Unpopular and Unpalatable
Introduction
The subject matter of this and other related essays posted on the writing sub-site of (dlakusta.org) will be considered by some (many) to be quite unpopular and unpalatable… perhaps even incendiary and blasphemous. So much so that it’s highly unlikely these issues will be talked about at the dinner table tonight or discussed in coffee shops, at the mall, super markets, at sporting events, churches, schools and universities, on the evening news or the late night talk show circuit. Nor will they be debated in parliaments, legislatures or supreme courts. Nobody, and I mean nobody seems to want to touch these issues with a ten-foot pole. And yet, they are critical issues which will need to be addressed if we are to have any chance of navigating our way through the ‘gathering storm’.
Note: Most of these unpopular issues are examined in much broader detail (in related essays on the website) but for the purposes of an introduction I would like to here provide a brief thumbnail sketch of a few of the more controversial subjects. Those who have read other essays on the website will quickly discover that some of the following issues tie-in and overlap with those essays.
Psychosis n. The loss of contact with reality: a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia or mania that is marked by delusions, hallucinations, incoherence and distorted perceptions of reality.
Issue #1. Modern advanced techno-industrial super-humans suffer from the rarest of psychoses, an affliction where we appear to have been mass-indoctrinated into the pervasive and collective mindset of ‘entitlement’… existential entitlement. This psychosis further posits that somehow, we humans were invested with some kind of special right – perhaps divine right – to exist. The concept of existential entitlement was manufactured by the new ‘elites’ (especially Roman Catholicism) over the course of western civilization as an instrument of control over the unruly and gullible masses. The self-serving concept has been, and still is, so deeply embedded within the collective human psyche that it is now generally accepted as an unquestionable truth.
As the current global meltdown continues to spin out of control (exponentially) and we continue to careen head-long into the gaping maw of yet another extinction event, the absurdity of the notion (entitlement) becomes more and more obvious. The 21st century’s current human population (8-11 billion) is 2000 times what it was just prior to the invention of agriculture (5-6 million). Think about it. A population explosion of this magnitude (which occurred in a mere 8-9 thousand years) should set alarm bells ringing all over the place…but it (the explosion) doesn’t even show up on the radar. Anyone sincerely interested in making sense of the currently-unfolding meltdown should consider the human population crisis as a glaring indication that something went terribly, terribly wrong on Planet Earth.
Ironically, the more the fabric of the super-human system continues to unravel, the deeper we become mired in the mindset of entitlement. It would be laughable…if it weren’t so tragic. The general tone and tenor of local, national and global conversations these days seems to include the obstinate insistence (fueled mainly by religious ideology) that we are superior beings, that we are the crown of creation, created in the image and likeness of God and therefore we are entitled to exist…to conquer, to rule, to dominate and to subjugate. The mere suggestion that we super-humans might be flirting with self-extinction ourselves is (to some, perhaps many) blasphemous, preposterous, heresy, unthinkable. We are God’s children, his chosen people…how could we go extinct.
Pernicious. The notion of existential entitlement is arguably the most dangerous and most deadly construct ever synthesized within the cerebral vacuum of the human super-mind. The concept is so pervasive and insidious that most human beings on the planet have probably thought, at one time or another, that they actually had the God-given right to ‘be here’. The God-given right to occupy and own land and property…to own the forests, lakes, wetlands, oceans and the natural resources under the ground…to own the Earth itself.
Issue #2. Sahelanthropus Tchadensis provided the first empirical evidence that we hominids began branching off from our primate ancestors way back in the late Miocene (approx. 8 million years ago). Due to a series of naturally-occurring events or ‘quirks’, which included bipedalism, opposable thumbs, the invention of fire, transition to a meat-based diet, tool making, communal hunting, language, etc., the hominid brain exploded in size from an average of 350cc (primate) to an average of 1350cc (advanced Homo sapiens). The bulk of that growth occurred post H. habilis.
In the one-hundred-and-fifty million history of placental mammalians (which includes us) there has never been an instance of a mammalian brain growing by more than 5-15 percent (relative to body mass) in the same timeframe that witnessed the 300% growth of the advanced Homo sapien brain. This little factoid has ‘aberration’ and ‘meltdown’ written all over it.
The explosive growth of genus Homo’s brain (post-H.habilis) endowed it with the dubious ability to arbitrarily synthesize ideas which were not necessarily in accordance or abidance with the laws of nature. Two such ideas led to the inventions of agriculture and animal husbandry and granted, they may have seemed like good ideas at the time, but these two innovations were in fact outright contraventions of natural law because they attempted to alter and change the natural order of biological life on the planet. The act of capturing animals and plants – from the wilds where they belonged and where they should have remained – then taming them, domesticating them, mass breeding and mass producing them into (what would eventually become) voracious and Earth-destructive monocultures did in fact alter and change the natural order of biological life on the planet. That one single ill-conceived idea threw a major monkey wrench into nature’s finely-tuned system of balance and order and, via the unforgiving laws of consequence and causality, triggered an exponential process which led directly to the social, environmental and geopolitical meltdown unfolding around us here in the 21st century.
