The Cockroach Theory of History, Or Why Christianity Is Wrong

The “burned in” impression most people have, whether atheist or Christian, is that if you condemn Christianity, you are also condemning the Bible. That is not correct. The reason should be explained simply enough.

“Nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. because if it’s provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it’s provably true, then the existence of God is proven, and there’s no reason for faith”.

From the point of view of the superorganism, “faith” is one of the best things it ever came up with to sustain itself. If you could neither prove nor disprove a thing, and if that required faith, then your entire social form could be maintained without proof. Everything could be organized around self consistent, self referencing principles that were accepted because the group selectively accepted them.

What is the best meme for collective survival and perpetuation? One which demands that choices be made that ensure perpetual survival in the future. Michael Shermer writes in How We Believe:

“…religious memes are like computer viruses that contain a ‘copy me’ program not unlike those irritating chain letters or virus ‘warnings’ that command you to ‘copy and distribute’ the document. If you do, happiness and success will be abundant. If you do not, misery and failure will be your fate. From an early age children are brought up by their Catholic parents to believe that if they break certain rules they will burn in hell forever after death.The children cannot easily test this since either hell nor God can be seen, although He can see everything they do. So they must simply live in life-long fear until death, where they will find out for sure or not(a form of Pascal’s wager). The idea of hell is thus a self perpetuating meme”.

Obviously the reason why it is self perpetuating is that it can never be proven nor disproven, and those who choose to believe will be in endless debate against those who choose not to believe. How is it resolved? By a proselytizing battle between those who believe, and those who do not believe. The meme, like an organism, evolves defenses against all attacks to eliminate it. This is what I called in 1980 the “cockroach theory of history“. The more you try to kill off cockroaches by poison, the stronger they get against the poison, until it has little effect. In fact, the very attempt to poison them will likely affect the prodigious rate of their reproduction. The genetic adaptive response is to reproduce as many cockroaches as possible, so that statistically, they will evolve genes that are resistant to the poisons.

This follows the statement made by Howard Bloom earlier, regarding “conformity enforcers” and “diversity generators”.

In memes, the conformity enforcer acts to create “cookie-cutter molds” that function by a common language(DNA transmission), and then pull the crowds together so they become so large that no single individual can see the larger scheme in its entirety.The “true believer’ then realizes that he alone cannot understand this great mystery, but “together, we can go forth and realize the true goal”. The self-replicating unity depends on the inability to prove/disprove the organizing belief.

With the “diversity generator”, each individual represents a “hypothesis’ in the communal mind. This, said Bloom is seen easily in the immune system, that generates diversity in order to recognize and neutralize threats to its functions. For the lowly cockroach, this “hypothesis” , called an individual cockroach, will represent slight differences in the strategy of the immune system to survive. It will likely mutate and reproduce rapidly, and the effects are tested statistically against it survival rate. The greater the attempt to eradicate it by poison, the larger the population of cockroaches.

If this sounds like I am reaching for a “mind’ that doesn’t exist, I would point out conclusions reached in the study of a concept known as the “hive mind”. Researchers took a pan of sugar water and placed it near to a beehive. Once the bees began to depend on this source for their honey, the researchers moved the pan a measured distance farther away from the hive.

The bees began a kind of individual exploratory behavior, after which they found the newly located pan, and bean to congregate there. With each move, the bees had to search for the pan, but after a time, the “hive mind’ was able to calculate the measured distance the researchers moved the pan in advance, and they were found waiting for the pan to be moved at each interval.

In experiments with humans, it was discovered that groups of humans could guess at finite quantities, such as the number of jelly beans in a jar, and by taking an average of their guesses, the total was amazingly accurate.

The diversity generator, therefore, acts to create individual “hypothesis” in the form of cockroach or honeybee, which acts as a form of exploratory behavior for statistical analysis.

In like manner, humans will tend to base their faith on statistical analysis consciously, concluding that “all those people can’t be wrong”. The fact is, there is no way to prove whether they are wrong or right, so the “faith” is maintained and only proven by death. Since there is nothing certain but death and taxes, religions place their certainty on death, and bet that their truth is correct. The “attacks” of the atheists will be perceived consciously as the immune system responds to poison in the cockroach. The “immunity” of the faith becomes stronger in defense against the atheist ‘attacks”.

