On The Relative Insignificance of Human Achievement
Part One
“What happens in Vegas… stays in Vegas.”
The phrase ‘arbitrary manufacturing of ideas’ shows up numerous times in recent writings and accounts for some (perhaps most) of the ‘eight-ball’ notions hyper-humans have about themselves and their relevance in the grand scheme of things. The fact that we have made a big mess of things in an extremely brief period of time (since the invention of agriculture) is indicative of just how ‘eight-ball’ many of our manufactured ideas have been (and still are).
“We are right smack dab in the middle of ourselves and hopelessly prone to ideological centrisms… why wouldn’t we think we’re the ‘crown of creation’, the center of the universe and the best thing since sliced bread?”
A manufactured idea does not necessarily have to be generated from, or grounded in, reality, e.g. the flat earth concept, Ptolemy’s geocentric universe or the Easter Bunny. The anthropocentric belief that God somehow looks like humans or that a hundred different religions can claim their God is the ‘one true God’ or that one group of humans are somehow ‘chosen’ by God…these are other examples of manufactured ideas (constructs) that were fabricated, mostly back in the dark ages and over time have morphed into incontestable truths. It is this patently human and centrism-based penchant for grossly over-stating (over-bloating) our importance and stature in the bigger picture which has partly come to identify our sub-species as perhaps the ‘worst’ thing since sliced bread.
“From a purely clinical perspective the explosive growth of the human brain (300%) in such a short time frame (post H. habilis) certainly qualifies the advanced modern human sub-species as a biological aberration, a ‘freak of nature’. Who else but a freak of nature would wreak this much havoc on its own fragile and irreplaceable biosphere. Who else but a freak of nature would attempt to destroy its own planet. Who else but a freak of nature would rape its own mother”.
There’s no doubt that the modern human is a crafty and creative organism. Due to (1) the explosive growth of hyper-man’s brain, (2) the subsequent ability to manufacture ideas and (3) the added dexterity of opposable thumbs the super-ideological creature went quite berserk inventing, innovating, changing, altering, re-configuring, molding and picking apart the world around him. (These early intellectual pursuits were the progenitors of the modern fields of physics and science, language, the arts, architecture, medicine, anthropology, genetics, social sciences, etc.). But the super-thinker-gone-berserk also began – unwittingly, blindly and quite tragically – to meddle and interfere with systems that should have been left well enough alone…nature’s delicate balancing act and human population dynamics being just two of them.
If one accepts that the 300% explosion of the human brain in only two and a half million years duly qualifies hyper-man as a biological aberration then it only follows that a good deal of whatever his super-brain hath wrought (invention of the wheel, agriculture, organized religion, colonialism, the atomic bomb, advancements in arts, sciences and medicine, pharmaceuticals, machines, space shuttles, technology, the military/industrial complex, nanotechnology, etc.) will likewise be aberrant. Why? Because it’s all the product of one integrated system…much like a long and twisting vine whose many leaves are poisoned because the DNA of the original seed was mortally infected.
Our subject is the relative insignificance of human achievement. All human accomplishment is valid within the context of the greater system (western civilization) and when the laws of consequence and causality are factored into hyper-human history the train wreck unfolding around us today makes perfect sense – all of which is courtesy of the aberrant foundation (mortally infected seed) modern human history was built upon. For anyone who thinks otherwise they should bear in mind that in only seven thousand years – a mere blink of an eye in universal terms – we advanced super-ideological hyper-humans have transformed this once beautiful, once pristine planet into a lethally-overpopulated, toxic cesspool in the throes of another major extinction event. In only seven thousand years.
“He was a legend… in his own mind.”
To conclude, the (1) over-bloated opinion of our significance in the grand scheme of things; that (2) we have some delusional affiliation with an imaginary God; that (3) we are the crown of creation and that we have dominion over the earth; that (4) via technology we will conquer aging, disease and even death itself; that (5) hyper-humans will stand the test of time and that our achievements and our super culture will endure for a thousand, a hundred thousand or a million years from now is not only laughable but attests to the insidious nature of the aberration. The human experiment, along with its myriad inventions, its religious wars, its kings and queens, its victories and defeats, its literature and arts, its machines, its industrial revolution, its laws and values, its violence and disrespect for nature, etc. will have no significance outside of the suffocating limitations of the human mind or its hyper-active and vacuous imagination. These limitations are like the city limits of Las Vegas…the ideological constructs generating our over-aggrandized sense of importance will remain within and extend no further than the ‘city limits’ of our cerebral membrane.
Clarification:
Two items require clarification. Firstly, the preceding essay must be tempered by the historical fact that human achievement was chiefly the domain of the elite class (the royalty, the wealthy, the Church) and was designed by the elites to benefit mostly themselves. The peasantry (a.k.a. chattel…derived from the word cattle) were – and still are – unfortunate dupes who have no other choice than to ‘go along for the ride’.
Secondly, no one is (or was) to blame for the biological aberration or its genesis. The aberration’s formative base and structural underpinnings were established as far back as the late Miocene epoch… all subject to and guided by a series of natural-occurring events. Which accounts for the term ‘freak of nature’. (Nature would have certainly and efficaciously dispatched an ‘aberration’ such as homo sapiens to the ‘scrapheap’ of posterity but the crafty organism managed to outsmart natural law at every turn and at every juncture…to the obvious peril of our fragile biosphere) It’s quite a stretch to suggest that the train wreck unfolding around us today is the result of a chain of events that began seven or eight million years ago but the biological and historical data is there for anyone interested enough to check them out.
One last thing. The acknowledgement that we are not to blame for the aberration does not necessarily exonerate hyper-humans from responsibility for the social and environmental meltdown currently under way. Due to our super-sized brains, we modern humans manufactured (over millennia) a synthetic paradigm of elitist-driven values, ethics and laws which greatly conflicted with nature’s values, ethics and laws, and this unprecedented ethical schism created a major dichotomy. For the first time in the planet’s history natural ethics was confronted by a new kid on the block, an ‘alternative’, an exact opposite, a negative to its positive, an antithesis. Mankind’s synthetic paradigm of values, laws and ethics immediately began to collide with nature’s values, laws and ethics and all hell broke loose… systemic collapse was, from that moment on, a guaranteed, forgone conclusion. Creating an alternative or exact opposite to natural ethics saddled modern humans with the dubious ability to distinguish between the two counterparts… which there-after came to be interpreted as ethical vs. unethical or right vs. wrong. Like a new element added to the Earth’s periodic table, conscience became the instrument of measurement that gauged the difference between the two diametrically opposed states. (Without the man-made ‘alternative’ there would have been no need for conscience to exist because all other organisms acted in abidance with nature’s laws). After first creating and then adapting to this ethical dilemma over the past seven thousand years (the span of western civilization), conscience has now become the ‘albatross’ we hyper-humans carry around our necks…an inescapable and inconvenient barometer whose unerring and brutally impartial readings negate all options of pleading ignorance for what we think, say or do here on Planet Earth.
Dennis Lakusta
January 22, 2018
Website: www.dlakusta.org