The ideas of agriculture and raising livestock added a new element, a new poison to the Earth’s periodic table. That poisonous element was interference…human interference. The poisons inherent within that seed of an idea would go on to infect the entire civilization which grew from it and culminate (in a mere eight or nine thousand years) in a global train-wreck.
Issue #3. Collective denialism and an obstinate reliance on false hope are preventing modern human societies from preparing their children and grandchildren (the new millennials) for the deadly ambush they will (most assuredly) be walking into towards the latter half of the twenty-first century. The fabric of the ‘human system’ is quickly unraveling… we are currently mired in an irreversible process of collapse and yet no one is ‘screaming’ at our youth – our highly distracted youth – to wake up. We leftover fossils from the twentieth century (who caused most of the problems) are quickly dying off. It would be unconscionable, and an egregious dereliction of duty to our youth if we allow them to walk blindly into the ambush – on their own – without some level of preparedness. That preparedness should begin in our education system and work its way out from there.
Issue #4. The ominous specter of collective denialism seems to hang over most (if not all) of these unpopular issues and issue #4 is no exception. The Anthropocenes, i.e., the advanced, progressive, hyper-ideological, industrial technological, lethally over-populated super humans are currently on the cusp of yet another extinction event. And it’s not a case of being ‘on the verge of’ or ‘approaching’…it’s a case of being now fully engaged in the early stages of the event itself. One would think that, given the gravity of our situation, a major extinction event (in our time) would be the number-one, hot button issue of the day…on everybody’s lips…headline news…on every government’s agenda. But, to repeat, it doesn’t even show up on the radar. Such is the power of denialism.
Issue #5. We must allow nature to do its work. In terms of the human subspecies, we are talking about the necessity of a major ‘correction’…a long, long overdue cull of the advanced modern human subspecies. Of course, who wants to talk about that? It’s worth repeating once more that the global human population (pre-agriculture) was a manageable and sustainable 5-6 million…the human population for the 21st century (a mere 8 to 9 thousand years later) is expected to top out at around 11 billion. Eleven billion represents a growth factor of 2000 which means our population this century will be 2000 times what it was pre-agriculture. Ouch!!!
The lethal over-population of humans and their livestock is a prime example of our ongoing penchant for interference with nature’s ‘work’. The invention of agriculture spawned the ‘stratification of human societies’, a whole new paradigm of social order (eventually to become the New World Order). The invention led to the emergence of the new ‘elites’, (i.e., the royalty, the land barons, the merchants, the intelligentsia, the Catholic Church, etc.) in control of the under-trodden masses. Considering the mad scramble for power, wealth and land exhibited by the burgeoning kingdoms, principalities and the Church in western Europe, it was in the best interest of the new elites that there be unrestricted, unfettered and uncontrolled population growth among the masses to ensure a steady and ever-increasing supply of ‘grist’ for the mill, i.e., farm labourers, soldiers, factory workers, colliers, etc.. Add to this the fact that the under-trodden masses were generally viewed by the elites as expendable economic units, ensuring a steady flow of taxes to the state and tithes to the Church).
The current meltdown unfolding around us today can (quite accurately) be traced directly back to this unique, unprecedented and completely untested social phenomenon (i.e., the elites and the ideologues in control of the masses), which was the subsequent and unfortunate spawn of the agricultural revolution.
And of course at the centre of this failed experiment in social engineering was the Catholic Church. To the Church and the rest of the elitist state, it was all about numbers. Numbers represented strength, represented dominance, represented expansionism. Blinded by the lust for power, land, control and with visions of unimaginable wealth filling their heads, the Church and the state completely ignored the higher laws, the universal laws and the natural laws which prescribed balance and order amongst all species and subspecies populations (including advanced modern humans).
To wit. In 1967, then Pope Paul VI enacted the ‘Humanae Vitae’ Encyclical which forbade any and all interference in the ‘transmission of life’, i.e., birth control, family planning etc.. The world’s human population had just hit the four billion mark around the same timeframe and regardless of the warnings from the scientific community (particularly the likes of Thomas Malthus and Paul Erlick) and combined with the United Nation’s dire predictions of a doubling or even tripling of the global human population within the next hundred years or so, the Catholic Church went ahead and enforced (under pain of excommunication) the reckless and draconian encyclical.
‘I am the midnight minstrel, this song I’ve come to sing
Of hunger and starvation over-populations bring
You’ve turned your head too long, it’s time you listened well
Your Father may be in Heaven but your children are in Hell’.(verse from ‘The Midnight Minstrel…Fire on the Sun’)
To some, the above encyclical may be viewed as a crime against humanity, a crime against women, a crime against children, perhaps a crime against nature and the Earth itself. But the encyclical was also indicative of the backwards mentality and self-destructive mindset (held by the elites, held by the Church) which, to some degree, helped fuel the gradual collapse of western civilization. The pervasive and self-serving credo, (i.e., the more people, the more power, the more wealth) became the death knell for the imminent collapse of the super human system.
Issue #7. There are numerous factors which have contributed to the collapse of the super-human system. One of the more virulent of these factors revolves around ideology, particularly, the synthesis of human-specific centrisms and their associated semantics.
