As progress in human thinking and organisation (rather than progressive drivel) grinds further to a halt – and visions of something better beyond “more and more” start to fade – human beings given a large brain partly by mistake need more and more escapes from natural reality. These are sure signs that unless we give science back the freedom to think without hindrance, we are a go-nowhere species.
As far as can be archeologically established, human societies have been taking mind-altering drugs for at least 3,500 years. Everything from mescalin, mushrooms and young shoots via brewed leaves and wheat or hops to grapes for wine, distillations for whisky, vodka and Tequilla, weed, ganja, resin, opium, heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, nicotine, caffeine, amphetamines, antipsychotics and antidepressants, through to the psychedelics from LSD to XTC: there are hundreds of ways to get off your face, and a lot of people doing it.
Forty per cent of all Americans binge drink, and worldwide over 110 million have “a drink problem” causing three million deaths every year. 25 million are hooked on cocaine, 29 million abuse heroin and associated opioids, and 158 million are daily users of cannabis ‘spliffs’. All told, there are twelve million premature deaths per year as a result. So drink and drug abuse see off fifteen million of us. In that same year, 2.2 million deaths were attributed to Covid 19….so mind alteration as a problem is more than seven times bigger globally. But you wouldn’t think so, would you? And here’s another stat: 78% of all Covid deaths occur among over 75s with other pathogens – the most common of which is excess toxicity – or booze.
The point of today’s piece is not, however, to get dragged back into blatant medical scams. There are a number of much bigger questions to address:
- Clearly, many people need to be taken out of reality: regardless of cultural or religious development, there is without exception always a tolerated and acceptable way to get “stoned out of your mind” – a very apt phrase in its own right. A large percentage of us are ill at ease with reality, and look for ways to blot it out.
- Futhermore, Homo sapiens has always been like that….and perseveres in the pursuit of the legless condition despite the many initial disadvantages of so doing. The taste of most forms of alcohol, for example, is pretty awful, and last year our species spent $8.6 billion disguising it with mixers….at a compound growth rate of 7.8%. Hangovers are rarely less than foul. Yet the dogged need to reduce reality is always there. One of the biggest differences between ourselves and other animals is the human desire to introspect and see what’s coming.
- “The answer lies within” say the Buddhists, and they’re right. All stimulants act directly upon the pleasure-centres in the brain. How and why we got to have large brains is fascinating, and does add to our problems. Some people get a charge from audiences, others from playing football, others still from music and many of us from religion. But such things rarely cause death directly: drugs and drink are, one has to admit, a real scourge of mankind.
“Life is nasty, brutish and short,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, whose surname itself ironically means ‘Devils’. (Nasty, brutish and short also works well as a default descriptor for Matt Hancock, probably the most unpleasantly false and corrupt MP since Bob Boothby – as he proved again at PMQs last Wednesday, but that’s not important right now). In Hobbes’ own time, life was indeed something of a lion-eat-okapi existence for the overwhelming majority of humans flooding from the tied slavery of bucolic serfdom into the expanding towns and their chimneys attached to satanic mills.
But putting the blame for escapism onto capitalism simply isn’t borne out by the data – as Karl Marx eventually realised. When young, he said “Religion is the opiate of the People”. What became obvious as he grew older and more wise was that opiates are the religion of the People. Dogs, cats, horses and primates have a different awareness spectrum to us, and seem to spend more time in what the German philosopher Eckhart Tolle calls ‘Now’…the best way yet developed to keep right-brain fear and panic at bay. We on the other hand are fully aware of death’s inevitability, and are equipped with comparatively huge brains that compute unconsciously on a 24/7 basis. Our ability to deal with life’s more unpleasant possibilities has resulted in a factory-wired denialism of mortality; if at any time that breaks down, we turn to mind alteration…and always have done.
So then: a lot of us prefer happy-clappy land to the apparent 3D reality of that multiverse we inhabit, we’ve been like that since we got a sapiens brain, and our limited spectrum of consciousness refuses to accept that Time and Space are an illusion in the first place.
It is a thing to behold, is it not, that we resort at will to the blocking out of something unreal in favour of something else more pleasantly unreal, believing the trip through each surreal landscape to be, while we’re there, a reality.
I don’t think it would be overstating the situation here to suggest that, as a species, we are both confused and wide-open to suggestion.
Such a context is always going to favour the high IQ (but low emotionally intelligent) narcissists who run Planet Earth. For myself, I don’t know but I increasingly suspect that the abnormally sized brain we have was a side-effect, not the objective.
Following radical climate change in Africa some 850,000 years ago, some of our distant Hominid relatives saw their fruit-bearing tree “safety refuges” dying, and were forced to come down to Earth. Scuttling about on arms used like legs was not, in the tall Savanna of the time, the optimal way to spot a predator. This resulted in our change to upright stance; but that alone didn’t solve the inability of Homo Erectus to match the speed of Big Cats. Such predators had more speed than us, but were unable to sustain it. So we needed more blood supply to the brain to run further rather than faster. And the sole way to achieve that was a much bigger brain.
