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Aswad -> RE: Riots continue to spread in UK/ is this a means of protest? (8/10/2011 8:16:09 PM)
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~fr~
Spending and waste and not saying stop is just an artifact of the treadmill.
That's how nature works. Trees grow to a uniform height that is well above their optimal height. If most trees grew to optimal height, the ones that grew taller would have an advantage. And so all the trees have to grow that tall to avoid being the one reasonable tree that thus becomes unsuccessful in the evolutionary arms race. This nullifies the advantage for all the trees, while all of them have to keep spending energy on maintaining their height at the absolute limit of survivability.
Anyone that thinks humans are fucking things up unnaturally with consumption should revisit their idea of what is natural. Either that, or put their money where their mouth is and marry a stupid guy with no charm or charisma or looks, that also happens to be a couch potato in his mother's basement, with no particular interests, hobbies or skills. The fact of the matter is that humans mate based on several factors, including standard of living and status symbols. This is an arms race, and you can't win. Every contestant in the recent olympic games beat what was the record in the 60's for the field they competed in, yet the olympic games weren't any more enjoyable this time around.
In the mating game, it's the same. Some hook up for other reasons, but most hook up because hundreds of millenia of evolution are telling them what gives them a leg up on the competition, and millenia of patriarchy have influenced the strategies employed, and ensured that financial success is a huge factor in deciding on a partner to pursue for women, which means men and women are both stuck giving their all to establish something that becomes a routine and later somewhat addictive, only to keep up with the field. Nobody ever really gains a lot of ground. And this isn't even taking into account such things as memetics, parameter diversity or the agricultural revolution with its domestication of the human species and immense impact on selection.
You can get off the treadmill, of course. That's choosing to be selected against. And for a quick lesson in how it works to collectively get off the treadmill, study the Cold War and consider that the monument to the possibility of trust has more bugs per cubic foot of concrete than any other man made structure. It would be an aid to sleep not to consider the implications for science, genetics and technology in the long term.
Religions have tried to fight the destructive aspects of this since the dawn of spoken words. Secular societies have tried to change humanity just as much in other ways. But the outcome is fixed: with the abilities we now have, we will turn it all into a Dolcett comic writ large, no objections voiced until the final frame. The proverbial Tower of Babel is the Halocene Era, and curtains is going to- most likely- be the Halocene Extinction, one of the Great Five extinction events in Earth history. Then nature will spawn a new ecosystem and arrive at another attempt,nwith humans having been yet another species to go under the heading of epic fails.
It's a solvable problem, but it's not trivially solved.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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