Arrested and Abstracted Development: A Species at the Crossroads Pre-publication Weekly Chapter Excerpts

Chapter 2: Initial Conditions and Early Human Responses Chapter 2 explains how early humans, facing an unfamiliar and constantly changing world without mental skills or a sense of self, responded to experience through first impressions, projection, and trial and error behaviour. Human development began at the dawn of consciousness, when early humans faced an unexplained, constantly changing world without any mental framework for understanding experience. Humans confronted a world they could not interpret and, lacking mental skills or a sense of self, projected their inner experience outward, imagined external forces to explain their feelings, and sought identity, order, and stability outside the mind. These early responses formed four foundational assumptions that shaped the entire historical path of human development: • Managing existence through the collective — defining identity and guidance outside the individual. • Conceptualizing existence in the abstract — creating speculative images beyond experience. • Establishing order and stability externally — relying on external structures for clarity and certainty. • Managing existence by controlling external conditions — acting on the world to cope with inner mental demands. These assumptions became embedded in cultural, social, religious, economic, scientific, and technological development. Cultural systems reinforced them, transmitting externalized frameworks rather than developing individual mental faculties. Though originally trial and error coping mechanisms, they hardened into the long historical path of human development and now contradict natural mental conditions, generating persistent mental, social, and environmental crises.