Friday, December 20, 2024

The Human Farm

Andrew Atkin

Desmond Morris, the famous zoologist, wrote a wonderful book called "the human zoo". He described the modern city as being like a zoo, and noticed many human behaviours were akin to the same aberrant behaviors that he saw with zoo animals, such as over-eating due to boredom.

Desmond gives a lot of great insight, but as a specialist his insight was incomplete. Though he indirectly romanticises tribal life, he did not mention what tribal life was typically like in reality. It was brutal, with unspeakable levels of child abuse. Why? Ultimately, the survival struggle. The norm was barbarians at the gate and the ever-present threat of starvation. This ruins tribes as they must go through traumatic repression to adjust to violent conditions, which is an inevitability as populations expand into limited resources. The tribal norm is what we called 'savage', and it was indeed very neurotic.

The gift of the human "zoo" is abundance and security, and that's a very powerful thing. For all the pains we go through with over-crowding, forced-associations, government schools, robotic working lives, and status disempowerment, etc, the deep survival security nonetheless allows us to live in a golden age, which in turn allows us to slowly come away from the traumatic repression that we inherit from our parents, to varying degrees.

Yes we are a human zoo, and that's wonderful albeit imperfect. But really, what we are before anything is a human farm. As I believe, at the [opaque] top of the political game, we have people who see our world exactly as a farm. And indeed they should, because we do need a farmers mentality to achieve long term survival (sustainability).

Now, what must a farmer do to ensure his animals are kept healthy? First, he must keep the numbers within what he can provide for, to avoid a nutritional breakdown. At times he must either cull his herds or functionally sterilise some of them. He has no choice. Also, if he wants to maintain a strong herd, he must restrict excessively weak specimens from breeding to avoid dysgenic decay.

We like to think that those dynamic don't apply to the human animal, but that is just wrong. Of course they do. And this is the problem. Our inability to act as our own famers, I believe, is inducing the most powerful people (whoever they are, exactly?) to take control of the herds in manipulative ways. In times past it most likely happened by culling with orchestrated wars, whereas today we're being partially sterilised with mRNA vaccines (and other) and carefully engineered disincentives to breeding.

And should we call it evil - or, a darkish necessity to avoid an even greater evil? There's a debate!

I myself don't dismiss the need for global human management. We just have to have the intrusion, including restricted breeding. But management should ultimately turn over, so that the executive function can be run by an intelligent democracy. Autocratic dictatorships that don't have to compete for position are always extremely dangerous, of course.

My model, is for the world to be managed by a democracy that's restricted for merit. Anyone should be allowed to vote, but not until they complete a political course - to the end of removing gross voter ignorance and demonstrating mature political engagement. 

We want a 'people's elite' to manage this massive global farm. With this, we can maybe cheat nature and preserve a golden age forever. And if broadly embraced, the farm can be more like a libertarian garden than a concrete human zoo.


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