living Authentically

A common definition of "authenticity" in psychology refers to the attempt to live one's life according to the needs of one's inner being, rather than the demands of society or one's early conditioning.

One of the things I really enjoy about animals in the wild is just how authentic they are. They have no religion or ideology. No superficial trends they need to follow to be socially accepted. They are free to live their lives according to their inner instincts. They live the way life bred them to live and not some superficial role society told them to fill.

This desire to be authentic was also described by philosopher/naturalist Henry Thoreau when he said “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Being authentic in this sense requires one to study what our inner being is with as little ideological/religious preconceptions as possible. The sciences of evolutionary psychology, positive psychology and human ethology can be tools of self discovery. It doesn't necessarily require one to abandon the benefits of society as Thoreau did. 

But why live authentically? I think we should strive to live authentically, because it leads to a more purposeful meaningful existence. The science of positive psychology has identified three modes of living that provide happiness which are as follows.

The pleasurable life, the pleasure seeking, sensation seeking  orientated life which is the most common and requires the least self knowledge. This mode also is the most fleeting and superficial and is the most vulnerable to external changes to your situation. It is also the most unsustainable and often comes at the expense of the well being of the next generation and the environment. This is the life consumerism and popular politics promises us.

The good life, the life of engagement refers to involvement in activities that draws and builds upon one's interests. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains true engagement as flow, a feeling of intensity that leads to a sense of ecstasy and clarity.The task being done needs to call upon higher skill and be a bit difficult and challenging yet still possible. Engagement involves passion for and concentration on the task at hand and is assessed subjectively as to whether the person engaged was completely absorbed, losing self-consciousness. This is a more fulfilling life than the pleasurable life. It is not as vulnerable to external changes and depending on the tasks one chooses to be engaged in can be unsustainable or sustainable.

The meaningful life, is also known as purpose, and prompts the question of "Why?" Discovering and figuring out a clear "why" puts everything into context from work to relationships to other parts of life. Finding meaning is learning that there is something greater than you. Despite potential challenges, working with meaning drives people to continue striving for a desirable goal. It questions how individuals derive a positive sense of well-being, belonging, meaning, and purpose from being part of and contributing back to something larger and more permanent than themselves. This can be the most fulfilling, sustainable and least vulnerable to external changes than the other two modes especially when the more sustainable aspects of the other two modes are incorporated.

Essential to the accurate discovery of your inner being will require knowledge of some of the essential facts of life the natural world has to teach us thus far. Such as:

• We owe our existence to the fact that every single one of our ancestors had at least one child before they died.
• We share a common ancestry with all living life forms.
• We are just one of many manifestations of life that has occurred over a trillion generations.
• We enjoy no special diplomatic immunity from the implacable laws of nature, that we are constructed entirely of of natural materials.
• Life is the drawing of energy from your surrounding to make copies of your particular pattern of natural materials.
• You are not a singular thing you are a multitude a vast cellular community of trillions of cells working together and your experience of the "self" is a product of 100 billion neurons working together.
•  We are animals which means we feed on other forms of life and transform their stored energy into our own form and behavior. 
• We are mammals and mammals specialize in two characteristics: adaptability and caring for dependent young. Mammals are the most adaptable vertebrates and human beings are the most adaptable mammals.
• We are primates and primates carry this mammalian specialty to a greater extreme by reproducing one very dependent child at a time and educating it to a greater degree than other mammals.
• Homo Sapiens specialize in sapience. Which is the acquisition and application of knowledge to produce innovations that increase our contributions to the next generation.
• We like all life forms must obey the law of life, or face biological non existence.

The meaningful life is likely the most fulling mode of life because human emotions find their cause in evolution and offers ways by which we can use this for our advantage.

More specifically, mammals are equipped with a nerve system that enables them to distinguish not only between pleasant and unpleasant sensations, but positive and negative experiences in general. While the biological term fitness refers to the capacity to create offspring, happiness (or sensation that follows increases to our survivability) is, at least in a biological perspective, a question of the qualities of the experiences our nervous system offers us.

The meaning of meaning the purpose of purpose the evolution of the psychological strength of the drive towards a meaningful mode of life exists because those of our ancestors who pursued with a spiritual zeal meaningful contributions were the most in sync with the law of life and passed this trait onto us. It is the legacy of our ancestors, to be passed to our descendants.

Your inner being was bred by nature to perpetuate itself into the future generations to live for any other purpose would be out of sync with your origins and ancestry and constitutes a distraction which can only result in a less than optimal life and the eventual end to the legacy of your ancestors.

Being authentic in part means internalizing your inner being to live a generative and meaningful life which in Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development, described generativity as a struggle against stagnation that ascends during adulthood. Generativity in the psychosocial sense refers to the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation and is said to stem from living one's life according to the needs of one's inner being which produces a sense of optimism about humanity.

