So, a flying saucer full of aliens comes down to earth in 1790, about 30 years after the start of the industrial revolution, to study our planet. They are pretty impressed.
“Wow Xanex, this place is off the chart!”
“I know Keanu, look at all this shit! Now this is what you call a rich biosphere right?”
“Totally X, there’s like millions of species of animals and forna, we could be here for yonks classifying it all. Where shall we start?”
“I’ve got an idea Keanu, why don’t we take a top-down approach and identify the species at the very top of the food chain and work our way down?”
And so they do. Keanu tells Xanex to do a quick search to try to find evidence of any intelligent civilisation on the planet. After about 10 alien minutes, Xanex is standing at his console scratching his head.
“Wassup X?”
Says, Keanu
“Erm, honestly? I’m a bit confused. I did my search and I found what looks like one single species, but I’m thinking they are actually two. I mean they are biologically exactly the same except for a few environmental adaptations like skin colour, facial features and what not, but in every other way they are completely different”
“I don’t get you X, how can they be two species if they are biologically exactly the same? That don’t make no sense at all bra'”
“Yeah I dig it Keanu, I wasn’t chosen for this mission because I’m a pretty face you know. I am actually the astro-biologist on this fecking mission”
“So what you flappin’ about then X?”
“Ok look, Let’s give the whole bunch a name so we know what we are talking about. I dunno, how about humanity?
So I’ve made a picture of the first kind of human. On the face of it, this geezer seems to be more technologically advanced than the other type (clothes, wigs, sail around in ships and making stuff in factories), but they seem to be spreading all over the planet from this bit of the planet here, taking over all the land but then fucking up everything they come across. Forests, killing all the wild animals for fur, killing all the whales for oil for their lamps and whatnot.
They spend a lot of time killing each other, but they especially like killing this other type of human. It’s almost like a sport! They seem to want to own and kill everything they see. Except for dogs! They love their dogs. Just for the sake of argument, lets call these ones “Greedy Humanity” or “Avarus Humanitas” because us aliens love our Latin don’t we?
Then there’s this other lot. It’s almost like they don’t give a crap about technology. They have basic hunting tools like spears and blow pipes and bows and arrows, and a really weird wobbly stick that they throw at big hopping mice, but it’s quite clever really because it comes back if they miss so they don’t have to run and go pick it up before they can throw it again, and some basic tools for a bit of farming and such, but no machines you can really point at.
They don’t seem to want to own anything at all! In fact, they seem to be very determined to not use anything they don’t actually need. They only hunt what they actually eat and farm in a way that preserves the land. Classic hunter gatherer types. Pretty nomadic bunch following the seasons and allowing the land they just left to recover from their presence. Great wheel of life stuff really. They live in relative harmony with each other (odd scuffle but nothing to write home about), and they seem to show a lot of respect for the natural environment and well, everything really. So whilst they are technologically miles behind these tossers, it strikes me they have a much more sustainable and intelligent way of life; almost wise. In fact so wise that they seem to intuitively understand at a spiritual level that energy and matter are the same thing and that makes everything as valuable as everything else. They make no distinction between a pebble or a person. We could call them “Wise Humanity” to distinguish them from these greedy bastards. “Wise Man” for short or “Homo Sapien”.
“Some are smart but they are not wise”
Shoshone Proverb
So, whilst the greedy ones seem to have all the power, land and technology, I reckon these wise ones, intellectually, philosophically, spiritually, ethically, and environmentally are actually the top of the food chain, but from the looks of it, they are pretty much on their way out what with all the butchering and slaughtering these greedy ones are doing.”
If Keanu had eyebrows, they would have been furrowed in thought. After about a minute he speaks up
“So, we’d better kill all the greedy ones then init?”
“Eh? What all of ’em?”
Says Xanex.
“Yeah, we better kill ’em all. The greedy ones I mean. It’s logical and us aliens are known for our logic and that. Look, if we let ’em live then these wise ones are goners right? Also, if these greedy fuckers keep going the way they are, then I can see a time when they will fill the atmosphere with Carbon Dioxide from all these fossil fuel burning factories they are setting up, and we all know what happens when you pump the atmosphere up with CO2 right? Just a big mess and all of ’em, including the wise ones will become extinct along with lots of other species. So if you think about it we are duty bound to kill ’em really. Actually, it’s like we are doing them a favour really, because I’m sure that if they were thinking straight, they wouldn’t want to set off a global extinction event.”
Now X is thinking.
“Couldn’t we just show ’em how to do fusion and then they won’t use these fossil fuels?”
“You crack me up X, you really do.”
laughs Keanu
“You really think these nutters would use fusion properly? These dickheads would blow the planet up. No, we’re definitely gonna have to kill ’em. That is exactly, what we need to do”
He reaches over to a big red button on the console, winks at X and pushes the button.
“Kaboom motherfuckers!”
Ok, so I’ve sort of nicked the idea from the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, but I have modified it in two important ways: A) I didn’t want to kill off ALL of humanity and B) I didn’t pussy out at the last minute because John Cleese reckons we are all capable of changing our ways if only we were allowed to get to the point where everything was teetering on the brink of an abyss.
