It's All about Survival and Reproduction

It is interesting to see an ant running around—busy—looking for food, biting another ant, running away from another, or mounting another in apparent copulation.
As you go higher up to the human animal, the same busyness seems to be the order of the day: feeding, fighting, fleeing or finding a mate. It seems then that feeding, fighting and fleeing are basic ingredients for survival, and finding a mate leads to reproduction/replication.

Whatever form of any activity, it is seemingly a function of the four Fs. If evolution posits that life, as we know it in our planet, began from a “primordial soup” of chemicals—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen—and developed over millions of years by fits and turns, trials and errors, it follows that the successful life is the one that has the best capacity or code to survive and reproduce. Scientists tell us that this capacity for survival and reproduction has been encoded by natural selection into the DNA. In other words, each act of the four Fs is on behalf of the DNA to survive and reproduce: may the best one win!

Considering that the said coding took millions and millions of years to refine, it is very powerful and grips us like an iron vice. When we are surprised by our sometime out-of-control actions, it is because we have not taken stock. Of course, there are some actions which are beyond the pale, and they are more a function of miscoding apart from the norm.

Superimposed on the four Fs is Consciousness, which is a construct of the mind, which is a construct of the brain (mainly, but probably emanates from every cell of the body, in part). From consciousness we get freewill and self-awareness. With freewill and self-awareness we figured out that, to successfully operate the four Fs, beyond the vagaries of randomness, we needed to Belong, to Distinguish ourselves or Excel, to gain Group Approval, to Care for one another, and to obey Authority. These again are characteristics developed over millions of years and are observable in living things, including humans.

Over time we also developed civilization and technologies that continue to serve us. In the meantime the four Fs have not gone away, however sophisticated we think we are. They can sneak up on us in the form of greed, gluttony, obesity, oppression, wars, slavery, anger, hatred, ethnic cleansing, fear, rapes and other bad behaviors in all their guises.

So, when a congressman or senator is caught with his pants down, and abruptly resigns or fights shamelessly for his job, we slap our heads and ask: what was he thinking?!

When the so-called most powerful man in the world dips a cigar into the womanhood of an intern, we slap our heads and ask: what was he thinking?!

When a self-proclaimed revolutionary president concocts a rape case against his opponent, we slap our heads and ask: what was he thinking?!

When the same revolutionary president demeans his predecessors, but a few years later, he is doing the same horrid things against the people, we slap our heads and ask: what is he thinking?

Overall, when we go into a shouting match, when we beat up or even kill a spouse, when we steal from the poor, when we cast our votes against our obvious self-interests, when we spread rumors, when we revel in conspiracy theories, the underlying motivations can be found in the four Fs.

So, are we helpless? No. By free-will and self-awareness we can be conscious of the automatic tendencies of the four Fs. We can then be able to call on our civilization and technological advances to come to our aid. It is a process. Gradually we become less destructive to ourselves and others, and, hopefully, act more mindfully and elegantly in our survival and reproductive quest on behalf of the mighty DNA.