The alternative is stagnation which refers to the failure to live authentically and find a way to contribute to the next generation. These individuals may feel disconnected or uninvolved with their community and with society as a whole. They may become uncomfortable with the way their life is progressing, and they're usually regretful about the decisions that they have made in the past and feel a sense of uselessness. They experience an all-encompassing form of existential anxiety, due to their failure to live a meaningful life and live authentically which as meant it means in sync with their inner being.

Law of Life

The Law of Life states that these biological imperatives are the needs of living organisms required to perpetuate their existence: to survive. Include the following hierarchy of logical imperatives for a living organism: survival, territorialism, competition, reproduction, quality of life-seeking, and group forming. Living organisms that do not attempt to follow or do not succeed in satisfying these imperatives are described as maladaptive; those that do are adaptive. Those that are adaptive will replace those that are maladaptive. It is inevitable mathematically and differences matter only in degree. This process called natural selection can occur over a single generation or a 100 generations.

Territorialism is a fairly fundamental feature of all living organisms, by simple virtue of the fact we live in a physical universe. Bacteria evidently acquire territory as they spread out in a Petri dish. Observing living organisms in nature suggests that the step before procreation is to establish a territory within which they may hunt, breed, and ensure the growth of their offspring.

Competition is one of the environmental factors that constitute natural selection. Individual organisms compete for food and mates; groups of living organisms compete for control of territory and resources; species though, do not so much compete, as passively adapt to their environment.

Reproductive biological imperative is important to the study of evolution. In order for species to persist, they must by definition reproduce to ensure the continuation of their species. Without reproduction the species ceases to exist. The capacity for reproduction and the drive to do so whenever physiological and environmental conditions allow it are universal among living organisms and are expressed in a multitude of ways by the spectrum of living organisms.

Relationships between potentially conflicting biological imperatives, such as self-preservation and reproduction are similarly resolved in an extraordinary variety of fashions by different organisms, from those who sacrifice themselves to procreate or increase the survival chances of their offspring to those who will abandon their descendants to their own luck when threatened so they may live and successfully procreate another day.

Notwithstanding the evolutionary emergence of conscious voluntary action in some forms of life, the urge to procreate is an involuntary and unconscious biological drive which first emerged as an inherent property of living cells and is echoed in the upper levels of organization of multicellular organisms.

In psychology, genetic imperative is important as a way of understanding family structure and gender interactions.

It has been theorized that genetic imperative is the basis for the dominance of polygyny over polyandry in most polygamous human cultures. The theory states that since it is biologically feasible for a male to impregnate many women in a shorter amount of time, while the female reproductive cycle is limited to intervals longer than nine months, the male genetic imperative compels males to seek multiple sexual partners, while the female genetic imperative compels the female to seek one male who will help with the process of bringing the child to adulthood.

Genetic imperative is also theorized to be the basis of exclusivity in sexual relationships. Since genetic imperative works in an organism by causing the organism to wish to spread its own genes, the organism tries to prevent other organisms from spreading their genes in the same territory. This behavior is theorized to be exhibited by humans in the exclusivity of many human sexual relationships, also known as monogamy.

The same theory can also be used to explain many other observed behaviors, especially relating to nutrition and available food sources. For example sheep (herbivores) killing animals and chewing on their bones to supply needed calcium for their diet. It is theorized that many of the cravings women sometimes have for strange foods during pregnancy can be attributed to important nutrients that are required.

A living organisms' need to improve their quality of life seems to serve the purpose of improving their chances of survival. Quality-of-life-seeking also includes reducing the levels of stress experienced by an individual organism. Stress can cause both physiological and mental illness. Stress can be due to crime: threat and acts against the person; threat and acts against property. Health in general comes under this category: individual organisms that seek to maintain and improve their health and future possible challenges are improving their chances of survival.

It is observable that most organisms form groups in order to enhance their chances of survival. Groups can be of simply two or of huge numbers. Group-forming is complex, and involves territorialism; notions of identity; culture. Group-forming is what leads us as humans to form families, clans, tribes, and nations.

This group-forming in Humans is the result of biology: due to the size of our brains, children are dependent on their parents for much longer than most animals; the result of this is that the biological couplings necessary for reproduction linger so that the parents can ensure the survival of the offspring.

This necessary time investment and larger brain-size, coupled with our ability to communicate precipitates the evolution of social constructions such as the family. After several generations, many more families exist with varied connections to each other; a common ancestry, evidenced by their phenotype can unites these clans. With the growing and healthy diversity of phenotype's the most accurate/reliable evidence would be the use of genealogical records with genetic genealogy.

More generations later with multiple clans, tribes form; then the non-biological group-forming can take place where tribes can split due to geography and demand for resources. As an aside, this is also the stage where different dialects of language forming.

