State of the World Address

It all started when…

Seems the rise of the cancer we call “civilization” may have taken hold after humans began creating large surpluses of commoditized food like wheat with the switch to monoculture ag. ~10,000 years ago. Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky hypothesizes “hunter-gatherers had thousands of wild sources of food to subsist on. Agriculture changed all of that, generating an overwhelming reliance on a few dozen food sources. Agriculture allowed for the stockpiling of surplus resources and thus, inevitably, the unequal stockpiling of them, stratification of society and the invention of classes. Thus, it has allowed for the invention of poverty” (Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers).

Basically, with big surpluses of a relatively small number of crops that can be stored in big silos came the inevitable unequal stockpiling of said surplus. It’s easy to see how that could naturally lead to stratification of society and the invention of classes.

It probably all seemed like a good idea at first, but if there is such a thing as “evil” it seems to have infected this system and for 10,000 years the ruling class have stratified us within more and more classes for their own benefit. They started off really simple: just royalty, clergy, warriors, merchants, and peasants right? At least that’s what we were taught in our sorry excuse for a primary education. Now, we have dozens if not hundreds of named and unnamed classes that divide us up.

What I think may have happened is that a system that specifically incentivizes opportunism (instead of specifically disincentivizing it as many other species in the tree of life do), allowed people who seem to lack the human trait of empathy to take over our society. It seems likely given the state of the world that they view the 99% as little more than livestock to earn an ROI from. Before large scale monoculture ag it seems those with no empathy were kept in check by the tribe. Their role may have been to go up against other tribes. To commit, when necessary, the acts of violence that most people can’t handle. But psychopathy rises to the top in a “modern” economy that rewards greed, opportunism, competition, and ruthlessness. That’s a problem. But it has a solution. We stop playing in their economy. If enough of us band together we can provide each other all the things the billionaires currently do, except we can do it much much better. We can build a mostly separate, thriving economy and society right under their noses.

And for the last ~600 years the powers that be have further stratified us by race, with white at the top and Black at the bottom, everything else somewhere in between. Even within each race there is colorism, which reaches absurd levels as we evidenced by the ridiculous looking full body swimsuits that are worn by some populations and include total face/head covering to prevent tanning. Yet it doesn’t work like this for the “white” race. Instead this race simply grants “whiteness” to some groups and not others, slowly giving more and more ethnic groups the gift of being considered “white” over the years, making the whole thing all the more absurd, and the injustices suffered on those not in the “white” club all the more heinous.