Sapiens, A Book

 

Morality, right and wrong doesn’t have a chance anymore.

Sapiens. The advance of sapiens through time has shown we have not only bartered away what we have made, believed, or borrowed from nature but we have frittered away the codes which we lived by. We’ve been boiled down and rendered (in fat) into whatever aggregation of moral codes, traditions, laws, rules, standards of whatever dominant society in which we live, none of which are much more than a generation old and none of which are so viable today that almost any advance of technological, scientific inventions and experiments won’t further degrade them, or at least, if degrade is too harsh a word, won’t further negatively change what has lasted to this point into mostly obsolete.

When primitive people with limited technologies walked the earth, stone tools proved durable and worth the tedious but hard work put into creating them. On the other hand, iron and steel become rusty and useless in less than a lifetime.

Trump is an example of this general rule. When democrats, who currently represent  impeachment standards, cannot accept certain behaviors in a president ( history notwithstanding) and have to decide if what Trump does is constitutionally correct, are themselves hard pressed to differentiate between what they and other politicians have, over time, made the “new normal”. All politicians by sacrificing certain powers ascribed to them by the constitution in order to “give” more power to the president of their political party have now reaped what they’ve sown.  They have to all ask themselves, what presidential behaviors (or powers) truelly transcend  rational and morally acceptable behaviors which even god would find objectionable puts them in such a divided state that the general public is left completely divided as well with no center of gravity and a confused  belief in a system we’ve been taught to always exonerate at the highest levels of our magical world.

Laws are remnants from an old moral code placed against an economic, scientific reality of the present added to by what the powerful (politics, faith, and empire) have decided ( in the loosest of terms) what will be the Future. In other words, we’re all socialized to try and live a code of conduct that is not for everyone because it is based on historical precedents that have been obsolete almost from the time of their inception. Notions such as justice for all, equality for all, equal opportunity for all have always ignored the very conditions upon which reality exists. That is, justice, equality, opportunity are not real things, merely ideals, and they are as widely varied as the differences between capitalism and communism or buddhism and catholics which in themselves are all merely ideals as well.

No ideal is an island. Or a place. Or a job. Or a way of life. We can raise our children like we were raised, thinking that has something to do with how pleased we may be with our lives right now, and our children may have completely different lives. Ideals are not formulas, enchantments, or rituals, though we treat them as such.

That’s the problem. Humans suckle their children on the tit of moral codes and standards of conduct for a modern society which has been built on so called traditional and mostly, amorphous, senseless codes of conduct, developed over  more than a century of scientific, technological, and historical advancement ( call it progress if you want), plus a lack of  differentiation between what’s right and wrong, illusionary belief, and an erroneous concept about what “reality” really is. Reality being the actual rules of behavior that govern us through economic, nationalist, and world view which we need to survive.

It’s ironic to the nth degree that the amount of attention paid to such valueless principals, such as the stock market, international affairs, gossip and rumors about what other people are doing has reached a pinnacle akin to worship mixed with the usual fear one would expect from bowing down to a god.

When sociologists tell us that for all practical purposes the gods have abandoned us, have no interest in our petty lives, we doubt their premise but it’s better not to put all your ducats in one basket so we have turned (bowed) to our governments and the politicians as we would to priests. There are those who retain power and position to influence those who insist they live by the simple rules of the ten commandments and use prayer to ask for that which only god can give, which is as close as any human gets to the art of magic, ritual, and outright lying can get. Still, we must retain our doubts about one or the other.

There are those of us, in the majority, whatever that means, who try to live according to rules left over from their parents or grandparents or even priest, rabbi, grammar school education and who are actually trying to instill these same values in their children or grandchildren but without acknowledgement of the reality that this methodology of conveying such behavior modification has changed a couple of times since even they were being socialized. The education system no longer differentiates between things in the same way. Schools look like prisons, as do housing projects, cities, all designed for accommodating more and more what? Workers, children, seniors in the most oppressive manner possible. We no longer live, we survive. We no longer trust in the knowledge bestowed by acknowledging Nature, we have been inculcated to believe that the problem is Nature.

For some reason we believe that the problems created by man-made institutions, beliefs, ideals, technology, and governance are better handled than the problems of Nature. It isn’t actually so abstract, we have left Nature behind, the parts we haven’t made a real effort to kill off outright.

California is a good example. In the fifties, California progressives (progressives being those who think about what the future will look like) bought into roads and freeways for people to get around and initially, like all things, it seemed a good idea. Considering that freeways take time to build and migration for that elusive opportunity only takes a minute it wasn’t long, say the time it took for a freeway to be completed, it was already obsolete. Now, once that happened was there a review well, no, because while the one freeway and all its hopes and dreams of a better life was becoming realized, commitments by city and state governments were already buying into the ideal and had more freeways being built, all of which had the same fate, obsolete before complete.

As this was happening, California with its relatively mild weather, its “futuristic” model of living the good life attracted all those who desired the american dream which consisted of those “equalities”, those opportunities, so the engineers, construction firms, the planners, put their heads together and simultaneously along with the freeway people built new cities, new houses, new commercial buildings with the hope that the cities, houses, apartments, buildings would be filled and the ultimate dream eventually have a freeway come, making everything as good as it can get, in their eyes.

The one thing city and state planners didn’t foresee in their dream for creating the “equalities” was the natural world. And here’s the gist, if not the dilemna of modern man’s plan, nature has always been left out of the planning. Not just nature but space between things. Man has created a forest (some might say a jungle) of human bondage.

Sapiens tells us there are only three things which are responsible for the complete amalgamation of human experience-money, faith, and not least, military might. What is not mentioned is that trickery in a genetic code that somehow takes these three things and seemingly transforms everything into caging the human soul. Now if that isn’t an alien force I don’t know what is. Can we imagine another being, like a god but rather than good or even evil, simply is designed to be a form of parasite with the powers of consciousness manipulation.

I say this because if you ask most people if they like what’s happening around them, questions about infrastructure, clogged freeways, normal difficulties of living which have nothing to do with “natural” but those things manufactured by politicians, faith healers, and engineers. Everywhere around us, despite a hundred years of developing the intransigence we’ve built our belief in, none of the politicians, faith healers, military chiefs, or planners of the future of our security and survival, no one is about to change the direction we’re in.

It’s all magic isn’t it. The magic gene is what unites us but it’s technology that divides us. Our magic cannot influence what the “priests” manufacture for our constant betrayals to nature any more than it keeps the wolves from our campsites. All of our consciousness has been focused on eliminating fear (defined as that which we cannot control and could harm us). We do have a strong sense of survival. That’s in us. Yet, we are defenseless against our own ability to destroy each other and create that very fear in others who eventually not only defend themselves but prepare to go on the offensive when the opportunity arises.

Probably the biggest question mark. ?