For celebrating the end of 2002 (2)

The Top � Down approach has been used always by researchers and
scholars as soon as they were interested in identifying the causality
of one or another large problem, though their efforts have not been
reported according to this denomination, which is only a
conventional title. At the dawn of the 21st century, this approach
has become urgently indispensable for comprehending the evolvement
(quicker growth and faster aggravation) of each one of the problems
that is generating the serious crisis that nowadays faces humankind.

One of them is the warring that has determined de facto the
controversial trajectory of the whole civilizing adventure.
Bertalanffy commented in 1969:"...Reason does not automatically lead
to a solution of the human problem and, by and large, has little
influence in the sanguinary course of human history,..."

In 1959 Lewis Mumford commented: "At the time that the first great
civilizations of the ancient world were coming into existence, the
human race suffered an injury from which it has not yet recovered.
... This injury happened at a moment when primitive man's powers...
had suddenly expanded; and it was due essentially to ... a series of
aberrations, which put his most beneficent inventions at the command
of his neurotic anxieties. ..., this original injury has only
tightened its hold upon the collective actions of tribes and nations.
The aberration(s) is the institution of war.

This early injury had an effect upon civilized life, somewhat
comparable to the kind of childhood injury that psychiatrists
characterize as a trauma: an injury whose worst results may not show
themselves till far on in adult life. Instead of being buried in the
psyche of an individual, it became embedded in the institutional life
of every succeeding city, state, and empire.

In an individual injured by "...childhood misapprehensions,
animosities, and resentments, childhood misinterpretations of natural
events,... all account for the persistence of infantile patterns of
conduct. Often, later in life, these patterns overcome the adult and
leave him helpless. He still views present realities through the
distorting glasses of his childhood fantasy" This individual becomes
"unable to cope with the problems of his life, unable to make
rational decisions, baffled, depressed, paralyzed, because he is
still the prey of infantile fantasies he is unable to escape or
control" (Mumford, The Origins of War)

It is improvable, said Mumford's , to recognize a parallel between
the general human situation and that faced by an injured child who
has grown without being psychiatrically attended.

Humans of one species or another have existed for more than 2 million
years. modern humans are believed all to have descended from one
woman ancestor about 250 millennia ago, probably in Africa. After
being radically transformed the perspective of this species, Homo
sapiens when everywhere some women discovered how to invent
agriculture around 10 millennia ago, soon people became good at
cooperating based on the invented symbolic communication that help
them to conceive and develop many diverse technologies. Every group
fascinated by their words invented afterwards writing and learnt to
use diversely their manual abilities in painting, sculpture,
monuments and the building of walled cities.

However, scarcity of food due to natural disasters and many fears and
anxieties that emerged when the gradually developed human mind tried
to comprehend how cosmic forces - sun, moon, the planets - and
different terrestrial circumstances on whose manifestations all life
depended led some minds to invent something else for justify their
survival endeavors. Among these inventions theological explanations
and human sacrifices for satisfying the needs of invented gods under
the control of the all-powerful king as the secular ruler, the chief
priest and even the living god became the civilizing circumstances.
Those that determined the transformation of the disordered wild life
of the barbarous humans in communities composed by instructed and
disciplined people needed for organizing an efficient bureaucracy and
a trained army and building major public works with forced labor
either temporarily conscripted or permanently enslaved.

Gradually it was necessary to institutionalize the war against other
groups of people for recruiting new slaves and seizing enough
captives for the human sacrifices in accordance with orders expressed
by the king who personified the community as he assumed FULL
RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE LIFE AND WELFARE OF HIS SUBJECTS. Meanwhile
every community could not avoid to search continuously a way forward
while learning to be adaptive enough. The road created and followed
by humans in order to civilize humankind was determined by numerous
contradictory and conflicting Bottom � Up approaches

The Top � Down approach is intrinsic to human thinking but the large
problems engendered by the controversial dynamics of many diverse
irreconcilable interpretations of what the purpose of human life
might be makes necessary to learn explicitly how to develop this road
scientifically.

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Received on Wed Jan 1 02:03:51 2003