The Universal Meaning of Life: The Scientific Method Applied to the Human Condition, #1

Dedication:

I dedicate this book to Caterina De Michele, who, with her love, supports me and allows me to continue developing my project.

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Prologue:

Everyone creates their own opinion about the agents that determine its life cycle and its role within the social reality in which he lives. It swings from the idea that everything depends by own determination and perseverance, up to the most complete and absolute fatalism. The individual destinies are, in any case, a reflection of the destiny of mankind, as a species, in turn connected with: the fate of the general biological life on earth, and of the cosmic evolution.

The analysis of the opinions, for how authoritative, of who he herself pronounced in towards one particular theory it does not increase its scientific value, however, analyze some of the arguments, reflections and considerations of some thinkers, whether they are: philosophers, theologians, ideologues or experts of social sciences, it may be useful to single out the problem, placing them to premise of their own investigation.

The philosophers of all times have provided the most varied theories about the terms and causes evolution of social reality. Give account of the formulation of the theories that the more they approach to the one we formed and we support it will appear, perhaps, a useless and idle exercise. But we believe that constitutes a prerequisite, although it not provides validation for the our assumptions, nor can give them any legitimacy or authority, since this can only come from the their verification in the same reality and in its evolution. Only this can corroborate or disprove our theories.

Any theory and even more, every theoretical system, it requires a terminology, in part new, to express themselves. I hope that the terminology I have adopted does not makes too obscure my thinking and its overall formulation.

Many, not being able, on the basis of the knowledge that society offers them, to give a very precise, exhaustive, and autonomously elaborated meaning to their existence, increasingly find self-destruction as the only possible response. In contemporary societies, an ever-increasing share of the population, appears increasingly distrustful of science, above all due to the construction of the atomic bomb, but also due to the widespread belief that it is the results of scientific and technical progress that endanger the very existence of life on Earth. In these conditions, although it is increasingly urgent to develop a scientifically verifiable theory, of the actual human condition and the prospects for progress, in order to provide meaning to the existence of the human species and of each individual, not dependent on other entities with respect to the same individuals; its elaboration, and even more so its diffusion, appear very problematic. This work proposes a new interpretation of some philosophical conceptions, some of which date back to the so-called pre-Socratic philosophy, outlining a new interpretation of the human condition, of the meaning of its existence as a species and as individuals, based on the scientific method of comparison with reality, for obtain a definitive and unappealable confirmation or denial. Attempts to create a science of society and humanity characterize the entire so-called modern age and constitute a basic element of it. These attempts have failed when confronted with historical reality and, therefore, have not achieved the status of a scientific paradigm. If it appears impossible to create a science of man that ignores the analysis of the peculiar and unrepeatable characteristics of each individual, the same cannot be said of a science of society, which presents characteristics that are found, unchanged in their substance, in every society based on statehood, found at any latitude and in any historical age. It is, therefore, possible to lay the foundations of an authentic science of society, based on the human knowledge achieved, up to now, by humanity, if not contradicted by the reality of historical evolution; proposing a new interpretation, with a view to acquiring knowledge of the most authentic meaning of human life and therefore of human destiny, both of the species and of each individual, which individuals have within themselves the entire essence of the species, to which they belonging, and of which they are a unique and unrepeatable manifestation.

