You heard it here, folks. Agriculture ruined the world and continues to do so. Before agriculture, we had constraints on our population and on our dominance. All our food was just enough for the population that was there. We did not say the Earth belongs to us, but rather that we belonged to the Earth. I read in the book Ishmael that 99.8% of the world’s population was added in the last 10,000 years, exactly around the time that we started dominating the land instead of living off of it.
Why was this? Because creating more food led to more people, and then food production was increased, which led to more people, and so on until we got to where we are today, with hyperinflated cities and towns with central authority and heirarchy that was all made possible through the advent of agriculture. One book I suggest reading on this whole issue is called Against the Grain by Richard Manning. I already knew most of what he wrote about, but there were some new information that I had never considered before. In order to understand what a big problem agriculture is and how unnatural it has become today just to sustain and grow our population more, get the book and read it.
Agriculture forced our populations to grow and to concentrate because the food was only in one place and it had destroyed the forests that used to exist there, so it left us completely dependent on it. Not only that, it concnetrated populations so much that central authority was the only way for there to be any order, creating a necessary evil that still lurks today. And also, since grains fed opiate receptors in our brains, we became addicted to agriculture. And finally, it enhanced our need to dominate more land to feed our expanding population, which in turn created more people and then more food and so on.
This is exactly why feeding starving children in Africa will only make the overpopulation problem worse. When humans or any other animal feels like they are going to die and their whole tribe is starving, they reproduce more to ensure that at least some of the children survive, and then we feed them with food from a farm in Nebraska, making populations larger and more mouths to feed. In pre-agriculture, the bounty at the hunter-forager’s feet was enough to sustain a certain population, but no more. If the population ever got out of balance, then some of the people would die off. Getting out of balance had a price and it kept all living things around instead of the mass extinctions we are seeing imposed by humans. We have no right to just kill off millions of species because we are only thinking about ourselves and no other animal.
It’s a sick world since we started civlization. It really is. And even if there is a crash, who’s to say that we won’t start another agriculture and another civilization? There’s no stopping it unless we realize that the way we live is wrong and that it is very, very destructive to all biological life, including humans. Look at the pollution that civlization has caused. Look at the corporate giants who love to dump things that destroy ecosystems. Are they held responsible? No. But that doesn’t really matter right now. What matters is we get out of this system. Moving back to the hunter-forager way of life is simple and will allow our population to get down to a sustainable level, a permanent state in which humans can exist for millions more years. We’ve only been in agriculture for 10,000 years and we’ve been around for about 3 million. Why don’t we scrap the whole agricultural industrial complex and allow the Earth to heal itself so we can go back to being what it truly means to be human? Why are we still addicted to the drug of civlization, allowing it to take us to our deaths?
When Jesus said we should immitate the birds and bees, he was being very profound, but he was no savior. The people never did go “back” to immitating every other creature in the world. I put the word back in quotes because back is relative. We could call it forward to being ourselves again. Jesus knew how we were supposed to live, but nobody got the message. And those who did never acted upon it. But it shows how bad life was even back then that we felt we needed a savior. To be saved from what? Society created through agriculture. It was a hell world back then and it’s a hell world now. Why do you think people look forward to the apocalypse? They hate this shitty world and they want to get out of it. Why are movies like The Road Warrior popular? Because we fantasize about a world with no trees where we are outside fighting for something that matters instead of checking account balances and filing legal documents. The civilized world has become boring and predictable and we are either subconsciously or consciously bringing it down purposely because we know in our bones that this is not the way we were meant to live.
We don’t have to scrap our intelligence and become animals in the sense that we don’t communicate or accomplish anything, but it would help if we just started by living off the bounty of the Earth instead of creating more and more food through dominating the Earth, creating billions of people that shouldn’t be here if we had stayed in balance.
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