Lately, I’ve been watching the Mentalist again on Amazon Prime Video. In many episodes, you’ll hear Patrick Jane (a.k.a. Simon Baker) saying: “There’s no such thing as a psychic”. Still, people around him continue believing that he actually is. His denial is fruitless. This observation brings me to today’s blog title: People need and want to believe.
On 19 September 2016, I published my first blog on this topic: The 7 Belief systems – Needs, Wants and Beliefs. It took me several months to realise that there is another level above: an Awakening (my 2017 blog). Remarkably, Needs Wants & Beliefs (my blogs) are collective development stages in societies, while an Awakening is an individual development stage.
Ever since, I’ve been wondering if there are more development stages and if an Awakening (my blogs) could ever become a collective development stage. Most likely, it would take a collective life-altering moment. Even the 2019 Covid pandemic did not qualify as such. Perhaps, a public visit of alien species could cause a collective life-altering moment. I’m not sure though.
All lifeforms have Needs (eg, food, shelter, water). Some lifeforms use tools to get what they Want (eg, monkeys, Wiki). Only humans have reached the 3rd collective development stage: Beliefs. There are, however, indications that animals also show religious behaviour (eg, Atlantic, BBC, Wiki). A more common animal belief system would – obviously – be Love.
The observation in today’s blog title (ie, People need and want to believe) was an eye-opener to me. Once again, it suggests a complexity bias (my blogs) in Life. I cannot believe (sic!) that Beliefs are the ultimate collective development stage. Hence, my continued search for the next collective development stage (eg, afterlife, Awakening, transhumanism, wisdom).
While writing the previous paragraph, I suddenly realised that transhumanism (my blogs) might be the next collective development stage because technology is – basically – a sophisticated set of tools. Essentially, transhumanism is a (philosophical) belief about integrating technology in the human body for expanding its capabilities and/or restricting its limitations.
Slowly, our lives are becoming (fully) dependent on technology (eg, electricity, smartphone, WiFi). Yet, technology still seems to run a parallel course in our lives. Nevertheless, people need and want to believe in technology. Transhumanism would merge these parallel courses.
“It’s a burden to us even to be human beings – men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.” A quote from the 1864 novel Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), a Russian writer and philosopher.
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