The theme of the meaning of human existence has recently been addressed, among others, by Prof. Edward Osborne Wilson, a well-known scholar of myrmecology, who recently published a monumental work on this same topic. He had addressed the topic on the basis of sociobiology, a new branch of studies that theorizes a close connection between biological evolution and social evolution. The analysis of the various contemporary human societies leads, however, to realizing how on the globe some societies similar to those of other living species coexist, albeit in different geographical areas, which the most accredited evolutionary theories have cataloged as pre-human species, and other societies, very different, with an exclusive human prerogative. Therefore, and unfortunately, the bi-univocal link between biological evolution and social evolution, hypothesized by sociobiology, is totally unfounded. Further proof of this groundlessness, the which entirely falsifies every sociobiological theory, is the sense of suffering, if not outright desperation, which has always been felt by human beings due to the inequities, infamies and inhumanities that are inherent in human societies (and which historians continue to catalog in multiple civilizations, on the basis of minimal cultural differentiations and/or slightly different production techniques), and which have led philosophers and theologians to theorize a fall, namely a huge regression from a pre-existing condition of happiness (which would have been achieved in a society suited to nature), to a society generating unhappiness (for all its members, but above all for the social strata relegated to an almost, or totally, irreversible condition, of social and economic inferiority) and having connotations hitherto unknown, both in its structural and organizational characteristics, and above all in its evolutionary logic: the latter escapes the understanding of the people and of those who lead the states (or to put it better: they delude themselves into thinking that they are the guide); as in a science fiction story by H. G. Wells, entitled: Land of the blind, where all the members of society are blind, despite managing, for better or worse, to survive, maintaining the illusion of their leaders that they are those who lead their own people, despite being blind themselves and, therefore, incapable of understanding the reality of the world in which they live.

Philosophy, since its dawn, in ancient Greece, has correctly identified the contrast between the deepest and most authentic human nature and social reality. This contrast can only be the consequence of a profound gap between the times of biological and psychic evolution (namely the increase in potential intellectual abilities), on the one hand, and those of psychological and cultural evolution (namely, of type cognitive), on the other. This gap has not, until now, allowed, human beings, to create interpersonal relationships that allow them to express all their potential, or natural, desire (or need) for sociality, without mortifying the similar and overwhelming need for individualization, and at the same time to create an organizational method that allows them to be fully aware, conscious and co-responsible of collective goals and choices.

Precisely in the concrete realization of such an organizational form, one can identify the ultimate meaning of human life, as indicated by the teleological theories of all philosophies, religions, esotericisms, and political ideologies. In this purpose, we can see, in fact, both the meaning and purpose of human beings as a species and of individual individuals. This purpose arises, in fact, from the deepest nature of human beings and is, therefore, inherent to them. Every single individual, as a manifestation of the human species, with unique and unrepeatable characteristics, must be able to have full autonomy in establishing the meaning and purposes of their existence. Only when this is made possible, and individuals have freed themselves from the conditioning, which sometimes takes on the characteristic of real forms of mental slavery, implemented by the social reality in progress, sis of various monotheistic religions, of globalization (since religions, like totalitarian political ideologies, tend to confuse the universal value of their belief, which they doubt all the more intensely, the more ferociously they proclaim out loud to firmly believe in it, with the totalitarian acceptance by human beings of that same belief: and therefore they try to impose their belief, by any means on all living beings), confusing the globalization with the universal validity.to the most authentic needs and purposes, as it is inherent to the individual individuals themselves, and of the human species.

E. O. Wilson dedicated a part of his already-mentioned monumental work to explaining the meaning of the term meaning. This is not, contrary to what it may seem, the least significant part of his work. After over three millennia of history of human thought, and therefore with the accumulation of the most diverse and often conflicting theories, in the field of the study of society and human beings, always far from the use of the scientific method, every single term is arrived to take on multiple meanings and values, sometimes even opposing ones. It therefore appears of fundamental importance to define a priori, precisely, what meaning it intends to attribute to each term you use in our work. It is also necessary not to be afraid of using terms in current use with completely new, or unusual meanings, as long as you are careful to specify precisely the meaning you intend to attribute to each term used.

The very thought that individuals can establish, in full autonomy and freedom, the meaning and purposes of their existence still appears as an attack against the established order, especially at a time when religions, especially in some of their fringes, take up the dream, which is at the basis of various monotheistic religions, of universalization (since religions, like totalitarian political ideologies, tend to confuse the universal value of their belief, which they doubt all the more intensely, the more ferociously they proclaim out loud to firmly believe in it, with the totalitarian acceptance by human beings of that same belief: and therefore they try to impose their belief, by any means on all living beings), confusing what is defined, now, as the globalization, with: the universal validity.

