As The Last Faith professes, levels of Freedom of Choice on Earth are constantly increasing (fluctuations notwithstanding) by virtue of the Law of Humandynamics (see: “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer”). As a consequence, levels of acceptance and tolerance in society are also growing: political, religious, racial, cultural, sexual and many others.

The reader will no doubt make the same conclusion by simply observing how life has changed over the past few years and/or by comparing the acceptance and tolerance levels of various historical periods to the present times.

Growth in levels of Freedom of Choice and tolerance is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Whereas previously, one would have to review quite a large period of time, at least several decades, in order for change to be visible, now, similar change can be perceived with every passing year.

How does the Law of Humandynamics work? Recognising the undeniable fact of a growth in moral virtues from one generation to the next and the accumulation of humanistic principles in society, one might be tempted to believe that each succeeding generation is born smarter and kinder than the one before it.

Is there a physiological explanation for the buildup in one generation of the experience of previous generations? Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there is not.

The most in-depth research shows that there is no spiritual or intellectual difference between a statistically average child born in a primitive tribe in the Amazon Jungle and an average child born in the centre of contemporary London. Similarly, there is no such difference between a child of the present day and a child of say, one hundred years ago. Judging from the methodical observations of teachers of that time, junior schoolchildren solve the same mathematical tasks today just as well or as poorly as their peers of a century ago. There is every reason to believe that no significant change has taken place in this regard over the past thousand years.

In order to understand more fully why humanity’s sense of moral ethic develops, we must first look at the cases in which it is compromised and the influencing factors that bring that change to bear.

It is a well-known fact that when a small group of people finds themselves in the wild, isolated from the rest of the world as the consequence of a shipwreck or other disaster, the moral virtues to which they have adhered throughout their previous life up to this moment are almost instantly swept aside. The individual’s entire expression of Freedom of Choice is directed exclusively towards securing the survival of self and family, if they are still together, in other words, towards Gene Preservation. In cases of extreme hunger, people will not only steal food from one another, they will go as far as to commit murder or an act of cannibalism. There are numerous accounts of such cases, in literature and particularly in documentary sources.

Lord of the Flies, the wonderful, allegorical novel by the English writer and Nobel Prize Winner William Golding comes to mind. With horrifying realism, the writer tells the story of how a group of teenage children end up on an uninhabitable island after a plane crash and how the relationships of a primitive community form and develop among the group based only on the privilege of force and how, eventually, they divide themselves up into tribes who hunt and kill the members of other tribes.

The thing is that this kind of tragedy is quite likely to take place, not only among children, whose sense of morality is not yet consolidated, but among entire nations in the context of conditions of military, economic or political crises, and not only in conditions of extreme survival.

In the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, the world witnessed two global catastrophes: firstly, the coming to power of the Communists in Russia, and secondly, the Nazis in Germany fifteen years later (subsequently in China and Cambodia).

How did the Communists and Nazis manage to control the souls and minds of millions of people and force them to reject so rapidly the humanistic moral ethics that had developed over centuries (including the Christian commandment ‘thou shall not kill)?  How is it that millions of people not only agreed to the mass murder of millions of innocent people but actively participated in the act?

One has to acknowledge that people not only feared for their own lives and the lives of those close to them, huge masses accepted a new cannibalistic morality!

What did the Communists and Nazis use to lure and entice millions of their followers?

The answer is easy to find when one considers the conclusions set out in “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer”. As the book explains, man (like any other living being) lives first and foremost for the sake of preserving his or her genes on Earth. Secondly, human beings (and only human beings) live constantly striving to expand their personal levels of Freedom of Choice. Of course, the extent of this striving may differ between any two individuals, as much as the earth differs from the sky.

Both the Communists and the Nazis played on promises to fully satisfy all conditions essential for the realisation of the primitive instinct for gene preservation, i.e. the promise to feed everyone until they were full, to provide everyone with adequate housing, and generally, to create a high material standard of living in all areas of life.

At the same time, they made no attempt to hide that this state of affairs would be achieved via plunder, suppression and, if necessary, the physical annihilation of the non-proletariat on the one hand and the non-Arian race on the other. People followed the Nazis and Communists because the horizons they promised were so tempting and, it would seem, so easily achievable that the existing humanistic moral principles were not enough to support the population in withstanding the introduction of a new misanthropical morality.

