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The Human Manifesto A General Plan For Human Survival edition by Vincent Scarsella Politics Social Sciences eBooks

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Based substantially on Ernest Becker's 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning "The Denial of Death," this book promotes the establishment of a revolutionary cultural system, the "Genuine Hero System," that satisfies the human need to overcome the stark reality of death while also advancing the establishment of an enlightened society. "The Human Manifesto" argues that unless such a system is adopted, the human species will continue to be motivated to engage in destructive or trivial behavior that falls short in enabling individuals to attain genuine happiness and fulfillment.

The Human Manifesto A General Plan For Human Survival edition by Vincent Scarsella Politics Social Sciences eBooks

Another "planned" civilization idea that uses what we have learned thus far to explain why we do what we do and why.
What if we successfully reprogrammed civilization to embrace ideas and behaviors that are conducive to our survival instead of our destruction? A LIE is a LIE until repetition makes it true...if suppressing our knowledge of our imminent death makes us neurotic why shouldn't we do things that enhance life for us and others? Very interesting take on human nature over the eons that compresses what we've learned about ourselves into a small book. Worth your time to read.

Product details File Size 530 KB Print Length 284 pages Publication Date September 17, 2012 Sold by  Digital Services LLC Language English ASIN B009CLSF14

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The Human Manifesto A General Plan For Human Survival edition by Vincent Scarsella Politics Social Sciences eBooks Reviews

Thought-provoking and a relatively quick read...the only concept I personally struggled with is the re-conceptualizing of a 'God' figure and how it was made the basis for Scarsella's Geniune Hero System--this is not a bad thing; I just find it very difficult to subscribe to any concept that features a God entity.

That said, please don't let my personal bias in that respect discourage you from enjoying a very thoughtful book. God-aside, Scarcella makes a great case for re-inventing human societies that truly love and value its members [irrespective of creed, color, faith], and he gives some great ideas on how to go about it!
I finished this book a couple of weeks ago. I published a note on Facebook to discuss it with some of my friends because I wasn't completely confident of my own reaction to it. I've now had the chance to refine my thoughts about the book.

The review is still my own, but some of the comments my friends have made have helped me evaluate it.

I think there is a great value in identifying the right questions, and this I think Scarsella has done well. He has raised many questions that thinking people should seriously consider. Although in many cases I think he has offered the wrong answers to those questions, the mere exercise of asking the right questions, stating them, and being willing to analyze them makes the effort more than worthwhile.

We should consider whether human cultures have created mythologies designed to ease our fears. I believe Scarsella is correct that we have. We should further consider whether those mythologies have any usefulness in the modern world. I believe Scarsella makes a good case that they have little usefulness today. Mythologies that may have been very adaptive in the world of our ancestors are not useful today. It is not we who have changed. It is our environment. We have changed our environment. The mythologies that served our forefathers well are now destructive and obstructive. They are currently maladaptive.

I agree with Scarsella that the old mythologies, including Christianity and Islam, are not only falsifiable but have indeed been shown false. Where I think Scarsella goes wrong is that he offers a new and improved deity, one more in keeping with our understanding of the universe. But all he has done is discard every heretofore falsified claim heretofore made about the deity, postulated a truly benevolent deity in the place of the sadistic monster postulated by the brand-name faiths, and suggested that we act as if we wished to placate that more palatable deity, rather than act as if we wished to placate the deity of bronze age sheep herders.

I can understand the impulse to create a new, more fitting, mythology that would be serviceable in the present day. Of course, he does not see his own Genuine Hero System as a mythology, but as truth. I see it as just another mythology, albeit a less poisonous one than the one we inherited from our forefathers. It is a myth no less than the earlier ones.

He insists, in the absence of any real evidence to support the existence of a deity, that we must believe that there is one. He repeatedly insists that modern scientists find evidence that there is indeed a god, but when the time finally comes for him to provide his proof, all he can offer is Francis CollinsThe Language of God A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Stephen HawkingThe Illustrated Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded Edition, and Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Anyone familiar with Hawking's work will know that the god that Hawking alludes to from time to time bears no resemblance to the involved deity that Scarsella postulates. Indeed, Hawking's deity seems to be more of a figure of speech than an actual entity. Bryson is a historian of science, and I heartily recommend his book, but as authority for the proposition that scientists believe objective evidence points to a god it's just not there. Bryson expresses his wonder at the "coincidence" that circumstances just happened to be just right for life on earth to show up. This argument is complex, and problematic, but in no way can it be stretched to support the idea that there is a serious scientific consensus building that this happy set of coincidences is evidence of a creator god. Of the three, only Collins supports the idea that the scientific evidence points, however weakly, in the general direction of an intelligent creator god.