If the aliens had visited back in the 1790s, and had pushed the big red button (and they would’ve), wiping out Avarus Humanitas, the world would be a very different and better place today, because the ethical, philosophical and religious worldview of the remaining indigenous peoples is so fundamentally centred on the idea that
“Man belongs to earth, earth does not belong to man.”
Native American Proverb
Geographically, the remaining peoples of the earth would include Native Americans, South American indigenous tribes, Pacific Polynesian peoples, New Zealand’s Mauri peoples and Australian Aboriginal peoples.
All these peoples shared a common understanding and acceptance of our place in the world and the need to live in a way that maintains Nature’s fine balance.
All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle (Seathl)
Now, I know what you’re thinking…
“Isn’t it a bit insensitive to be talking about pushing a big red button that kills pretty much everyone, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means we are teetering on the brink of WW3 Creasy?”
I can see why you might think that mon brave, but A) I would retort that I have actually been thinking about writing this blog for about 6 months (way before comrade Putin and NATO bolloxed everything up) and 3) what better time is there to demonstrate that not only have we not changed since the industrial revolution, but that we never will and that pushing that big red button (not the one that sets off all the nukes, the other one the Aliens had), is really the only logical and ethical thing left for us to do.
We have lost our humanity, or rather, our technological evolution has stolen it from us. We have lost our spiritual connection to the Earth. Walking the dog in local woods with the sound of the M25 ringing in your ears doesn’t count. It really doesn’t.
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Crowfoot (1836-1890) warrior and peace-promoting head chief
Implicit in these words, is the notion of being still in the world and simply observing, and in that observing we learn truth and nothing could, or should, be more important. Instead of this simple but powerful truth, we, Avaratus Humanitas, have chosen to define and teach and reinforce a set of “moral” and “ethical” values based solely on the assumption that people are more valuable than everything else.
This is the fundamental difference between the world’s wise people and the rest of us. If a single human life is more valuable, more sacred, than everything else, then everything we do to preserve, enhance or worship that life becomes ethical. If human life is so sacred why wouldn’t we build temples of concrete and steel to worship it? Why wouldn’t we sacrifice everything that was there before to build those temples? Why wouldn’t we rape the earth over and over to grow the things we need to feed or decorate that abundant and most precious life? Everything else is secondary, everything else doesn’t matter. Only we matter, and we have enshrined that core value deeply into our collective psyches and our religious beliefs.
“Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains for ever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end.”
Catholic Catechism
Whether it is Christianity or Islam or Judaism, the basic premise that we are more special than everything except God is baked in. This is the most basic and flawed form of logic. All cats have three legs. Tom is a cat. Ergo, Tom has three legs. Logically flawless and absolutely wrong. Humans have value, trees are not human, therefore trees are not valuable. The initial premise for the function is wildly incorrect, so no matter how logical or flawless the rest, the final conclusion will always be wrong.
You have to start from a different place. A more correct premise. A place where a pebble has the same exact value as a new born human baby.
“From a grain of sand to a great mountain, all is sacred”
Peter Blue Cloud (1935-) Mohawk writer
You have to start from a place of simple need versus want. If our only purpose was to survive, using only that which the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would understand that our current rate of consumption of natural resources was not a problem to be solved later, but one which should occupy our every action and decision.
We would be watchful and careful in the way we shared this space and it would be entirely natural to preserve it so that our progeny could survive and know that everything had equal value too. Imagine the wisdom required to consider the impact of our every decision on the next 7 generations? We don’t even have the wisdom to think about the next one.
If we had this mindset, the decisions we would take would be very different. If nature produced a female that could not bear children, or a male that could not produce sperm with high motility, the decision wouldn’t be to conquer that natural selection with technology over and over again until the infertile couple actually produce another unnecessary child. Instead, adoption would be as normal and natural a way of “having” children, as actually giving birth to your own or having someone else do it for you as a surrogate. Sacred cow, right? Every man and woman have the right to have their own child whatever it takes, right? Why, because we are more valuable than the beasts of the field who naturally have the same condition, and anyway we have the tech to do it so what’s the problem?
The problem is that nature never gets a say. It tries to rebalance our numbers to levels it can sustain all the time, and we just keep giving it the finger. Disease? No problem. Famine? No problem. Floods? No problem. Infertility? No problem. Soil not producing enough human/livestock feed? Industrial Agro, no problem. Global warming? Bigger A/C units and houseboats, no problem. We think of everything as a problem to solve except us!
“We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavoured to live with the land; they seemed to live off it. I was taught to preserve, never to destroy.”
– Australian Aboriginal – Tom Dystra
If our only purpose was to survive using only what the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would not allow our population to to burgeon. It simply wouldn’t make any sense for our survival, or the survival of the other species that share this world. Look at the fuss we made about a few people who died during the COVID pandemic. Yeah, I said it! As I write, 5.98 million people have died of COVID. That’s 0.07% of the world population (7.8Bn and rising), and the vast majority of those people were over the age of 75! Shit, it’s not even one city’s worth of people. A normal and sane thought process would say “ahh, poor Doris/Jim, but s/he did have a good innings”. Instead, we were beating our breasts and going on and on about how unsafe care homes were, when we should have been taking them on daily outings to Val Doonican concerts in the COVID wards!
