The Urgent Necessity for “Sapiens Union”
All Terrestrial beings now share the same destiny that is leaden by sapiens, whether towards common destruction or common bliss. All humans are now linked together in a collective civilization that reaches around the entire Earth. But, shamefully, we don’t use this evolutionary trait to develop the best prosperous ever imagined sapiens civilization. Actually, the tool (democracy) we are supposed to use to achieve this is even more fragile than ever. Nevertheless, there are places on Earth where that’s absolutely not true. Where every individual has a voice. Where corruption is unknown. Where the community acts only when it has arrived at a consensus through reason and debate. I am not talking about a fictional utopia, but a humble beehive. Contrary to popular belief, the hive is no monarchy. The queen is no absolute ruler controlling the other bees, she has just the reproductive role. That all makes primitive insects societies more democratic than most of the sapiens’ ones. Here is an example of how a hive’s society works.
When a hive decides it’s time to leave the mother hive to find a new colony, the scouts reconnoiter the local trees for the best possible new home, and they’re extremely picky. Close scientific observation over many decades affirms this astonishing fact, each bee has a platonic ideal of home in mind. Each scout must measure the exact dimensions, height, width, and depth. If it’s even slightly too small, or too large, the entire swarm will be wiped out before the next spring.
When all the scouts return, the bees are ready to hold their annual convention. Each scout finds a place to stand on the swarm. There, she presents her argument for the best site she has discovered. This house-hunting discourse is conducted in their scientific and mathematical language. At first, opinions differ widely, as each advocate persuades her share of followers. At our political conventions, people routinely lie. They press our buttons, demonizing, scapegoating, appealing to our fears. But the bees can’t risk that. In both cases, ours and theirs, the future depend on seeing reality clearly. But for some reason, we easily let ourselves to be manipulated and deceived. The bees somehow know that they have to stick to the facts. They have to be accurate. They can’t oversell, and they act as if they understand that it matters what’s true.
The scouts who have found the optimum sites for the swarm’s new home are the most passionate ones. Moreover, the members of the swarm don’t take the testimony of the most popular scouts on faith. Many of them go to see for themselves. Skepticism is a survival mechanism. The fact-checkers fly off to the site to make an independent evaluation. If the hollow turns out to be as good as advertised, they will return to the swarm, where they, too, will tell its praises. Without deceit, or violence, or back-hive deals, the scouts are the first to arrive at a consensus. But the larger population remains to be persuaded. Once they all align behind one dance, once they’ve achieved unanimity on the best new place to call home, the great migration can begin.
All humans need to take part in making their destiny, and if we are going anyway towards a dystopian apocalypse, at least we deserve to have a say in it. Humans have done so far a lot of changes in the world, and the largest portion of them are undeniably catastrophic ones. The dangers posed by nuclear war, global pandemics, environmental devastation, biodiversity loss, or climate change harm every living. As we acting right now like toddlers who found a vast playground full of magical toys, with no instructions or restrictions for the way we should play with them. Thus, we need to contemplate drawing up our own guidelines. The current political and economic systems don’t care so much about the greatest possible good for the largest number of people, and I don’t need to mention animals or the environment. We are now in the matter of a tiny percentage of humans determining the upcoming destiny of not just humans but all our planet’s living creatures.
If we waited to see what’s going to solve these problems, probably we won’t see anything before we witness the death of our planet. And even if there are some honest individuals’ or organizations’ attempts to solve the minor issues, we will not be able to see the true change unless all humans desiderate and carry out this change. The neoliberal capitalist movement is towards transforming the entire world into the largest factory of power and money, using all other possible means their eyes could look upon, including their own species. Most political governments that controlling the world today are supporting the neoliberal movement not because it’s the best economic system humans had come up with, but because this rapacious system is the most beneficial one to them.
Could you see what I am trying to tell you? We live in a world where we choose so-called trustable representatives who deliver our so-called authentic voices to the decision-makers so we live in a so-called democratic fantastic world. While actually what happens is just the decision-makers (capitalists) only care about their desires- the economic system, the political system, the military system, and even the educational system. And from time to time they shush us by fulfilling one or two of our rights like slavery, women's rights, and feudalism.
This system is the reason for our suffrage from the current global pandemic. You probably positive by now that COVID-19 isn’t a result of a biological weapon or an evil conspiracy, but it doesn’t mean that this misery wasn’t anyone’s fault. As Noam Chomsky says that “It’s another colossal failure of the neoliberal version of capitalism”. If we are not going to stop them, it’s going to recur worse next time. After the SARS epidemic in 2003, the scientists knew perfectly well that other pandemics were coming. It would have been possible to prepare an initial vaccine or hospital equipment at that point, like how it’s done with the flu. However, it wasn’t done, because market signals told them there’s no profit to be made in preparing for catastrophe in the distant future. Governments are standing idly by this situation; they aren’t allowed to do anything. Here we can clearly see as Chomsky said that “governments are the problem, not the solution”.
The revolt depends on how the global population will react to what is happening. We can’t exclusively blame governments and capitalists, as we are also guilty of letting them manipulate and tamper with our inclinations. Because this current condition could lead to highly authoritarian, repressive states which expand the neoliberal plague even more than has happened. In fact, they’re working on it right now. They’re calling for more funding for fossil fuels, destroying regulations that offer some protection.
If we want to get humanity through this miserable state of its maturity journey, we need to unite our purposes and efforts to catch up with the accelerating pace of this unprecedented change of this life extortion. This unification is more urgent than ever before. It is also inevitable. If we didn’t unite ourselves, they will unite us as their slaves under their conditions. We should take a beehive as a model for our societies. All of us pursue the supreme good for the world, all of us debate and argue to arrive at a compromised consensus, not the majority’s opinion, and all of us use skepticism about every given to find the truth. Like the swarm, humanity is a kind of mind, a collective consciousness to which every individual sapiens makes a contribution. I can’t tell what it would be this one supreme good or these better economic and political systems, and neither can anyone because this mutual fate needs all of us to participate and contribute in defining it, and all other aspects of life. If there is a certain thing I am sure of is that our existence depends on our collaboration.