Scarsella's insistence that we seek out a deity in the absence of a shred of evidence that there actually is one (pace Francis Collins) seems to me nothing more than an invitation to a new LIE that ultimately shows no more promise than the old ones. If we remove your amorphous new and improved deity from the Genuine Hero System, we're left with little more than an exhortation to be nice to each other. That's been tried. It didn't work.

I have a few other recurrent criticisms of the book.

Scarsella builds on the work of Ernest Becker Escape from EvilThe Denial of Deathas if the reader would be familiar with Becker's work. I am not particularly familiar with Becker's work, nor do I feel that I am alone among reasonably well-educated American readers in not being familiar with his work. That being said, I cannot comment on how much of what Scarsella says about Becker's writing is Becker and how much is Scarsella's gloss on him. As Scarsella presents Becker, Becker presents human motivation as essentially a quest to obliterate the fear of death. It is, however, completely unrealistic to reduce all human activity to a quest to obliterate the fear of death. We have many other motivations. This reached its most glaring absurdity when you sought to explain a man's sex drive in the context of death denial. pp. 101 et seq. Death denial is not necessary to explain the sex drive.

Scarsella begins the book by complaining that humanity has failed to accomplish what it should have. He repeats the accusatin throughout. By what standards has humanity failed? By my subjective standards we bald apes have done a fine job. In reality, however, there are no standards. We cannot say humanity has done well or poorly in achieving goals that we, ex post facto, set for it.

Scarsella uses the term "Life immortality elusions," which can conveniently be abbreviated "LIE"s to describe the mental gymnastics we engage in to avoid our fear of death. The idea is cute, but it is overdone. Death is certainly not the only thing I fear.

Scarsella has problems with atheists, as he must, as atheists refuse to go looking for his new and improved deity. Further, atheists give the lie to his "LIE"s. "Life immortality elusions" are not universal. The atheists whom he excoriates throughout his book do not have LIEs as Scarsella describes them. Instead, atheists enjoy LMSs, life mortality elusions. The atheist does not "believe" anything in the same way that the religious person does. Even the word "believe" is misleading. The atheist suspects that he or she is a product of millions of years of evolution and natural selection. Everything that creates consciousness is the arrangement of the neurons in the nervous system. The nervous system comes into existence as the body is formed between conception and birth, and begins to disintegrate immediately upon death. Everything that created consciousness ceases to exist at death, and the atheist happily accepts that at death he or she will exist no longer as a conscious being. Far from experiencing a paralyzing fear or disabling dread, the atheist accepts this as the normal way of things, and considers himself or herself incredibly fortunate to have existed at all, albeit for a short time. The atheist does not face death dreading the judgment of a sadistic omnipotent monster who will burn him or her for all eternity for the slightest imperfection, nor does he or she hope for eternal Disneyland because for saying the right magic words or joining the right club. While the religious look forward to life AFTER death, the atheist believes in life BEFORE death, and lives that life to the fullest. To the atheist, a life spent alternatively chasing and cowering before a figment of one's own imagination in the hopes of attaining an unnatural and incomprehensible immortality is a life wasted.

Throughout the book Scarsella makes broad, sweeping promises of the benefits of adopting a Genuine Hero System without ever offering a shred of evidence that such a system would work. Sure, it sounds good on paper. So does Christianity. So does Islam. So does MarxismThe Communist Manifesto. So does Edward Bellamy's Looking BackwardLooking Backward 2000-1887 (Oxford World's Classics). So does The JetsonsThe Jetsons - The Complete First Season. After all the smoke and mirrors, I do not see how Scarsella offers evidence that his system would actually work any better than any other made-up philosophy.

JG Schulze
Despite a couple of general concerns noted below, it must be said that Vince Scarsella has penned an immensely credible, readable and potentially enduring gem of a book. What he has done here is reinvent God in a more convincing, more factual and more scientifically sound, if indeed not in a psychologically more honest way.

As Ernest Becker, Sigmund Freud and Soren Kierkegaard have all alluded to all renditions of God are synthetic creations - that is, man-made creations done mostly as an unconscious neurotic reaction to the ever-prominent and terrifying fear of death. Scarsella's rendition of God however, is a creation done as a "conscious" acknowledgement of this overriding collective fear. Thus this is a book that has at its base, the more creative works of Sigmund Freud, Soren Kierkegaard and the genius in our own time, Ernest Becker. In this sense, it is a timely book that resonates with the strings at the depths of my own heart, since I too am in the middle of a project leaning heavily on both Becker's "Denial of Death," and his "Escape From Evil."

