Survival is not the driving force behind humanity.... no human in the history of time has ever survived. The real issue for humanity is that people should do whatever they understand to be the right thing to do from their own perspective and from the perspective of the society in which they live. Yes, longevity of life is desirable.... but anyone who sees their life as merely survival is deluded on the grounds that they will, beyond all doubt, die at some point, and that it is preferable to die for what you believe in rather than to die because you simply failed to survive. The survival principle, in this sense, is what gives rise to negative behaviour within society becasue people will act at a detriment to others to ensure their own economic survival, or the survival of their own quality of life. Living in a western society, I have to say that there are not many threats to my immediate survivial, and that as long as I strive to understand further the society in which I live, then this survival is not likely to be threatened by any new unseen quantity.
Hitler was a proponent of survival of the fittest, as was Stalin, Napoleon, Mussolini, Chilean Junta, and pretty much any other regime that used the survival tag to justify and authorise the killing of the weak facets of society. And just say that my survival was threatened.... I still wouldn't see myself as a survivor.... I'd see myself as a fighter... and I would fight to the death, basically because fighting for what you believe in transcends any notion of survival.
On this point, I will finish by saying that the survival instinct was someting that came out of Darwin's evolutionary theory, but in the light of humanity, it must be applied to the survival of ideas and theories. This is how Newton has survived, how Einstein has survived, how Darwin has survived. All are dead, but all survive.  |