Our Economy & Society (part 2)
CHAPTER TWO: The Evolution of Idiots
Scientists believe that humans are the grand result of billions of years of evolution. I can't explain the entire theory of evolution here, but it can be summarized this way:
Theory of Evolution (summary)
First, there were some amoebas. Deviant amoebas adapted better to the environment, thus becoming monkeys. Then came your average working class Joe.
I'm leaving out some details, but the theory itself also has a few holes that are best left unquestioned.
Anyway, it took us many years to get to this lofty level of evolution. That leisurely pace of change was okay because there wasn't much to do except sit around and hope you didn't get eaten by wild pigs. Then somebody fell on a sharp stick and the spear was invented. That's when the trouble started.
I wasn't there, but I'm willing to bet that some people said the spear would never replace fingernails as the fighting tool of choice. The nonconformists probably hurled bad names at the spear-users -- names like "moog" and "blinth." (this was before the merchant marines had been created, so swearing wasn't very good yet.)
But "diversity" was not celebrated back then, and I expect the "Say no to the spear" people finally got the "point" if you catch my drift.
The good thing about a spear is that almost everybody could understand it. It had basically one feature: the pointy end. Our brains were equipped for this level of complexity. And not just the rains of the intelligentsia either--the common man could find his way around a spear too. Life was good, save for the occasional plague and the fact that the average life expectancy was seven...and the fact that you'd be praying for death after the age of four. But almost nobody complained about confusing the spears were.
Suddenly (in evolutionary terms) some deviant went and built the printing press. It was a slippery slope after that. Two blinks later and we're switching batteries in our laptops while streaking through the sky in shiny metal objects in which soft drinks and peanuts are served.
I blame sex and paper for most of our current problems. here's my logic: only one person in a million is smart enough to invent a printing press. So when society consisted of only a few hundred apelike people living in caves, the odds of one of them being a genius was fairly low. But people kept having sex, and with every moron added to the population, the odds of a deviant smarty-pants slipping through the genetic net got higher and higher. When you've got several million people running around having sex a-la-carte, the odds are fairly good that some pregnant ape-mom is going to squat in a field someday and pinch out a printing-press-making deviant.
Once we had printing presses, we were pretty much doomed. Because then, every time a new smart deviant came up with a good idea, it would get written down and shared. Every good idea could be built upon. Civilization exploded. Technology was born. The complexity of life increased geometrically. Everything got bigger and better.
Except our brains.
All the technology that surrounds us, all the management theories, economic models that predict and guide our behaviour, the science that helps us live to eighty--it's all created by a tiny percentage of deviant smart people. The rest of us are treading water as fast as we can. The world is too complex for us. Evolution didn't keep up. Thanks to the printing press, the deviant smart people managed to capture their genius and communicate it without having to pass it on genetically. Evolution was short-circuited. We got knowledge and technology before we got intellingence.
We're a planet of nearly seven billion dumbasses living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.
Scientists believe that humans are the grand result of billions of years of evolution. I can't explain the entire theory of evolution here, but it can be summarized this way:
Theory of Evolution (summary)
First, there were some amoebas. Deviant amoebas adapted better to the environment, thus becoming monkeys. Then came your average working class Joe.
I'm leaving out some details, but the theory itself also has a few holes that are best left unquestioned.
Anyway, it took us many years to get to this lofty level of evolution. That leisurely pace of change was okay because there wasn't much to do except sit around and hope you didn't get eaten by wild pigs. Then somebody fell on a sharp stick and the spear was invented. That's when the trouble started.
I wasn't there, but I'm willing to bet that some people said the spear would never replace fingernails as the fighting tool of choice. The nonconformists probably hurled bad names at the spear-users -- names like "moog" and "blinth." (this was before the merchant marines had been created, so swearing wasn't very good yet.)
But "diversity" was not celebrated back then, and I expect the "Say no to the spear" people finally got the "point" if you catch my drift.
The good thing about a spear is that almost everybody could understand it. It had basically one feature: the pointy end. Our brains were equipped for this level of complexity. And not just the rains of the intelligentsia either--the common man could find his way around a spear too. Life was good, save for the occasional plague and the fact that the average life expectancy was seven...and the fact that you'd be praying for death after the age of four. But almost nobody complained about confusing the spears were.
Suddenly (in evolutionary terms) some deviant went and built the printing press. It was a slippery slope after that. Two blinks later and we're switching batteries in our laptops while streaking through the sky in shiny metal objects in which soft drinks and peanuts are served.
I blame sex and paper for most of our current problems. here's my logic: only one person in a million is smart enough to invent a printing press. So when society consisted of only a few hundred apelike people living in caves, the odds of one of them being a genius was fairly low. But people kept having sex, and with every moron added to the population, the odds of a deviant smarty-pants slipping through the genetic net got higher and higher. When you've got several million people running around having sex a-la-carte, the odds are fairly good that some pregnant ape-mom is going to squat in a field someday and pinch out a printing-press-making deviant.
Once we had printing presses, we were pretty much doomed. Because then, every time a new smart deviant came up with a good idea, it would get written down and shared. Every good idea could be built upon. Civilization exploded. Technology was born. The complexity of life increased geometrically. Everything got bigger and better.
Except our brains.
All the technology that surrounds us, all the management theories, economic models that predict and guide our behaviour, the science that helps us live to eighty--it's all created by a tiny percentage of deviant smart people. The rest of us are treading water as fast as we can. The world is too complex for us. Evolution didn't keep up. Thanks to the printing press, the deviant smart people managed to capture their genius and communicate it without having to pass it on genetically. Evolution was short-circuited. We got knowledge and technology before we got intellingence.
We're a planet of nearly seven billion dumbasses living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.