Monday 20 May 2013

What Came First, the Sexism or the Biology? Genetics vs Memetics at its Finest.

This was intended to be a reply to a Facebook post made by a friend of mine. It evolved into this over the course of the train ride to work.

The Facebook post itself was well put: it was about the passage from the book of Exodus, where the law regarding female cleanliness after childbirth and of male circumcision are laid out.

All the people who are horrified at how women were treated, should please settle down. I agree that this God is a sexist douche but under any system, there are always going to be abused and abuser, as well as decent human beings who love and care for one another. And there are still a lot of women who desire nothing more than to be protected and provided for by their man, just as the blueprints of biology designed her.

Ironically if I marry, then I hope to be the housewife in the team. I'd be better at that than working a career 12 hours a day. So I am definitely NOT lumping all women into the same basket with my previous paragraph - all I am saying is, it's about time that we understood a very simple, very important, very undeniable fact that brooks no argument: Biological, evolutionary construction has lumped MOST women into that basket. If you have a problem with what I have said so far, then take it up with your genetics, not me. This is not misogyny, this is fact. Fact derived from unchangeable biological reality. Let's start accepting truth instead of rebelling against it. Rebellion is a symptom of ideology.

Do remember that we are talking about a time in history when men needed all their strength to protect women and women needed all the protecting they could get. People did not have the luxury of sitting around and arguing about misogyny or pitting men and women into competition with each other...they were too busy trying to survive and perpetuate the species using all the tools that they evolved biologically to possess. This dynamic dominated the entirety of human existence and pre-existence - and still governs many of us and indeed many animals - until the last 150-odd years of the western world. Memetically, I would dare to suggest that we are changing at a rate too fast for our genetic evolution to keep up. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution versus a couple of generations of oil-gorged opulence. You wonder why people are collectively and individually imploding, this might point to why.

That said, the priest caste was a different story, as it was a cultural (memetic) evolution, supported by the rest of the people's hard work, living off the grain stockpiles that enabled not only them but cities themselves to exist. It was in their best interest to reinforce a system that worked for them. That's what's happening here.

Writing developed as a necessary communication revolution to manage the new energy regime of hydro-agricultural society, and it in turn continued to shape the society that ultimately evolved - under the guiding hand of the priestly parasites of course. So we can see that scripture is essentially propaganda to idealise and perpetuate the system by which the elite classes of those days stayed that way. And both memes and genes evolve.

The current doctrines that props today's elites up are consumerism, ideological minefields and willful ignorance. And the system is democratic capitalism. Churchill said it was the worst system we'd yet tried, save all of the others. Communications revolutions are necessary, and the memetic and genetic evolution that occurs is par for the course. There are positive and negative traits to any revolution, but every time history repeats itself the price goes up. We're running out of reserves to ravage, and the planet itself is fracturing and collapsing around us.

I think it's time we agree that the semi-regular institutionalised discrimination against women that the scripture-makers initiated is a non-issue. After all, we have the priests of post-post-modern, consumerist, ignorant occupiers of wall street, campus whiner feminists and climate change crusaders beating us about the head with their own zealously pseudo-moralistic ideological lead pipes. When I put it like that, it shouldn't matter what their actual agenda is. You should first be urgently interested in removing yourself from the impact arc of the ideological lead pipe...and checking to see if there's one in your own hand.

Wednesday 8 May 2013

What is Happening to People?

Taken from my notebook, dated 14th January 2013

Walking along the beach, for lack of a better, my brother imposed an SMS debate on me as to the colour of General Douglas MacArthur's liver. We agreed that he was, in my brother's words, a 'real bell end,' and then - I forget the segue - my brother quoted a line from HBO's 'Rome;' "What a dreadful noise plebs make when they're happy.'

Then I started paying attention to the people around me. My tranquil repose, basking in the beauty of the beach and the crisp sea air, views of landscape and beach bodies...all of this ended rather pleasantly as my mind re-engaged. Hey, I'm used to it by now, it's a relentless thing, but it's the only one I've got. Being glad to see it switch on was a most agreeable occurence. I must try to capture this lightning in a bottle more often.

Plebs are supposed to be noisy when they're happy. And yet it was all quiet out here, at one of the most expensive and coveted beach camp sites in the country. Filled to capacity with tired, shuffling campers. Even the children were subdued, the teenagers sullen. Oh, all the behaviours one would look for, whenever one has occasion to assess the health of a teenager, were still there. Those with bodies and $120 boardshorts and/or bikinis flaunted, even as they snarled behind clouded eyes and sneering lips. They snarled at everything, but even the snarl didn't have teeth. Only one of over a dozen even bothered to be vain, as I saw her gaze flitting everywhere to see who was perving on her. That was the most animated thing I saw anyone being all day.

I felt like bounding urgently to them, and shaking them...especially the one girl who still looked somewhat alive. Asked her 'What are you doing, here?' Then I realised that no matter when, or where I crossed her path, whatever the circumstances, the same question would occur to me. The same answer would meet it: a disaffected, post-twitter/instagram/i-Phone/entitlement shrug of bare, white shoulders and of dark eyes. Eyes that would have been beautiful but for their sullen, defiant emptiness.