Centrisms, as a grammatical term, is far too benign and basic for the purposes of this essay…the term needs to be dissected and its nuances scrutinized more objectively. Centrisms generally refer to the self-centred biases (filters) we use when seeing or ‘thinking’ of ourselves in relation to the world around us. (These ideological biases include; anthropocentrism, geocentrism, Eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, religio-centrism, egocentrism, etc.). Self-centred biases appear to be an unfortunate spinoff of the super-human’s aberrantly over-sized brain (referred to in related essays on this sub-site). Considering the advent of the industrial, technological age, with its frenzy of invention and innovation, it’s hard to blame super humans for thinking that they were the ‘centre’ of it all. Ideological centrisms are the source of malignant concepts like ‘manifest destiny’, ‘crown of creation’, the doctrine of discovery, dominion over all things, self-deification, ‘chosen’ people, and ‘god is on our side’.
The singular and seminal event which triggered the age of self-centeredness and self-deification was the Great African Diaspora some 70-80,000 years ago. Ancient tribes migrating out of a dangerously over-populated Africa wandered to the far reaches of the planet and eventually settled and began to establish their unique cultural identities. Because these cultural identities were developed in relative (sometimes total) isolation from the rest of the world, it was only natural that early human cultures would likewise develop a worldview under-pinned by a rudimentary foundation of ideological centrisms.
At last count we had approximately two-hundred-and-forty-five major religious and spiritual movements spread across the globe, most of those professing a belief in their conceptual understanding of a higher power. And – surprise, surprise – today we have a world awash in conflict and conflagration with a death toll – over the past five-hundred years – running into the many hundreds of millions. Most of that horrendous death toll can be attributed to the conflict between religious ideologies…which are greatly fueled by Euro-centrism and religio-centrism.
Issue #8. It can’t get any simpler than this. If a seed is infected with some strain of disease or rot, the resulting plant will be likewise infected. That’s how DNA works. All organic life is subject to the laws of consequence and causality. The properties of DNA and the laws of consequence and causality appear to be – essentially – cut from the same cloth.
Cultures, societies and civilizations – being the extensions and direct reflections of the organisms who create and sustain them – can also be said to have their ‘own’ variation of DNA which further mirrors that of a plant. If the seed or seminal event that spawned a modern civilization (like ours) was infected with some form of poison, then that poison will in turn affect all future growth of that civilization. Warmongering, genocide, the tyranny of the European state and the Catholic Church, man’s inhumanity towards man, the holocaust, the violent clash between religious ideologies, man’s obsessive preoccupation with material wealth, the industrial revolution, the lethal over-population of humans, environmental degradation and the global livestock industry’s wonton rape of the earth’s forests, wetlands and dwindling water reserves….can all be traced back to the poisons inherent within the original ‘demon seed’ (the idea) of human interference.
We are certainly not suggesting that the specificity of the above events were somehow predestined, foreseeable or detectable within the DNA of the infected seed that spawned and nurtured western civilization. Instead, we are suggesting that the poisons inherent within the original demon seeds (human interference) created a conducive environment where any variety of potentially poisonous events could have occurred over the last ten-thousand years of modern history – those events being directly indexed to and commensurate with the poisons within the original infected seed. Of course, one has to view this process through the unerring, unforgiving and (oftentimes) brutal laws of consequence and causality.
If one looks at these issues through the filter of genetics, then western civilization’s DNA has been infected by a self-destructive gene which has been incubating, mutating and spreading (exponentially) in all the wrong directions since the invention of agriculture some ten-thousand years ago. Even today we can trace the infection back to a very precise moment in human evolution, to the exact moment when the self-destructive gene first began to infect its unsuspecting host. That precise moment was when early modern humans began interfering with nature and its ancient and time-enduring laws of balance and order. The poisons inherent within the ‘seed’ of human interference were so vile and insidious that they infected every branch, every leaf, every twist and turn, and every future generation of western civilization’s development. The cumulative effect of ten-thousand years of unchecked growth and mutation (of the lethal infection) is the now-imminent collapse of the human system.
Issue #9. The three accepted axioms which underpin our (quantum) understanding of the universe are (1) that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, (2) that energy has no future or past, existing only in the present moment and (3) that just beyond the wafer-thin limitations of human sensory perception and mental cognition exists a universal and omnipresent field of pure energy which permeates all of creation and unifies its seemingly separate and independent parts (see the Allegory of the Christmas Tree).
‘Tomorrow we will gather up the star dust
Tomorrow we will gather up the crumbs
And the nature of the mind
Leaves us gullible and blind
For in truth….tomorrow never comes’
Just how far hyper-humans strayed from the ‘real’ world can be measured by simply applying the above three axioms to the rest of the biosphere and then doing a quick cross-comparison with hyper-ideological man. Modern humans, due to their capacity to hyper-ideate and linear-think, spend way, way too much of their time wandering around the capricious fantasy-land of past and future, and precious little time in sync with the reality existing in the present moment.
**This essay is a work in progress… additional issues will be added at a future date.**
Dennis Lakusta
July, 2024
Nanaimo, BC