I am no longer inclined to accept the philosopher Bronowski’s idea of the Ascent of Man. Because in fact, what we have ended up with is an upright stance atop which is a brain far too heavy – and thus ever likely to cause problems – for the spine, hips and buttocks beneath it.
This wasn’t a big deal so long as our life expectancy was 25-35 years. But that same big brain has come to resemble a millstone – in that its creative imagination has produced better trade in foodstuffs, higher crop yields, meat husbandry and medical intervention “advances” that have shifted one score and fifteen years as a lifespan into four score years and ten for much of the First World.
Two conclusions can be drawn from this. First, survival into very old age has buggered pretty much every quant’s calculation about pension provision. And second, sheer longevity isn’t that great an experience if it carries with it the extreme likelihood of surgical intervention and a brain designed to last 35 years being asked to cope with more and more scientific advance after 75 years.
This is the net impact: nutters like Karl Schwab, Bill Gates and Matt Hancock want a cull of all the “useless eaters”. These might be Africans, Indians, old people, Filipinos, American Hispanics, kids or the disabled. Stumbling upon an accident of evolution, their analytical skills do not stretch beyond eradicating it without any empathy for the victims. Obsessed with the crazy Nazi remnants of a search for species perfection, their only sci-fi comic solution is to marry the élites who remain after depopulation with AI bots who will, at last, deliver a life of protected ease for themselves.
They’re not remotely interested in the much bigger underlying issue of how Homo sapiens might accelerate its evolution beyond the existing “error”.
Dedicated Warmists (who tell us every year we have only eight months left) have yet to put together any convincing evidence for climate change beyond scenarios that have been modelled but – predictably – turned out to be wrong. Climatic change over time is inevitable and has been taking place in every imaginable form throughout Earth’s history. Ironically, it is the greatest single cause of evolution via changing diets and migration to “better” climates.
At the same time, however, the other huge factor is isolation from the previous evolutionary version of the species. And thanks to the exponential growth in emigration, holiday/business travel, and First Worlders retiring to Third World destinations, such a thing is pretty well impossible in the contemporary setting.
In short, if the Sorcerer’s apprentices keep the climate zones steady and back-packers keep taking gap years, Homo sapiens is a dead end.
If some of the worst élite motives postulated by the 1in8 turn out to be justified (and are followed through) transhuman monstrosities will emerge from the Davosian cranks, and “vaccine” evaders will populate probably sea-based environments offering natural or constructed ‘separation’ from the New Mengeles. The spectre of a future in which our species divides in two to fight the Final War is easy to imagine, and to this end I have already submitted the outline script of the movie to Sol Hogwash and the other bright things at OutReach Pictures of Burbank California.
I still think that outcome to be spectacularly unlikely. As I wrote in a Saturday Essay over ten years ago:
‘Good science and philosophy is not about the past, but rather the eternal. Until such time as Homo sapiens evolves (which it won’t do without geographical isolation or huge climate change) the eternal species truth is that we have succeeded by genetic competition within the pack, and cooperation between packs. We are doing neither of those jobs properly at the moment. New ideas about how to do it are vital if we aren’t to blow ourselves to smithereens at the end of a globalist game nobody can win.‘
But “New Ideas” are the very antithesis of what Globalist and Medical claptrap have force-fed us over the last 3-5 years – viz, perverted old ideas and loopy non-empirical ideology on the questions of central banking, wealth accrual, interest rates and controlling viruses. With breathtaking brass neck, the guys with the distorted mirrors nevertheless choose to call it The New Normal.
A year after the post linked above, I returned to the theme once more:
‘Although this is a gross oversimplification, the more a species is isolated – and the more dramatically the species environment affects its ability to function and reproduce – the more fundamental and fast the evolution will be….what I observe is a species shunting itself into a siding where the game becomes squeezing the most out of what is, and every man for himself as the horizons of expansion shrink….that monopoly status quo is safer than entrepreneurial adventure…and above all, that all who question the New Wisdom are heretics flying in the face of There is No Alternative. It is, in my view, possible that Homo sapiens has reached a dead end……’
The doom-monger, Daffy Davos, Pentagon trigger-finger, climate emergency, digitalising, and bioweapon depopulators would answer this by saying, “Ah well you see, that’s why we need transhumanism”. But that isn’t evolution of a life form, it’s just coping with – and accepting – that what we need is to hand our lack of courage and decline in voyager genes over to AI devoid of any emotional intelligence whatsoever.
My conclusion today is that cracking the e=mc2 code, studying mass and Space/Time continuums and applying neuroscience discoveries to such an endeavour will force us to evolve in response to the gigantic awareness-spectrum leaps that lie ahead in the next twenty years. Such things will make the burblings of Schwab risible by comparison.
But it’s a race against time, and the stakes have never been higher.
The Slog 