ways I agree with his final commentary which (summarised) was that our scientific and technological progress has been amazing (once the crippling retardants of religion and superstition were marginalised) but our political progress has been much less impressive.
I was thinking about why this might be, it seems to me that we invariably go astray when we put too much faith in people (and their delusions) over evidence. The programme last night focused on the 20th century and posed the question "how and why did a loser like Hitler manage to create such a cult of personality and achieve absolute power over millions?" I'm sure the answer to that question is complex, but I think there's value in examining our inherited social primate instincts; these behaviours are still very powerful and clearly we haven't travelled the long road out of Eden fully yet, even though many might think we have. We all know what it feels like to do something stupid against our better judgement and innate morality just so that we can feel part of the in-group. It must have happened on a grand scale in Germany in the 30s but we can see it going on around us all the time. Take the current storm in the BBC, I still can't quite figure out how the mishandling of a particular story by one programme team could amount to such a crisis and why there seems to be a lemming like wave of people falling on their swords right now? Has some internal spell been broken has the fog of delusion cleared exposing the blade edge of reality. Just like the fate of every other in-group there has ever been, has the cult of "Auntie" reached its inevitable end?
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