Celestine ‘took the bait’ offered by Gabriel, asking, “If I understand properly, you are claiming that our species is inherently violent and generally without moral fiber whenever we deal with an ‘out group.’ Being of similar mind and heart, I feel all of us listening must be sharing a most unpleasant realization that our species is morally defective at its innermost core. As ‘men the physical creatures’, we are naturally self-centered, are ignitable so to consciously agree to commit mass persecution and murder under both manifest social compulsion and opportunistic expansion into a large geoniche. And it has nothing to do with stresses of the modern world. Genocide may be an intentionally created political action driven by greed and hate or genocide may occur without prior intent after a severe episode of an environmental cataclysm or famines. Gabriel, are we lost forever?”
It took some time for Celestine to finish for big tears had begun to flow down her cheeks and she began sobbing. The room was deathly silent. Morgana who was sitting next to Celestine stood up and kneeled beside her holding both hands in hers. “Oh, Child, has a good cry for what you feel is not only disgust and despair, but, the broken hearts and broken bones of every single mother and father of your species. Merlin and I may only exist in the dreamworld, but we understand for our world mimics the physical psychologically.”
Morgana with tears in her own eyes, looked up pleadingly to her beloved, “Tristan, do not wait any longer, you must tell the children what Creation is about. What they must accomplish as a species. The pain they feel is breaking my own heart as it is breaking little Eleanor’s.”
Gabriel quickly interjected, “Tristan, this is not the time for such a disclosure. I must finish with my discourses on Good and Evil. Then, you can tell them. I am not providing you any other option.”
Tristan nodded, “You are correct, Gabriel. But, I will do what you ask in due time, darling.”
Morgana said, “OK, but I am going to make a Magick spell to lessen the wrenching pain of our children.” Tristan and Gabriel nodded yes and Morgana made such a spell. The students did not really feel a great decrease in the depth of their inner distress, but, now it was mingled with a good dose of old-fashioned human hope.
Gabriel began again, “I am sorry that what I must tell you are so utterly painful and shaming. But, if you do not go through this experience, if you fail to truly see the life that physical nature bequeathed upon you and forebears, then this universe is doomed until its end times.”
Gabriel looked around to see if everyone was all right and continued. “You must come to see that physical evolution is the original source of all man’s misbehavior. It is best not to imagine that man’s evil behaviors arise primarily from an aphysical, original, evil principle, as an Iblis, a Satan, or an Ahriman, predating mankind. It is simply the product of a large brain so to allow the merging of a common theory of mind, the fundamental instinctual drive compelling each to live, the instinctual drive to hoard, and an instinctual need to trust others so to feel psychologically secure day to day. All ingredients mixed into a functioning conscious psychological life with episodic memory and a genetic structure similar to our violent cousins, the chimpanzees.”
“Now, if personal and group greed and aggrandizements were the only bequests of Mother Nature to man the story would have terminated most unhappily for all. The redeeming virtue given to man was the need to feel safe and secure in a terribly dangerous environment. The only way humans, who are relatively defenseless creatures, can satisfy such need is to feel the necessity to band together in small parties so to secure food, shelter, protection, reproduction, and fabricate tools. The capacity to effectively bond to each other so to live communally is mediated on a very unique qualia, the capacity to innately trust your neighbors and have them trust you! For the success of any local society possessing common goals, mores, customs, taboos, and mythological beginnings is predicated on intragroup trust.”
“The reasons humans understand the qualia, trust, are because each one of us has personal experience with our conscious life, our similar genetic unconscious motivation, our archetypal dreams, and so on. As a child grows beyond its first years of socialization, he or she comes to see that those persons surrounding him or her seem to possess a similar psychology, similar fears, similar desires, similar goals, similar emotional responses and so on. Psychologists call this capacity, theory of mind. I call it the social theory of mind. I use the word, social, as much of the conscious content each of us possesses was taught to us by our educators, including, our mores, social customs, and taboos.”
“I imagine all of you are saying to yourself, well, this makes sense to me. But, there is more. Being able to have a social theory of mind so to learn to consciously trust your neighbor was a great intellectual advance. Without such, man would be an extinct species and not the founder of modern civilizations. I admit this is true, but, every benefit comes with a high price. The price being that the more similar the social theory of mind between persons, the closer the emotive resonance between such persons, such emotive resonance being our level of trust.”
“Socially-mediated resonance is supplemented by an evolutionarily earlier method to identity conspecific from other. Though, our species is essentially genetically similar, we do not look so similar secondary to subspecies specializations under environmental stressors. To each other, we appear to be different races of people because of such physical differences. And just as is the case in other mammals, sensory data is important, even smell, to distinguish conspecific from other. And more often than not, physical nonresonance assumes precedence over social customs and mores.”
“The result being that we do not trust strangers just because they look differently, act differently, and worship differently. At a very deep survival level, we do not trust strangers.”