Abuse with an Excuse

What if I gave it up, what if I stopped fighting it and said, yes we are this large, intelligent, competitive ape after all? Aggressive, even?

I’m always trying to say we’re not, we don’t have to be, we’re not automatically or necessarily, for all you know I look around me and see a different bunch of them than you do or something, what safe, white, little world do I live in anyway – I don’t, I see it. I mean, I do live in such a world, but I can see out. It verges on dishonesty the way avoid acknowledging it, maybe. I’m sorry, sweetness and light ain’t cutting it these days. If I were preaching to the choir, even the choir wouldn’t know what to say to me.

We are. We evolved to be this way, so we are.

We oughtn’t be, is all I’m saying.

It’s in our power not to be, is what I’m saying, that evolution means never-ending, ongoing self-creation, and what happened tens of thousands of years ago is only still with us if we do the same things, make the same choices today – and so after that, it becomes a matter of information, of making informed choices. We are the environment now, most of what modern people must negotiate in life is modern people and so the environment we live in we chose, we provided both the selective pressure and the adaptation to it. With the right information, putting our choices in the right context, in theory, we could make ourselves, our today natures, more sustainable.

We could dial down the aggression and the competition.

Sure that war ape is us, but that was self creation, and it is time for another, corrective self creation. If your aggression becomes a data point instead of part of the manipulative question, then we could see what’s going on and try to do something different – of course, psychology, everyone knows a way to avoid dealing with your troubles is to simply write yourself odd as born bad. Everyone knows that that is always the lie that needs to be disproven at the personal level, and it is at the species level too. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

There aren’t fixed natures in evolution, nothing is non-negotiable and for every rule, some clever creature makes a living breaking it. We know there are successful non-aggressive creatures, and so aggression and competition are not necessary and foundational: everything in nature needs an explanation, and so does human aggression. I’m not going to try to make the explanation today, my views are not secret about it, today, the point is that I am accepting that the state of affairs today is that we are aggressive and competitive right now.

I give up. I admit it.

This is the life that is available for human being today, and it is not our natures forever, but this is a level of “default” for a human born and raised today, and this is the point, the political point of today’s rant – “competition” is not a system, not a human enterprise at all, but only the lack of a human system or solution, only a capitulation to the current animal default that we have unconsciously evolved to be.

I mean, for old people, this is not news, I think it was part of the whole idea, Adam Smith’s explicit idea that capitalism would be conceived this way, as a system our aggressive animal selves could function within – the wording was something about channeling “Man’s natural greed and avarice” as a constructive force, somehow, all will be motivated to succeed and survive – tomayto, tomahto. But it’s an idea based in permanent natures being a real thing which they are not, and there is no “going with it” that isn’t also creating it, I mean, going with what, with who?

It’s us!

You may say you’re “going along,” but I am “going along” with you, aren’t I? When you’re going along, you are also simply going. Everybody can be going “along,” and if so, we are all going, I mean rolling along, competitively treating most of our own species as an enemy and lamenting that they in turn, treat us that way. “Going with the flow” of some “nature” and agreeing to live in constant strife and violence. Warms one’s heart, doesn’t it, there is something we can all agree on after all, the inverse of the platitude, that struggle, fighting, is life.

And having agreed, it becomes “good,” the new good, somehow fighting and the taking of life is good, because . . . here we insert the secret, the mystery, the bit I am spending my life futilely trying to get to, there is a logical connection I cannot make yet I am fighting relegating it to intuition. I am sure it is there, because this is a matter of the world, not just my human mind, it happens, I can’t quite explain it, but we can all see it. We employ fighting when we are trying to fix things, trying to make things better, from a pat on the bum to the violence and ravings of the fascists.

About the latter, however, I cannot from here, understand what problems they hope to solve, what is so wrong in the world that some uber-can model of a police state is better?

I can sort of see the spanking, it’s everywhere, after all, if a spanking stops something worse, mass murder – what evil does the mass murder avert? What is worse? It is clear, what I said above, life is a fight, because peace threatens them somehow, going from peace to war is a solution, somehow. These crazies wave their guns and there is no enemy, no threat, no armed people but them!

The point, I almost missed again – the human list of unwanted behaviours and crimes does not include violence. It’s a solution, on the positive side of the ledger. The police respond to crime with violence, and if violence were a crime, we would all see they add one to every one they find, we would all see how even the good guys propagate violence endlessly. But it’s not, it’s sacred or something.

And so, we are doomed.

Jeff

Feb. 1^st., 2021