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OPPORTUNISTIC PREDATORS

I have always loved history since I was a small lad.  My dad had dozens upon dozens of illustrated Civil War books and scores upon scores of periodicals of the same ( from college ).  And my mom loved to take road trips to the coastal Spanish Missions ( this was in California in the ‘70’s before all the roads turned into parking lots and race tracks ) and other historical sites.  I accepted the other social sciences as a Better Than Nothing when there were no more history classes I could take in public school.  While psychology could be interesting, for instance, it had too much technical mumbo jumbo to really satisfy my curiosity of how things happen.  Not mechanical things.  I have never cared about how machines work.  But the intangible systems and how they functioned.  Society ( sociology could have been interesting but the field is too in love with its own terminology and the practitioners memorization of same-just like the military officer corps [ or, if you are Obammy and English is a second language to you, it is spelled “corpse” ] ) and culture and systems.

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I was aware of anthropology but never thought I’d be interested in it because all the adherents of said study do is go live with Bush Bitches and study Bush Bitches and talk about Bush Bitches.  It is like that history teacher that supposedly teaches history but all he does is vomit dates.  That is not history, nor are Bush Bitches anthropology.  The specialist anthropologist ruins the field for all of us.  The few generalists that can also write for a broad audience ( not for text books that are designed and written and sold at $150 each to be a perfect example of how a book should NOT be-kind of like a James Patterson novel ) can bring the study of how humans live with each other, and why they behave the way they do, to life ( highly recommended: “Cannibals And Kings“ for an introductory text ).  After many years, I finally fell in love with anthropology, despite my earlier exposure to Bush Bitch Studies which might have ruined me for life ( the problem with Bush Bitches is that the presentation is anti-primitive theatre and is pre-Industrial centric whereas it should have been non-era specific .  It is also techno apologetic ).  And all it was, was one sentence.  “It is all about the food”.  From there, it has been a fascinating journey.  I’d like to introduce another Headliner.  It isn’t as basic or as all encompassing but it comes close.  “Humans are opportunistic predators”. 

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Whenever you are wondering why somebody did something, and it wasn’t survival substance specific, refer to the Opportunistic Predator clause.  It explains a lot about human behavior.   It also outlines rather well, along with aforementioned All About Da Food, how and why people will act during and after the Die-Off.  First off, it explains that we are at heart Lazy Bastards.  That is cute and sarcastic and caustic, but it is also a descriptive statement rather than a judgmental one.  Lazy saves calories-it isn’t too much more involved than that.  Through human history, the default setting has been food scarcity.  That is what happens when you are at the top of the food chain and need dead animal flesh for optimum performance.  If you sat and ate leaves all day, like gorillas, absent Agent Orange or a asteroid induced Perpetual Winter, you would have a hard time starving.  When you are the Apex Predator, there isn’t always bloody meaty num-nums available.

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Man, through the superior traits of adaptation,  culture as the premier tool, opposable thumbs and language ability, has done a lot of things to circumvent this difficulty, but that default setting has been hardwired throughout our evolution and isn’t going away.  And before you start keening about the superiority of asparagus growing over hunter/gatherers, I would stipulate to you that the Agricultural Revolution was merely a survival adaptation rather than an improvement.  Agriculture led to agriculture empires which are incapable of anything other than the Growth Paradigm.  Growth is survival.

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( even today with seven billion of us, the group that grows survives-as witnessed by Muslims in Europe, Mexicans in the US, Mormons in Utah, etc.  Nine thousand years ago there was seven million globally.  That is even too much for the Earths carry capacity as witnessed by the Mega-Fauna extinction and the need to switch to farming.  Growth is survival, not just in an Agricultural Age, but the elephant in the room is that it is growth in a zero sum game.  Only one group survives, by destroying the other, and in the end the winning group dies also, from resource depletion.  The problem with agricultural growth is the same with hunting growth, grazing growth, or any other kind of growth.  Grow to survive, but growing uses resources.  It is a race to the bottom with the winner dying last.  Agriculture is no worse than hunting, except for both the scale and speed of destruction.  The Industrial Revolution fed with carbon fuel stocks exponentially increases THAT exponential growth.  Remember the parable of the wise man and the king, with the doubling rice grain on a chess board?  By the 64^th square, more rice than has EVER been grown in total is needed.  Exponential is bad  ).

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Lazy saves calories, and that is good.  But it is also surviving today and to hell with tomorrow.  It isn’t that man is incapable of long term planning.  He certainly is.  It is that the plans are never implemented.  That is the down side of being opportunistic.  You can make the worlds best laid plans and they all go to crap out of necessity and out of greed and out of humans simply being hard pressed to sacrifice for tomorrow ( and please be aware that I’m trying to avoid the techno centric viewpoint here.  I’m speaking of life outside of the Oil Age.  When you live in a society with material and resource abundance,  of course you can splurge on long term planning and short term sacrifice.  But historically, that has never been possible except in exceptional circumstances ).  More tomorrow.

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