The Urantia Book

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self-perpetuation

7 paragraphs · about 2 minutes

Every paragraph the index cites under self-perpetuation, once, in the order of the book. Beside each stand the entries that cite it.

68:2.3So­ci­ety is con­cerned with self-per­pet­u­a­tion, self-main­te­nance, and self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion, but hu­man self-re­al­iza­tion is wor­thy of be­com­ing the im­me­di­ate goal of many cul­tural groups.

68:2.4–8 · five paragraphs not cited here ·

68:2.4The herd in­stinct in nat­u­ral man is hardly suf­fi­cient to ac­count for the de­vel­op­ment of such a so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion as now ex­ists on Uran­tia. Though this in­nate gre­gar­i­ous propen­sity lies at the bot­tom of hu­man so­ci­ety, much of man’s so­cia­bil­ity is an ac­quire­ment. Two great in­flu­ences which con­tributed to the early as­so­ci­a­tion of hu­man be­ings were food hunger and sex love; these in­stinc­tive urges man shares with the an­i­mal world. Two other emo­tions which drove hu­man be­ings to­gether and held them to­gether were van­ity and fear, more par­tic­u­larly ghost fear.

68:2.5His­tory is but the rec­ord of man’s age­long food strug­gle. Prim­i­tive man only thought when he was hun­gry; food sav­ing was his first self-de­nial, self-dis­ci­pline. With the growth of so­ci­ety, food hunger ceased to be the only in­cen­tive for mu­tual as­so­ci­a­tion. Nu­mer­ous other sorts of hunger, the re­al­iza­tion of var­i­ous needs, all led to the closer as­so­ci­a­tion of man­kind. But to­day so­ci­ety is top-heavy with the over­growth of sup­posed hu­man needs. Oc­ci­den­tal civ­i­liza­tion of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury groans wearily un­der the tremen­dous over­load of lux­ury and the in­or­di­nate mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of hu­man de­sires and long­ings. Mod­ern so­ci­ety is en­dur­ing the strain of one of its most dan­ger­ous phases of far-flung in­teras­so­ci­a­tion and highly com­pli­cated in­ter­de­pen­dence.

68:2.6Hunger, van­ity, and ghost fear were con­tin­u­ous in their so­cial pres­sure, but sex grat­i­fi­ca­tion was tran­sient and spas­modic. The sex urge alone did not im­pel prim­i­tive men and women to as­sume the heavy bur­dens of home main­te­nance. The early home was founded upon the sex rest­less­ness of the male when de­prived of fre­quent grat­i­fi­ca­tion and upon that de­voted mother love of the hu­man fe­male, which in mea­sure she shares with the fe­males of all the higher an­i­mals. The pres­ence of a help­less baby de­ter­mined the early dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of male and fe­male ac­tiv­i­ties; the woman had to main­tain a set­tled res­i­dence where she could cul­ti­vate the soil. And from ear­li­est times, where woman was has al­ways been re­garded as the home.

68:2.7Woman thus early be­came in­dis­pens­able to the evolv­ing so­cial scheme, not so much be­cause of the fleet­ing sex pas­sion as in con­se­quence of food re­quire­ment; she was an es­sen­tial part­ner in self-main­te­nance. She was a food provider, a beast of bur­den, and a com­pan­ion who would stand great abuse with­out vi­o­lent re­sent­ment, and in ad­di­tion to all of these de­sir­able traits, she was an ever-pres­ent means of sex grat­i­fi­ca­tion.

68:2.8Al­most ev­ery­thing of last­ing value in civ­i­liza­tion has its roots in the fam­ily. The fam­ily was the first suc­cess­ful peace group, the man and woman learn­ing how to ad­just their an­tag­o­nisms while at the same time teach­ing the pur­suits of peace to their chil­dren.

68:2.9The func­tion of mar­riage in evo­lu­tion is the in­sur­ance of race sur­vival, not merely the re­al­iza­tion of per­sonal hap­pi­ness; self-main­te­nance and self-per­pet­u­a­tion are the real ob­jects of the home. Self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion is in­ci­den­tal and not es­sen­tial ex­cept as an in­cen­tive in­sur­ing sex as­so­ci­a­tion. Na­ture de­mands sur­vival, but the arts of civ­i­liza­tion con­tinue to in­crease the plea­sures of mar­riage and the sat­is­fac­tions of fam­ily life.

69:1.42. The in­sti­tu­tions of self-per­pet­u­a­tion. These are the es­tab­lish­ments of so­ci­ety grow­ing out of sex hunger, ma­ter­nal in­stinct, and the higher ten­der emo­tions of the races. They em­brace the so­cial safe­guards of the home and the school, of fam­ily life, ed­u­ca­tion, ethics, and re­li­gion. They in­clude mar­riage cus­toms, war for de­fense, and home build­ing.

82:1.8As an in­sti­tu­tion, mar­riage, from its early be­gin­nings down to mod­ern times, pic­tures the so­cial evo­lu­tion of the bi­o­logic propen­sity for self-per­pet­u­a­tion. The per­pet­u­a­tion of the evolv­ing hu­man species is made cer­tain by the pres­ence of this racial mat­ing im­pulse, an urge which is loosely called sex at­trac­tion. This great bi­o­logic urge be­comes the im­pulse hub for all sorts of as­so­ci­ated in­stincts, emo­tions, and us­ages—phys­i­cal, in­tel­lec­tual, moral, and so­cial.

82:3.2There al­ways have been and al­ways will be two dis­tinct realms of mar­riage: the mores, the laws reg­u­lat­ing the ex­ter­nal as­pects of mat­ing, and the oth­er­wise se­cret and per­sonal re­la­tions of men and women. Al­ways has the in­di­vid­ual been re­bel­lious against the sex reg­u­la­tions im­posed by so­ci­ety; and this is the rea­son for this age­long sex prob­lem: Self-main­te­nance is in­di­vid­ual but is car­ried on by the group; self-per­pet­u­a­tion is so­cial but is se­cured by in­di­vid­ual im­pulse.

84:0.2Mat­ing is purely an act of self-per­pet­u­a­tion as­so­ci­ated with vary­ing de­grees of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion; mar­riage, home build­ing, is largely a mat­ter of self-main­te­nance, and it im­plies the evo­lu­tion of so­ci­ety. So­ci­ety it­self is the ag­gre­gated struc­ture of fam­ily units. In­di­vid­u­als are very tem­po­rary as plan­e­tary fac­tors—only fam­i­lies are con­tin­u­ing agen­cies in so­cial evo­lu­tion. The fam­ily is the chan­nel through which the river of cul­ture and knowl­edge flows from one gen­er­a­tion to an­other.

84:0.3The home is ba­si­cally a so­ci­o­logic in­sti­tu­tion. Mar­riage grew out of co-op­er­a­tion in self-main­te­nance and part­ner­ship in self-per­pet­u­a­tion, the el­e­ment of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion be­ing largely in­ci­den­tal. Nev­er­the­less, the home does em­brace all three of the es­sen­tial func­tions of hu­man ex­is­tence, while life prop­a­ga­tion makes it the fun­da­men­tal hu­man in­sti­tu­tion, and sex sets it off from all other so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties.

Onward

Cited alongside: self-maintenance, self-gratification, civilization, home, marriage