Humans are all about conquest and taking from others. We spread across the world, like a cancer depleting the lands as we progress over the entire planet. The only reason we need to keep expanding our base is because we destroy our current land. When we were in history class, we were taught to view the great conquerors and something to admire, rather than something to resist. That humans are the center of the world and we are entitled to the entire world to be our own. And if there’s another group of people a few miles a way and you want that land, you go over there and kill them or find a way to get them to submit to your way of life. And it just spread like wildfire. The good thing about it is that the wildfire did burn out every now and then when one of the civilizations crashed due to its massive size, making it almost impossible to completely defend.
And so it goes. Over and over, civilizations rise and fall since at least 10,000 years ago. But what is the point of all this rising and falling? What purpose is it serving, other than the short-term gratification the elites of each empire feel when the acquire a new piece of land? The land gets more and more depleted as each civilization takes over it. It’s very cyclical, except for the fact that the control gets tighter and tighter with each pass. We become more depedent on the state each time around. Just think how easy it would be to send people into a mass panic. Suppose all the electrical grids went down. No more running water. No more lights. No more refrigeration. This one aspect of our lives failing could cause a mass panic and probably kill more than half the population if sustained long enough. And yet this electricity has only been around at most a few centuries.
We are only serving the government because we don’t think we can live without it. We’ve been told so many times what the world would be like without central control. “It would be chaos.” Was it chaos before we started civilization? No. The proof is in that we’re still here today. We learned how to survive off the land, rather than just using it to the brink of exhaustion and then moving other places to do the same. Agriculture ruined the world. We didn’t know it at the time what the ramifications would be of this new “invention,” but we certainly do now. Well, some of us do. Our population is way out of control. Because grain feeds opiate receptors in the brain and is easy to grow, we have populations so large and growing so large that in 50 years there will be 10 billion humans if something drastic doesn’t happen.
The root of conquest was agriculture. The agricultural way of life is what created the nations and control structures we live in today. If we hadn’t concentrated populations so much due to the way we grew our foods, we wouldn’t need all this control and conquest. If we kept the tribes small instead of exponentially larger, we may have been able to not only sustain our life on Earth, but have the Earth be better off for having us here. It’s a shame we let the drug of agriculture lead to the drug of civilization. I call it a drug because it is fundamentally destructive and exploitative, and yet we cannot live without it.
The only thing I see that even resembles the way we used to live is something I call permaculture, but there is still a domination aspect to this. We control the animals and the crops on the farms. But we use what we have there and make it better without increasing what we have. It’s the closest thing we have to natural, but there’s still the idea of conquest because of the use of land we supposedly own (stole). But how many people actually do this sort of permaculture? Not many. Most of our food is grown using oil fertilizers and pesticides because our topsoil is so depleted. And let’s not forget Monsanto’s new genetically-modified crops that are Round Up Ready, meaning that they are the only plants that can survive that toxic chemical being sprayed on it by whoever is tending the crops. Even organic crops are not natural. They’ve been hybridized and bred for higher sugar contents and to be more palatable to humans, while at the same time losing most the nutrition it used to have.
We used to have populations of humans that were at a level where we would never have to worry about the things we do now. I would say the most we could sustain at this point would be 1 billion, but preferably much less. And we would all have to be part of non-coercive tribes or villages where we all worked together to sustain our communities and refuse to go back to the drug of civilization. But it’s so tempting… We would have to not only remember what this world was like, but know enough never to go back to it. We would have to evolve in such a way that we would never break out of the cycle of nature again. We would have to love the space we’re in enough to not only sustain it, but enhance it. Then we would have no reason to conquer other lands, because we don’t have exploding populations and know enough not to ever go down that dark road again. We would have to possess a consciousness that expands way out into the future and the past where we know where we’ve been and know where we’ll be headed if we make certain moves.
I’m not calling for a mass extinction of humans anymore than anyone else. It is simply necessary for us to thrive and become what we were meant to be. It’s going to happen either way. It will happen when our population gets so big that disease spreads like wildfire, or it can start now with people starting to downshift their lives and having less children. But we must get out of this conquest mentality for this to happen. A nation is not going to lower its population if it thinks it will be conquered by another nation who does not lower theirs. I might as well be shouting into the wind because I know the scenario will be overpopulation leading to massive disease. People are too selfish to start now. Especially in the developed world. There are very few people in our world that will give it up for the good of the whole. They’re too attached to their way of life, much like the addict is attached to the needle. I’m not hopeless, but I expect a crash. It’s only natural. It’s been happening for thousands of years. But when it crashes, will we go back for more? Or will be start living smarter? That’s the question.
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http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/
Ignoring the whole… “jesus” part of this, it is a great read.
An absolutely essential read for human beings who care anything at all about potentiality or humans as creatures in general.
It explains that we, as humans, have the potential to differentiate ourselves from animals and eachother. The man who acts on physical urges only reduces himself to a beast, one on food reduces to a plant. the philosopher elevates himself to god himself, etc etc.
amazing read. incredible that at his time, he was thinking these thoughts and using proofs for his thoughts that would never have been acceptable. this writing was actually condemned, as were many of his others, by the catholic church.
it is considered the founding, or at least most representative, document of the renaissance.