The great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri stated: You were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge. He had a strictly religious vision of the human condition and, therefore, believed that the meaning of human life was not inherent in human nature itself, due to its specific essence, but attributed to man by the divinity who created humanity and the cosmos. Looking around us today, we seem to see many more people tending to demonstrate that: they are like the brutes, and even inferior to them, and that they want to live without caring in the slightest about any morality (or virtue), or any knowledge. This attitude is not, as it appears to some, the result of the lack of religiosity existing in the West, nor of a radical rebellion against an external imposition, but the most evident consequence of the increasingly unbearable logic of the historically formed society, with its ethics legalized and verbally professed, but constantly contradicted by the reality of every society based on statehood, in which citizens are forced to live, not due to their autonomous and conscious choice, but only because it appears to be the only possible reality.

Regardless of the incontrovertible failure of Marxist analyses of history (after the outcome of the anti-communist revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s), it is clear that the sciences of society and man require a Copernican revolution, which allows them to acquire the status of scientific paradigms, adopting the method of the physical-mathematical sciences, namely, primarily, the verifiability or falsifiability of the statements; therefore the demonstrability, of the progressive contribution, to cumulative knowledge, that can be ascribed to each new theory enunciated.

The authentic meaning of life can only consist in the concrete possibility of satisfying the most authentic needs of human beings. Every individual can find the value of their existence in contributing to making progress towards the full satisfaction of the human need for individualization and the satisfactory expression of their need for sociality. In other words, the meaning of life consists in acquiring the awareness of one's own individual possibility of contributing to the progress of the universal process of civilizing. This awareness constitutes the authentic human self-consciousness and authentic spirituality, which distinguishes the human species from every other animal species.

The meaning of life is universal in that it belongs, ontologically and potentially, to all living matter. This potentiality manifests itself in the species endowed with a sociality, even if minimal, and is transformed into consciousness, in the human species, when our species has reached a given level of cognitive, or psychological, maturation.

Alba, 12/21/2023

Copyright: hall rights reserved by Giano Rocca

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Other published works:

Il Grande Segreto ed i suoi Custodi, 2013, Prima Edizione.

"Fine del Mondo, Fine della Storia o Fine dell’Inferno sulla Terra? Una Risposta Scientifica

agli Eterni Quesiti: da Dove Veniamo? Chi Siamo? (Dove Siamo?) Dove Andiamo?", 2014,

Second edition, ISBN: 9781311740090

L’essere Umano e la Realtà Strutturale Storica: I Sette Livelli della Civilizzazione, 2015,

Third edition, ISBN: 9781310751226

"La Fine del Conflitto tra Dio e l’Io: Le Ricerche del Graal e le Teorie Gnostiche Svelate. I

Fondamenti della Scienza dell’Uomo e della Sua Socialità", 2015, First edition, ISBN:

9781311330628

Simbiosi tra Amore e Razionalità: Come Realizzare il Settimo Livello della Civilizzazione,

2016, Second edition, ISBN: 9781310488269

Il Destino dell’Umanità: Il Metodo Scientifico Applicato alla Condizione Umana – Book I,

2016, First edition, ISBN: 9781310704383

"Il Senso Ultimo della Condizione Umana: Il Metodo Scientifico Applicato alla Condizione

Umana" – Book I, 2020, Second edition, ISBN: 9780463284407

"The Ultimate Meaning of Human Existence: The Scientific Method Applied to the Human

Condition" – Book I, 2016, First English Edition, ISBN: 9781370873893

Dei e Demoni: Il Metodo Scientifico Applicato alla Condizione Umana – Book II, 2016,

First Italian Edition, ISBN: 9781370528790

"Gods and Monsters: The Scientific Method Applied to