Not entirely with his "tongue in cheek," Mr. Scarpella has introduced to great effect an idea that turns out to be the central organizing concept for understanding and explaining most of Becker's more complex ideas. It is the author's idea of the grand "LIE" that is, (as he has coined it) the "Life Immortality Elusion." Scarpella's LIE is an incredibly serviceable and creative double entendre. One that captures both Becker's central idea that religion is always an attempt to escape the 800-pound gorilla in the back of the room (the fear of death), and at the same time a constant reminder that we can only escape this fear synthetically, that is, through our own neurotic mind games -- only through our own clever and creative self-deceptions. However, the beauty of Mr. Scarpella's manuscript is not just that he "pulls this veil" from over our collective eyes by reminding us that the ultimate product of these games is the not so well hidden subconscious "immortality projects," but that another product is also the hero systems embedded in the social dramas of our respective cultural subtexts. His crowning point thus is to remind us that it is the dishonesty, rather than the artificiality (mind games per se), that is responsible for all of the evil in the world. In short, although we cannot escape the artificiality, we can be more honest about the fear of death and about the death defying qualities and meanings of our "God concepts."

Thus, as students of Kierkegaard, Freud and Becker go, they do not get much better than Mr. Scarpella He has not just carefully mined and digested them all, but also has tried to improve upon their respective models; and in the process has arranged for us to witness and scrutinize this, his production his own model of God as the ultimate (cosmic) hero system. One based not on our own LIES (or "Life Immortality Elusions") but on the facts of science, evolution and what currently stands as progress in human development. Scarpella's main contention, one that I whole heartedly share, is that existing culturally-determined hero systems, which have at their centers various ideas of a death-defying heavenly God, have failed us miserably. They have done so not just in the Kierkegaardian sense of being molded too much in the image of man and his evil tricks, but also in the sense of being models unsuccessful in warding off our collective fear of death. Scarpella is not the first to have reinvented this wheel (see also among others, John C. Lilly "Simulations of God,"). In its place, he has substituted for our old existing "dishonestly motivated `pretend' subconscious Santa Claus like God," his own more "honest consciously motivated fact-based, science-based God." Scarpella's God is not only one that we can believe in, but because his is a consciously constructed God in which the fear of death is "up front" (rather than repressed in the subconscious), it is also a God that can turn all of the negative, self-destructive, survival and humanity-ending aspects of the present God, into a life-affirming, survival-extending and humanity-affirming, more constructive God.

And while Scarpella's book may not be the final answer to our headlong race to human oblivion and extinction, a la the Christian version of Revelations, it is indeed a superlative intellectual exercise that will help us move swiftly along a different path in our quest for finding the correct answers to these unending questions.

Thus this book gets an automatic five stars from me because it struggles creditably and mightily with one of man's enduring problems the nature of meaning in man's existence. This is a very large issue indeed, perhaps the largest one our intellects will ever be asked to confront and shoulder. And the author has made a significant and worthy dent in advancing understanding and knowledge in an area that continues to sorely need more light. Whether the outcome is as simple as his construction of a new "God Hero system" or as his resulting "Manifesto" would suggest, other readers must decide this matter for themselves.

What I believe is that this book answers clearly, cleanly and honestly a number of rather perplexing questions surrounding the meaning and importance of man's existence and his dependence on a "God concept." That for me alone is enough for five stars. But more importantly, his efforts do not end there nor does he profess to answer all of the perplexing questions. In fact, it is my respectful opinion that his analysis begs a larger, perhaps even the most important if not the most primitive question of this important debate Why do we need a God concept at all? After all, it is difficult to quibble with the great British Mathematician and Philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who asserts that the question of God's existence need not be asked at all? And while it is true, that all our gods have been man-made, and that having a God based on verifiable scientific facts seems a great improvement over the old mythical "Santa Claus like" Gods espoused by the key religious faiths, it is still curious that the author would expect us to accept on faith his assertion that without a death defying and death denying "God concept" man existence is meaningless?

Those like myself who fail to accept this axiom on faith are left with no further platform on which to stand. The author must surely be aware of the fact that the club of Existentialists, of which both Ernest Becker and Soren Kierkegaard are "card-carrying" members, would argue that man's existence is all (and only) "process." And that it is the reciprocal interplay between "process" and symbolic interactions that gives meaning to this process. And thus, that it is the interplay of process upon process that gives whatever meaning there is to be had to man's existence. In any case, both the author's assertion and any that would challenge it, lie on the same philosophical plane as this of having to fall back on a controversial axiomatic given or principle.

But even more importantly, and laying this more philosophical issue aside, the author's more precise science-based God, still fails us, because it too falls into the familiar "God Trap," of my Scientific God is better than your Mythical God. Thus, whether myth-based or science-based, God remains "faith-based! And as the author notes, the struggle goes on. Whether the imagined improvement in the author's own hand-crafted, synthetically created, fact-based, science-based God is one that gets us out of the God trap and sends man hurling down the road to fulfilling his highest potential, or just begins a new cycle of religious strife and philosophical acrimony at a slightly higher level of abstraction, is difficult to determine a priori. Yet, if the history of human nature is to be a guide, clever synthetic arguments alone will not save the author's newer more science-based God. As he himself has acknowledged his newer more sound rendition of God is as likely as not to lead to the same "God cul de sac" as those that have gone on before it.