Yet, neither Lenin nor Hitler, nor their ideologists ever mentioned the natural right of man to Freedom of Choice and its associated Human Rights. Moreover, they made public warnings that anyone who failed to comply with their ideology would be destroyed.

Nonetheless, people followed their line. True only to the Law of Gene Preservation and the satisfaction of the flesh, people forgot and betrayed God’s second law, the Law of Freedom of Choice, turning their backs on the moral principles of the past. The link in time was broken! And finally, the peoples of the countries in question paid for it dearly in a manner known to all.

Those who believe that all these events are in the past and that humanity’s humanistic morality is strong enough never to allow such events to be repeated are fatally mistaken.  Alas! Sacrificing Freedom of Choice and encroaching on the freedom of others will inevitably lead to the tragic mistakes of the past being sorely repeated.

And so we can only draw the sorry but honest conclusion that the true nature of human beings does not improve with time. And yet, thanks be to God, it does not worsen either.  It remains unchanged.

That leads us to the question of how the Law of Humandynamics actually works. Who among serious observers of historical change would argue that morals in the world today are largely much more relaxed than they were yesterday, just as yesterday they were more relaxed than they were the day before that? Why does this happen?

This tendency emerges because every new generation begins not from a point of zero but from the point at which the previous generation left off in the battle to expand Freedom of Choice. This is the reason why levels of Freedom of Choice increase in human society and it is for this reason only that the Law of Humandynamics functions. Even though this law is guaranteed to work across relatively large periods of time, we cannot assume that it works consistently.

As we can see from the above, wars, revolutions and other disasters lead to relatively powerful fluctuations in the working of the Law, albeit tiny changes on a historical scale, when the link in time is broken and when the entire achievement of society’s morality is jolted far back into the past. The fundamental difference between the world of man and the animal world is that human beings are capable of transmitting an entire history of labour skills and morality from one generation to another. Animals, on the other hand, are incapable of doing this.

The life of each and every one of us, together with the rest of our own generation represents a single point on the Arrow of Time. Nobody wants a fluctuation to occur in their own lifetime and so, there is no cause for complacency. Virtuous morals are always very fragile. In just two to three months, television propaganda alone was enough to evoke hatred in one people towards another brotherly people transforming them into a mortal enemy (i.e. Russia’s occupation of Ukraine).

Whereas, we may be unable to influence the entirety of the Arrow of Time, either its future or its past, we are capable of bringing influence to bear in a subtle way on the point at which we currently find ourselves.

This brings us to our final question. Why is it that Human Beings strive to expand Freedom of Choice, driving the workings of the Law of Humandynamics? Could it be that there is someone above who takes care of us in this manner, nudging us further towards humanism? If only that were the case!

Man’s striving to expand Freedom of Choice was described in “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“ as an independent ‘physical’ law, confirmed by the endless number of observations.

And among the many consequences of this law, there is one key consequence: without doubt, growth in Freedom of Choice facilitates an increased guarantee of Gene Preservation. This means that the Law of Gene Preservation, in turn, will push human beings towards an expansion of Freedom of Choice, towards democracy and towards an expression of humanism. It’s like Yin and Yang…

This explains the endless stream of refugees from the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, who risk their lives en route, striving to gain entry to the Western world.

I call to mind how in the 1990s an elderly friend of mine, a retired colonel of the Soviet Army took the decision to emigrate to the United States. I asked if he was not afraid at his age to face the challenges associated with having to adapt to a totally foreign world, to which he replied that he was well aware of the insurmountable psychological difficulties that awaited him and his wife in America, but that he was doing it for the sake of their children and grandchildren. That is the Law of Gene Preservation at work!

Might one fear the possibility that the peoples of the third world will one day turn away from Democracy, ceasing to find it attractive?  One can say with confidence that this will never happen whilst the countries of the democratic world provide their people with the best conditions necessary to realise the most fundamental human needs, Gene Preservation and Freedom of Choice.

(Part 1 of this article on human morality is available here)

---

Translated from Russian original by Joanna Dobson

This article isn’t intended to give a comprehensive overview of the topic. It is simply an addition to the book’s contribution to the theme of morality already considered at length in “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer”.

---