Sunday, July 18, 2010

We Are But Infants

Yesterday, David and I went to the Fortscape event in Baltimore. We are both part of the Fortean society and have been to many of these festivals before. Ah, you don't know it? It’s not as bad as it sounds. It is no cult of people in mauve wanting to castrate themselves and follow a large 14 legged cat (though David said he met someone there who claimed she actually was in contact with a 14 legged cat). It is named after Charles Fort, grand collector of anything odd -- raining frogs, ufos, Bigfoot, pyramids, 10-foot lizards, and so on. And so the festival is really a series of lecturers who lecture about anything. Some are clearly daft. Actually, whenever I go to these things, I guarantee you I’ll be either leaving the room on account of either laughter or boredom at some point. However, it’s worth sitting through the paranoid schizophrenics to just hear one brilliant person blow my mind. Here are my thoughts after listening to that one lecture.

The current average human is a moron. I include myself in this condemnation.

Yes, yes, we have roads, we have light bulbs, we have chocolate pudding pops; but, only a select few know how to make these.

The current humans are idiots.

We are helpless. We are totally dependent upon our society to provide for us. We cant make, we cant grow, we can’t eat. We are babies.

Go ahead, move to the wilderness and see what happens. Get electricity? Um, I suppose you must first need a generator-this means metal-guess you better go mine it somewhere and smelt it. Build a house? Nails…damn….same problem. Glass….hee hee. Plastic…ah plastic.. best drill an oil well. Ah, now what? Um…how do I build a house anyway? Plumbing?

The “average” person 1000 years ago knew how to manage these things (ok well not the electricity or plastic, but they figured out how to exist without it). I just saw a picture of a building built 5000 years ago. The roof was made of stones. They were stones laid upon stones just loose in a spiral, each somehow supporting each so that now the roof has stood for 5000 years. Go ahead, get any local builder to do that!

So odd, so strange, so foreign to think that rather than "evolving" we have de-evolved. Our brains are less strong. Where once we had to memorize stories from elders verbatim, now we have the web. Whereas once we had to calculate in our heads, now there is the calculator. Once we had to do all for ourselves, now we do nothing, our brains are nothing but sheep jelly. Baaaa......office world...cubicle world.."little house little houses and they're all made of ticky tacky."

Finally, after all this "evolution"-The nature-less people.

In sum, our "evolution" and "innovation" and discoveries has reduced us to the level of infant.

Our society as a whole has many things. As individuals though, we are babies. And babies are very very VERY vulnerable.