past as future

PAST AS FUTURE


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I would hate to think I’ve been just as guilty as eco-puke tree hugging Birkenstock wearing Volvo driving female armpit hair weaving commie humps or stick up ass Victorian explorer and colonizing dudes burdened egregiously with Being White And Saving The Other Unworthy Races From Themselves, both groups suffering from irrational fuzzy thinking. But it seems I might have ( I leave it up to you to decide ). Like the Gaia huggers I perhaps thought that wishful thinking could overcome human nature. And like the tea baggers I looked through Africa with a prejudiced prism. At times I have wondered, but of course without much deep thought or analysis, in my own defense, why man kept overrunning his environment with population. And I have looked at the example of Africa as our future fate, thinking as we break down in law and order we shall emulate them. But now I’m coming to the conclusion that Africa is our future not because they have broken down but because that is how man has always survived and lived, and the only reason we see that in Africa is because almost exclusively they were mostly bypassed by the Oil Age.

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Gaia worshippers always preach that if we could just stop eating meat and stop driving and stop consuming and live on permaculture farmlets we would all survive rather nicely. Of course I agree to some extent, but there are a few problems with the fantasy. First, man evolved over many millennia as a hunter gatherer. He evolved eating meat. He needs animal flesh ( one could probably last well enough eating lots of dairy and no meat other than eggs of course ). To argue otherwise is to argue that evolution is balderdash and you base your dietary theory on a book claiming to be from a divine being speaking in tongues to a select group of humans ( I’m not disparaging the religious aspect of it but rather the assumption that those humans didn’t lie or cheat, being human after all. I do know that Darwin and his initial followers were religious and had no other thought than evolution was Gods creation ). Just the fact that vegetarians die off in splendid gory fashion unless they eat strange factory and chemically extracted crap such as brewers yeast or what not in a vane attempt to substitute for what nature has penned up outside should be enough to convince you of the fallacy of their arguments. Just from their irrational attachment to soy should send up warning flares. Not to mention there are one other group that won’t eat bacon. Hint, middle east terrorist ( I wonder if Obammy eats bacon? ).

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Secondly, you can’t subsidize enough farmers, assuming we all turn into decentralized organic turnip growers, while at the same time keeping the factory farms and long distance transportation going. We don’t have the resources, whether in raw materials or money or political will or the willingness of hundreds of millions to turn from desk bound paper pushers into the role of dirt scratcher, hard work if there ever was any. So, obviously, it is great sport to make fun of the people advocating this kind of pie in the sky fantasy. And yet, there I was thinking people should see the looming convergence of overpopulation and resource depletion. But that was also pie in the sky silliness. I should have been asking, not if people can see, but rather can they act. And I believe the answer is no. Because we aren’t evolutionarily designed to do so. We see the danger of too many people, but too many people is also what will save us ( or, at least the victorious in war ). And this isn’t an abstract equation like “the bigger army wins”. It is also on a very personal level a truism held by all those pragmatic folks unencumbered by a life softened by excess energy.

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War is a way of life on a continent that is crowded, full of diseases unable to be conquered, with no excess energy. War is normal. And you know that your tribe can’t always protect itself or win trying to defeat the next door neighbor for its resources. Tribal life isn’t backwards compared to “civilized” nations. It is enduring because it helps the species survive. It is as bare bones and as ancient as when man first started expanding outwards. Africa never had the advantages of a lot of other places that man eventually moved to, so it never “evolved” into other forms of social organization. Remember, everything else follows how we get our food. Tribes work, because war for resources never ceased there ( and remember, without tribal warfare and prisoner of war slaves, the American slave trade would never had gotten off the ground- white boys couldn’t survive the diseases past the shoreline forts ).

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People bred like crazy. Not necessarily because the farm needed more hands to till, or because more soldiers were needed. That was certainly a factor. But the main reason is, like insects, man needed to have the numbers to survive constant attrition. Through disease and famine and war. You have enough kids, your tribe survives through a simple numbers game ( this isn‘t to discount the ability to live within your resource base. Through infanticide and other practices, tribes reduce their numbers as needed. But the replacements, if needed, the surplus, keeps being generated ). I think we don’t like this stark reality. We invent reasons to discount it and hide it. We genocide whole tribes away, take over the land and so make increasing numbers of us look natural ( growing to fill in the land ). Africa, through its unique circumstances, avoids that by and large. They just keep in a constant state of replenishment and survive all the abuse man and nature throws their way. Tough little bastards. You got to give them that.

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