In addition to these general concerns, I also have two rather trivial nitpicks and one more serious concern that I wish to put on the record First, the only stylistic criticism is that the author seemed not to have trusted the reader enough to "understand Becker." So, he spent an inordinate amount of time trying to explain him to us. My own view is that while many of the details of Becker's theories may indeed be challenging, the essential outline of his main ideas is accessible enough to have adequately supported the author's analysis without the repetition, which tended to make the earlier chapters seem cluttered.

The second nitpick has to do with the fact that although he gave devastatingly clear, succinct, excellent and much needed critiques of two of the three leading religions he identified as being engaged in self-destruction and general mayhem in the world today Christianity and Islam, he unexpectedly left out the third one, Judaism. This was a most curious and debilitating omission and left a gaping hole in the analysis on at least two accounts. First, it is important to the analysis to know and explain the differences between Judaism, Christianity and Islam since they all are derived from the same source. And then to explain why the three religions are equally bad for advancing the goals the author sets forth (if indeed they all are?). And second, Judaism, as it "squares off" in the international arena with Islam is one of the key religious protagonist engaged in un-ending political strife and the global self-destruction he continually alludes to throughout the manuscript. How can the central protagonist of strife in the world today be left out of the analysis?

My final concern is somewhat more weighty. It is that as a result of the failure of the "God Hero system" in the face of science, man it seems has lost faith in global God-level cosmic hero systems altogether. This is true even though he still continues to "pretend" to pay lip service to the importance of "his cosmic God." But the facts that matter on the ground would suggest otherwise that he has begun to rely to a much greater extent on the sublimated death defying and death denying properties of local, tribal, racial and cultural hero systems and immortality projects, rather than on global or more cosmic ones. Death denial and death defiance has become very much a part of the local cultural milieu, that is, of the day to day cultural social drama, and less and less of the global or cosmic one, for all of the reasons the author himself has cited. However, I believe there is more than just lost of faith going on here. Through the same psychological "transference" and "projection" the author raised earlier on, these more "local Gods" have become greatly sublimated substitute "God fetishes" objectified through political and racial dominance as the ultimate subconscious cultural form of heroism. The mediating mechanism is of course the modern Western man's (i.e., the white man's mostly, although not exclusively) confusion between narcissism and self-esteem.

In the modern drama of politics, this confusion has actively promoted the development of "superior-inferior" power control games that have become in practice (even if not strictly in principle) the ultimate hero systems of last resort. That is to say, in practice even if not in principle, these local narcissistic hero systems are treated as if they are of higher value and higher meaning even than hero systems based on self-esteem or the death defying and death denying God hero systems they are intended to replace. This is true in part because narcissistic cultural control is mistakenly perceived to be "universal" in its effects, allowing this godlike ability to enforce obedience from challenging groups through tribally-defined and tribally-promoting abstract principles, self-serving laws and "relative moralities."

There is nothing more godlike or heroic than one tribe seeing itself as the universal standard and having a monopoly of this self-reflective narcissistic ability. Thus the fetish of "narcissistic control" has itself become a kind of "abstract God hero substitute." And the whole "immortality construction process" is thereby derailed, subverted, deformed, bent and reframed to deflect and corrupt the higher purpose of normal "God construction" as the ultimate hero system and as the ultimate "immortality project." This substitution of narcissistic "control fetishes" for the "immortality construction project," renders Western man as being cosmically self-sufficient that is, as his own self-reflective narcissistic god.

Under such circumstances then it is small wonder that one can ask Who needs a cosmic God hero system when tribal and racial hero systems such as Hitler's Nazi Party, South Africa's Apartheid and the U.S. racial segregation seem to work so much more effectively? It seems that the ruling and dominant classes and tribes are increasingly content with the sublimated death defiance (heaven) they have created for themselves here on earth. Especially with their flawed religions carefully "running interference" and otherwise protecting their inhuman earthly prerogatives. Even if Western man does continue to run around in circles like a chicken with his head cut off, the narcissistic hero system is still certainly more than he could ever expect from the author's more honest, more humane, less controlling cosmic religious manifesto and his more authentic God hero system -- neither of which would continue to feed Western man's narcissistic need for control and greed, nor offer the existing biased, built-in, one-sided tribal advantages. Five stars.
Another "planned" civilization idea that uses what we have learned thus far to explain why we do what we do and why.
What if we successfully reprogrammed civilization to embrace ideas and behaviors that are conducive to our survival instead of our destruction? A LIE is a LIE until repetition makes it true...if suppressing our knowledge of our imminent death makes us neurotic why shouldn't we do things that enhance life for us and others? Very interesting take on human nature over the eons that compresses what we've learned about ourselves into a small book. Worth your time to read.