Sea Change PT 1
by Brett Stevens on December 3, 2020
http://www.amerika.org/politics/sea-change/
Humankind thinks of its world in terms of categories. We say that an object belongs to the category โpens,โ and therefore has certain attributes like being able to write and leaking ink in your pocket when you forget it there and take an international plane flight to flee the tax collectors.
Nature operates on a much finer scale. Objects are what they are, composed of littler and littler bits until we get down to atoms, subatomic particles, and then one level where we think things are like waves or graphing equations, a gradual and varied manifestation over time.
In other words, nature operates via cycles. An object forms from the pattern to which its material is shaped, begins, expends itself, and then returns to the chaos. The pattern remains, encoded in the fabric of the reality around it, and manifests again when relevant to the ongoing action.
This means that we humans tend to think of things as universal, absolute, and permanent in the state they are in this moment, but really, they are passing to the degree of the completion of their cycle. So it is also with civilizations.
A civilization is born, comes to rely on the methods that have succeeded, forgets why it does them, then stops doing what made it great, and gradually slips into successive levels of decay until you find small bands of people, living in huts, surviving on subsistence agriculture and hunter-gatherer foraging, with low IQs, a matriarchal society, and low life expectancy. This is how nature keeps humanity in check: it works constantly to destroy us.
When a civilization hits a certain point of decay, normally, a group of the few who figure it out start to indicate without speaking clearly on the topic that they recognize what is going on. One morning, all of the unsung heroes of figuring stuff out with depth are gone.
They have moved on to a new location. They give up on their property, take what they can, and move to a new land. This both selects for the sane and wise, and filters out the weaker ones who cannot make the journey, setting up the new civilization with good raw material.
Western Europeans (Nordid-Cromagnid-Dalofaelids) have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years. We roamed Europe, Eurasia, Asia, and the New World in small groups, then wintered together in caves. In the new year, the best of them chose others like them and set off in newly-constituted bands.
Through this method, we conserved our raw genetic material while improving it. We avoided outbreeding with the various offshoots of humanity which genetics will someday reveal were just our cast-offs breeding with nearby species. The weak got left behind to a third world lifestyle.
Whether our group was born this way, or evolved to it, really does not matter. They avoided Darwinian degeneration โ the loss of traits not used regularly โ by keeping their lives plain and relatively hard, and not having labor-saving devices or organized institutions to keep all of them alive.
We call them primitive now, but this is mostly compensatory, because we know that they were something we are not. They lived without the cloying and suffocating weight of the need and guilt-bullying of other humans. Those who deserved to live, survived; those who did not were forgotten.
Eventually the world became crowded, and these groups settled in rugged Northern Europe as a means of preserving their connection to nature. They encouraged reckless behavior to eliminate the weaker. They lived without opulence.
Unfortunately for them, time means that things accrue, including knowledge. As wisdom piled up, methods took the place of being able to figure out unknown situations. People had only to do what their neighbors did and they would have farms, families, and even towns and later cities.
With the rise of cities, life became even simpler. People needed only get some kind of employment and pay for goods and services. Anyone with a high enough tolerance for tedium and their time being wasted on others could survive and be comfortable, and so deleterious mutations and weak people piled up.
On the other hand, this enabled technology, and with it, a substitute for those vast open lands: the oceans, skies, microscopes, cyberbia, and space. This tradeoff showed us how we could get to our next stage, that of separating from the vast accumulation of humanity, most of it mediocre and much useless.