On the other hand, the atheist, will see it as his/her duty to attack the sensibilities of the religionist, in order to prove that he, the atheist, is correct, yet neither of them can be proven correct. The strength of the meme is increased to the point that neither atheist nor theist has much to do with reality. Both are self-perpetuating memes in which the individual responds to “inner circuitry”. The battle rages over justification of particular beliefs rather than an open examination of what might be true in any larger sense.

The superorganism profits by this genetically because it can focus on perpetuation of the genes in a non-changing manner, building consensus on collective reality by an unchanging moral code. The greater the cultural focus on “internal circuitry”, the greater the gene’s ability to replicate itself with minimal change.

The apparent superiority of human minds and social systems actually do depend largely on narcissistic impulses, the ability to “numb” the mind to ideas that tend to threaten worldviews. This has developed largely by virtue of the immune system. For example:

fear of death: expansion of the immune system’s need for perpetuation to the level of conscious awareness.
paranoia: immune system’s need to protect ourselves from threats of others
agoraphobia or most any phobia: expansion of the immune system to conscious awareness.
xenophibia, the fear of those who are different, works quite well for the genetic replicative integrity of the gene.
OCD, the need for control and ritualized order of everything in our environment, again works well for the immune system.

These are all manifestations of the “diversity generators” those individual hypotheses that are born into life and operate according to certain judgemental functions that seek to perpetuate self. That “self” which expands itself most successfully into the environment is selected in favor of less successful strategies. Religious memes, the “copy me” command at the social level, are most effective in those areas which can never be proven. Once statistically successful, the masses are reluctant to believe otherwise, and the gene replicates with relative ease.

Once the meme selects to statistical success, the more people who agree, the greater the perpetuation and control of the meme. This means that as certain fears generated by the immune system reach collective awareness, the group will extend strategies to perpetuate itself against environmental threats.These strategies are first ritualized as religion, or rites of passage, or those ceremonies that allow the child to become a reproductive part of his/her culture. They remain embedded in our natures for cultural security.

Science however, by ignoring the lowly response of the cockroach, failed to realize that our successful attempts to protect ourselves by immunizing ourselves and developing antibiotics would have the effect of expanding the strategies of those same diseases that threaten us.

In fact, the better we became at immunizing ourselves against bacterial and viral threats, the more we weakened our adaptive response against them, because germs evolve their survival strategies the same as cockroaches. The same process operates at all levels of existence.

“From whence come wars and fightings among you?…”(James 4:1)

The “wars and fightings” increase as our intelligence increases, because intelligence is linked to the immune system. If we cannot achieve the dream we hop for ourselves, it is possible, by extension of “faith”, to achieve those dreams in another world where all things will be revealed.  Even though we die meaninglessly as individuals, our lives have meaning for the “greater good”, the statistical extension of the immune system.

Jesus, whoever or whatever his true reality, was smart enough to realize that if his message proved successful, it would simply operate by the same strategies as all survival mechanisms. If he sought reproductive success for his ideas here and now, those ideas would be hi-jacked by the “superorganism”, and it would immediately begin generating diverse ideas about God, to see which one worked best for the largest perpetuation of the genes.

In fact, a study of history leading up to an following the time of Jesus, there was an explosion of competing ideas about righteousness and the kingdom of God, which included not only the battle between numerous Jewish concepts, but among those who began breaking away into a more “universal” view of God. “Wars and rumors of wars”. That’s why, in Matthew 10:34-38, Jesus predicted the result of splintering and speciation of those who attempted to follow him by usual means of human reasoning. This has a purpose which is suitable to the “diversity generator”. As Howard Bloom writes, it serves evolutionary purposes:

“…in pitting father against son, and brother against brother, it opens up new avenues to genes, clans, cliques, and species. it slices through genetic bonds to generate diversity”.

Toffler writes in Future Shock:

“This split-up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms”.

So again we arrive at the core of Paul’s teachings, Romans 8:7. If the carnal, or natural mind is enmity against God, it will produce exactly the same diversity described by Toffler above, and by Jesus in Matthew 10:34-38. This inevitably leads us to Matthew 24:23: “Then if any man says to you, Lo, here is Christ , or there, believe it not.