ABSTRACT
Meaningful resistance to dominator culture demands of all of us a willingness to accurately identify the various systems that work together to promote injustice, exploitation, and oppression. Cognitive overload is a human-nature problem now widely mistaken for an Information Age problem. The original equipment firmware of Homo sapiens is advantageously adaptable but also dangerously so. It allows too many complicated, fuzzy-logical, and potentially conflicting programs to run simultaneously in our brains, and it is vulnerable to hijacking by alien programs for their own benefit. Evolutionary psychology sometimes tends to exaggerate the ratio of hard wiring to cultural shaping in the human mind. Discussions of the evolutionary aspect of human culture generally emphasize its ability to accelerate and distribute innovation, but it also has to slow down innovation and block out novel signals from different cultures. Sigmund Freud’s book sought to attribute human unhappiness to civilization’s necessary repression of those evolved biological drives.
