Dying Of A Broken Heart Is The Evolutionary Thing To Do

Is dying of a broken heart an evolutionary trait? Yes. Because it saves energy whena person’s utility to the group has vanished. The sudden death of Queen Elizabeth drew attention to this: one day she commented on a dark cloud coming to a photographer, as she could see a storm gathering in the distance, from her Balmoral castle in Scotland… a few minutes before receiving the new female Prime Minister, Liz Truss. The next day the Queen was dying. 

WHY WOULD DYING OF A BROKEN HEART BE EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGEOUS?

Survival of the fittest means also not just the fittest individual, but the fittest group of individuals. With human species, old individuals didn’t bring the bacon in, but brought in how to bring the bacon in, and many other pieces of wisdom only revealed in the fullness of time…

In other words old individuals such as Queen Elizabeth, the elderly, weak and difformed could still bring irreplaceable know-how which prehistoric people needed to survive. 

However, such Old individuals tend to die readily when their heart is broken. And not only them, but younger ones too. 

Why? 

How and why did the broken heart trait evolve? 

Because the “heart” is an indicator of happiness. That happiness flows, in part, from the social need the individual feels to be personally filling up. A broken heart indicates one has lost social utility.

True happiness also flows from satisfying animal needs: hunger, thirst come first.

However, for the old, many of these animal needs stopped being so pressing, for a number of reasons, including sensory failure and other basic mechanisms failure: for example, there is less hunger and thirst to satisfy when one feels neither hungry nor thirsty.  Cuddling is probably still an oxytocin enhancer, but a cat will do.

What remains in older age is the need to fulfill a social function. In prehistoric society that meant the old teaching to the less experienced. A broken heart, though, indicates that this function is not fulfilled anymore. The old one has just become a mouth to feed. Short in food yet pragmatic, many North American Indian tribes left the old to die in the wilderness.

Queen Elizabeth at 96…

Charles III was amply prepared, the queen, undermined by infirmities didn’t have the love of her life by her side, Philip, who died at 99, after driving until 98 (and causing an accident when he was blinded by the low sun). Philip, an authentic war hero (he played a crucial role as a commander in a crucial sea battle against the fascist italian navy), was of great counsel and the queen may have felt out of her usual depth advising all including Prime Ministers and family members, now that she had lost her sounding board.

The queen had lost her utility, her broken heart told her, so she died.  

Some have professed to want the queen to die an “excruciating death”. They are typically employed, not to say owned, by the plutocratic establishment so called “universities” which has put them in charge of stupidifying the youth. The idea was that she should suffer for the enslaving empire (except slavery stopped being lawful in England in 1066 CE… when England was really born and not just a Viking playground anymore). However, we do not choose how we were born. Queen Elizabeth had a dignified life and made pretty well out of it. Could she have done better according to my own criterions? Of course, but that’s from out there, Africa, America, and in insight.

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” Dr. Uju Anya, an associate professor of second language acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in a tweet on Thursday. “May her pain be excruciating.” 

Anya knows no history: none of the alleged crimes happened during Elizabeth’s life.

Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man in stock market capitalization, then quoted Anya’s tweet and tweeted back: “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?” 

“I don’t think so,” Bezos added. “Wow.” 

Later Carnegie Mellon said Anya’s hatred “absolutely do not represent the vie of the university“…

But Anya’s Deep State satanic influencers who direct that her and her ilk be employed in making the youth better, Pluto’s way, saw hatred through division. Anya does her job well. However hatred, in this day and age, in its ultimate expression, is nuclear war. Anya then pushes for it by glorifying misplaced hatred, and teaching that this is the righteous way.

Elizabeth never did that. That made her a better role model than many a “humanity” department has to offer nowadays…

Patrice Ayme

Elizabeth Philip was her man when she met him, and she was 13…

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P/S: I am of course against the monarchy, an institution obsolete already 25 centuries ago. However, it would have been better if the British-Indian Raj had kept Elizabeth as queen (no silly wars between Muslims and Hindus, killin millions, as happened). The preceding essay is just about a broken heart, and one must recognize that, given her karma, as an individual, except for not expressing herself clearly on the question of Brexit (she was against it), she did a very good job… Whatever her job was supposed to be.  

Monarchy keeps on reappearing. In Britain, it’s constitutional… Yet, all the way down the Eighteenth Century, it could be nasty. 

Queen Anne, upon accessing the throne in 1701, immediately declared war on France (Louis XIV of France had recognized earlier the rightful heir, James III ,the “Old Pretender”, as rightful king of England and Scotland (September), prompting Parliament to legislate for an oath requiring a public abjuration of the Stuarts’ claim to the throne). Queen Anne, upon dying in 1714, was succeeded by someone from… Hannover (Germany). It’s British plutocracy which rules…

Last time a monarch intervened, in England, with a veto against parliament was Queen Anne in 1708, when she blocked the reestablishment of a Scottish militia by the London Parliament in Scotland, “An Act for settling the Militia of that Part of Great Britain called Scotland”… the fear of the Queen being then that Scotland would join France in battling England…

It is the ongoing exercise of the veto power of the monarch which precipitated the US war of independence, because George III kept on refusing “assent” for many laws proposed by local governments in America…

Tyrant Putin is a monarch, but he doesn’t have the excuse Elizabeth did, to have inherited the charge… so that makes him technically what the Greeks called a tyrant (from unique in Greek)…. besides his advertised desire to bury the world in radioactive ashes if it doesn’t accept Kremlin suzerainty.

Generalize (“Cartesian”) Doubt To Emotions

There is a difference between seeing something and integrating it in a system of thought… the latter being called understanding.

People can see corruption, inequality, fanaticism, fascism and many other noxious features, but still not understand them, and thus can’t project them into the future (and their inacceptable, disastrous consequences). 

Many individuals in Muscovy, China democracies, the “West” have become very powerful, and, or,wealthy while supposedly serving the people or engaging in publicly financed or arranged endeavors… say from a tax code which engages in discrimination favoring the wealthy. 

Mental inertia is a major problem… if one wants to stick to reality, as science, knowledge, perception and sensibilities, let alone problems and catastrophes, progress. 

If one wants to decrease mental inertia, one has to realize that few facts are left free-floating in one’s mind: they would be too hard to remember. The mind remembers logically, to a great extent, so facts have to be logically integrated. Facts tend to get integrated in a system of thought. They acquire meaning, moods and emotions connected to them. And the dominant systems of thought tend to integrate free floating facts.

 

For example the Catholic hierarchy decided that the Moon couldn’t be a physical object, because, if it were, the question of who lived there, and thus the problem of the non-unicity of the Lord’s creation, couldn’t be far behind. Islam followed obsequiously, as the Moon became a direct signal from God. Thus astronomers and the theory that the Earth orbited the Sun and the Moon, the Earth, were considered to be heresy during the Middle Ages. Astronomy got discouraged.

When looking at any fact or idea, and emotion or mood, we have to ask: where did it come from? 

Descartes recommended doubting everything at some point. That Cartesian doubt has to be extended to emotions. This logico-emotional systematic doubt has to be fostered, not just to become smarter, but also to become more ethical, or ethical enough for civilization to survive….

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: This is an extended version of a comment kindly published in the NYT by David Brooks. I may add a tech addendum on Descartes, his “error”, etc.

I emote, therefore I am, says Hautes Alpes 2022 denizen