The life-giving cultural sorting of the USA

by Gunnar Adler-Karlsson [adler.karlsson@capri.it]

Those who would love to see their fellowmen live and not die should bless and not condemn the United States. Why? Because it is the combination of bad US imperialism and equally bad US discrimination which leads to that cultural sorting inside Superbrains which gives us our lives.

When the United States was about to send its elite soldiers to Afghanistan president Bush gave them a “pep talk” in which he said: “We in the United States are in no way the first who have increased our power in the world. It has always been an established rule that the weaker is kept down by the stronger. We might even be worthy to have this global hegemony. We might even be a bit commended. Because even if we, too, have yielded to the instinct of human nature to rule over others, the United States has been more observant of justice than we might have been, considering our power. If others should seize our power, they would, we think, like Stalin and Hitler, exhibit the best proof that we show some moderation; but in our case the result of our very reasonableness is, perversely enough, obloquy rather than commendation.”

This quote does not come from Bush. With some small changes, it is 2.430 years older. Thucydides (Loeb 108, p. 129) let an Athenian man say so when he wanted to defend the imperial policy of Athens as an expression of “the instinct of human nature to rule over others”.

So it may be. Today you can find scientists who claim that “dominance behaviour”, like sex and hunger, belong to our most deeply founded behavior in the “reptile brain”.

Secondly, the USA is not only imperialistic. It would give much work to a Swedish “discrimination ombudsman”. In some student papers, for instance, a company for in vitro fertilization looked for egg donations from young ladies with high IQ and sexy curves. Should that really be permitted? No, said some of the members of president Bush’s new “Bioethical Council”. Well, said the chairman, then you may also want to have egg donations from women with known genetic diseases? You say no! Then, where do you want to draw the line?

We in Europe often condemn the United States for its discrimination between different people. There also intelligence testing is fully normal. Entering universities is based on IQ-tests. Companies use “IQ-consultants” who are specialists on knowing about how high an IQ-level an employee should have for a given job.

This can take place because we now know that we are not fully as equal as nice declarations of human rights tell us. Genetic research has shown us that between any two unrelated human beings there are between three and six million differences in our alleles or gene variations, affecting physical and mental capacities.

What is called discrimination may, however, often also be termed cultural sorting. That, to me, is the third step in the long history of mankind.

About four billion years ago, the first life emerged in the form of bacteria. Evolution has required such a long time in order to create us “inflated bacteria”.

Three million years ago, man and the chimpanzee had the same brain volume. They still have about 400 centilitres. We have got one litre more. That is the result of a natural selection that has made us the lords of the earth.

But what is it that during the latest 40 years has given life to equally many new human beings, three thousand millions, as we had during all of our earlier existence, some five million years? What is it the in only forty years has been equally “life giving” as five million unconscious evolution?

Answer: the conscious cultural sorting that has taken place, most consciously in the multinational Superbrains of the United States. That, at least, is my hypothesis.

Sorting of what?

It took nature three million years to increase the brain volume of a human individual by one litre of grey matter. If you unite the individual brains with 1500 centilitres each and you get them to function as one, then we have achieved an increase in the volume of the intelligence base that is three times bigger than that, given by three million years of individual growth.

Behind a verbal veil of mist of terms like “knowledge society, human capital, brain capacity, brain drain and network” what really takes place is a “cultural sorting” of the measurable and highly unequal human intelligence. With about half of the inequality biologically inherited.

Openly in the United States but, if more hidden in this mist, also in our European multinational companies, thousands and hundred thousands of highly gifted brains are united in a similar manner and stimulated to function as brain cells, neurones, inside what I, in my latest two books, have termed “co-thinking Superbrains”.

Out of these emerge most of those innovations which during the latest forty years have more than doubled the production of food on our globe and thus permitted 200,000 new children to survive each single day. It is also through the global networks of these imperialistic companies that this food could be distributed to the poor of the world. Extreme hunger today exists only in nations which are engaged in warfare or in a few remaining communist nations.

Conclusion: The sum of American imperialism and discrimination or, what is the same thing, its global power and conscious sorting of men and women with different physical and mental capacities has, in only forty years, created a global economic power which has been equally “life-giving” as that, which evolution took five million years to give to mankind.

More than anything else, it is this American creation of “cultural sorting within co-thinking Superbrains” that has given three thousand million new children after 1960 their lives.

Thus, those who would love to see their fellowmen live and not die should bless and not condemn the United States.

This article was first published in the Swedish Financial Times, “Finanstidnigen”, Febr. 5th, 2002 with the title: “USA - Our Genetic Destiny”