As tribes enlarge, the benefits of being part of a larger group become evident and systems of managing these larger populations are required, this is the stage at which civilization begins to emerge. In primitive societies, religion fills this role: first animistic; later theistic. The earliest civilizations were these religious centers with influence emanating from an urbanized center. Such as at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, or in ancient Egypt.

This religious system perpetuated the essentially tribal systems of oligarchy and monarchy. Competition for resources and territory led to investment in knowledge-seeking; education precipitates the gradual evolution of economic systems and of democratic systems and of the nation.

The next logical step is the formation of an organised species-wide group, as population pressure compels the species to seek new resources and territory, and technology enables us to look beyond our current territory as a species to find new resources and territory beyond the Earth.

Living organisms enhance their survivability by acquiring information about their environment. Humans are not alone in their ability to acquire and exchange information and learn new skills. Termites build huge structures; bees dance; mating rituals are exchanges of information; otters, parrots and chimpanzees use tools and pass on this knowledge. Humans form religions as a way of managing a growing tribal group.

about Politicians

A politician is one who through the authority given them by their selectorate exercises governance/control over a community, but usually referring to  a level of government within a state. They determine the goals of a community and how to allocate resources for their achievement. For a politician to maintain its position or improve it they must ensure their selectorate benefits from their position, if they don't their particular selectorate will select another. For example lets take a look at our current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

He was selected to be leader of the Liberal Party by a majority vote of 300,000 Liberal Party members. Which is 0.84% of the Canadian population. The Liberal Party selected him because he was the most likely to get the support of national voters in mild agreement to Liberal Priorities, but not actual members of the Liberal Party mostly due to his campaign donations and his personality. As leader of the Liberal Party which is his selectorate he is expected to reallocated government spending according to their priorities.

So Justin Trudeau selectorate consists of primarily the Liberal Party who selected him as leader. Secondarily it consists of the 6.8 million people who voted for him. I should point out however that 10.6 million voted for someone who wasn't Liberal candidate and 8.1 million chose not to vote at all.

To maintain his position he has to be better than any alternative leadership hopeful to the members of the Liberal party, and also be able to raise enough campaign donations and win enough support from enough voters.

While we are discussing the Liberal party I should take some time to explain what they are. The Liberal party is made of people who share a Canadian flavor of the Liberal ideology. An ideology is a set of preferences of how society operates and how it should be organized. This is distinct from how societies actually operate and which type of organization strategy is evolutionarily stable and sustainable for generations. Liberals are a type of idealist. Most idealist are taught to have a certain set of ideological preferences from their parents, media, and educators. Their ideologies are fully intellectually/emotionally integrated into their minds in very early adult hood, which gives them little time to empirically verify them. Ideologies follow the same process of intellectual/emotional mental integration as religions. As opposed to naturalism where naturalists employ the scientific method to determine what they ought to prefer and that a society organizational strategy must be evolutionarily stable and sustainable. Idealists prefer moral/emotional reasoning to the scientific method. Idealists are well known for exaggerating evidence that supports their preferences and understating or rejecting any evidence that contradicts their preference usually falling back on moral/emotional reasoning when forming their rebuttals. Idealists also have the tendency to think that their ideology has been "proven by history" and has the support of "the evidence". This is easy to state when you reject everything that contradicts it.

Integrity and honesty is not a word most people use to describe politicians. I'm not sure this is fair to politicians, because of the idealism of their selectorate. Their political survival demands finding optimum policies and positions which satisfies the fiveish levels of their selectorate in following order of importance;

1. Party members
2. Campaign contributors
3. Your riding voters
4. Other voters
5. Potential voters

Not all of these five groups have the same set of preferences even though their is likely a lot of overlap. On occasion a politician must alienate a lesser selectorate group for the sake of gaining support from a more influential selectorate group and hopes the lesser either forgets or forgives. A politician who fails to do this risks being replaced by a politician who will. Their survival as politician depends on this. A politician who makes decisions using the scientific method will alienate the idealists who form the majority of the selectorate. Despite the fact that decisions made using the scientific method are usually more reliable in their outcomes than those not using evidence. Politicians have to respect and consider the popular prejudices and biases of their selectorate or end their careers.

Political parties compete with one another for the support of people. They select politicians that they feel will help them do this. In places where there is free speech they do this by investing in media that supports the party and divests in media that doesn't support the party. They seek to influence that curriculum of schools. The party that can get the schools and media on their side they will be more successful. Maybe even successful enough to marginalize competing parties so effectively that they become the sole party. Political parties will use the media and tax dollars to promote the view that their political party is responsible for every success in the country and they are the most qualified to deal any preceived social justice issues and standard of life issue. Political parties do not empirically measure the effectiveness of their policies. Their conclusions are completely ideological.

An understanding of the nature of politicians is critical for the health of a nation and if we are actually going to get the results intended by the policies put forth by politicians in reality. The quality of of the politicians/policies is directly related to the math/science education level, commitment to realism versus idealism and a strong preference for generationally sustainable policies of the voters.