Too soon? Put it in the comments section.
If we were sane, every school in the world should have at least half their teaching staff come from the indigenous peoples of the world. That would be the only qualification they needed. The other half should only be allowed to teach knitting (with sustainably sourced wool). I accept that there aren’t enough Native Americans, Mauri or Aboriginals etc. to go round because we killed most of them, but if for the sake of argument we could, they would teach our children that living wisely is consistent with the certain knowledge that no one thing in the universe has greater value than any other thing because everything in the universe is exactly the same as everything else. Everything is ultimately energy and it simply moves from store to store (matter). They would teach them that as sentient and spiritual beings, we carry more responsibility for recognising and respecting that value in everything, not less.
If we were sane, only indigenous people could stand for public office. If you live somewhere where you have already wiped out the indigenous people, then you would have to vote for one that lives somewhere else. As our leaders, they would ensure that every decision taken took into account the impact on our world.
Apart from the practical problem of most indigenous people being dead depriving us of the teachers and leaders we really need, we also have the lightbulb problem.
We can no sooner go back and start from a new set of values, than we can uninvent the light bulb. It’s like someone pointing at a yellow cup and saying “that cup is red”. Nothing will convince you that the cup is red when you can see it is yellow. Our value system and beliefs are so deeply entrenched that they cannot be unbelieved. They can only die out. We have set our avaricious foot on a trail that has a clear and unambiguous destination and all the tree hugging in the world will not stop us from getting there. We are collectively consumed with consumption, engorged by our bottomless appetites (ever been to an “All you can eat” buffet in the US?), and yet more individually isolated and lonely than ever before, as Globalisation lays waste small communities in favour of anonymous city life. At the same time, we’re all so badly trying to be woke about some things that we have forgotten that we are deeply and artificially asleep to the single central truth; everything has equal value to everything else. If we woke to that simple truth, then no other wokeness would be needed. Bias and prejudice and intolerance cannot stand up in water that deep.
“It’s impossible to awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep.”
Navajo Proverb
I wrote a blog a while ago called Shouldn’t we Weaponise Babies? because I believed that the root cause to all of our problems today is the sheer number of humans that are consuming resources on our world. The basic concept behind that blog was to rapidly and radically reduce the world’s population to preserve the ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth. I’d like to update that belief a little because it occurs to me that massive population reduction alone, albeit still very much needed, will not do the trick.
I seem to recall that I proposed a reduction from 7.8Bn people to say 500m people because at that level, provided that we never allow the global birth rate to grow above the replacement rate (2.1 kids per female), our level of consumption would be so low that the damage we have done could be healed naturally. I’d like to revise the reduction in population to 370m people, which just happens to be the total global population of all remaining indigenous peoples.
“That is a very spooky coincidence Creasy!”
Isn’t it?
I think I proposed that today’s children should be persuaded to not have children or to only allow 1 in 2 girls to have babies or something. So, I’ve changed my mind on that too. I don’t think that our selection of who can reproduce and who cannot should be random any more. We should limit reproduction to indigenous peoples only. What good is it to reduce the population if the people left teach those children the same values we carry around today. No, no, no, no, no! That won’t do at all. We have to scrape those values from the human consciousness like a burned lasagne from a baking dish that wasn’t stacked properly and therefore never made it into the dishwasher.
By only having indigenous people procreate, we can ensure that their children go to schools that only have indigenous children and indigenous teachers. To make sure that they don’t become infected by our values, we can create reservations in the cities for everyone else, where they can live out their lives. In 100 years they, and their values, will have all died out and the cities can be left to entropy to sort out. During that 100 years we should provide these people with every luxury their hearts may, and will, desire so they don’t feel like, well, like the indigenous people did when they were sent to a shithole reservation. Most importantly it might stop them from trying to escape or go to the countryside.
All other land should be returned to nature immediately and shared by the indigenous peoples of the world. We can’t give it back to them because their own system of values meant they never owned it in the first place.
Rewrite the 10 commandments as well, the one’s we have are pretty useless and nobody follows them, and they just keep going on and on about not committing adultery or not coveting they neighbours wife or not coveting they neighbours house which is fundamentally the same thing. If you ask me, the bloke who wrote the commandments is basically telling a crowd of sex starved other blokes, who have been wandering about for 40 years in a desert that takes a couple of weeks to walk across, not to shag his missus.
Our new commandments might look something like…
- In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next 7 generations (Iroquois Proverb)
- Regard Heaven as your father, Earth as your Mother and all things as your Brothers and Sisters (Native American Proverb)
- Remain among the clumps of grass and do not elevate yourself (Hawaiian Proverb)
- Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children (Native American Proverb)
- Take only what you need and leave the land as you found it (Arapaho Proverb)
- Pray to understand what man has forgotten (Lumbee Proverb)
- The love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome (Santee (Dakota, Sioux) Proverb)
- Only have 2 children. If one dies adopt another, or buy a dog….same thing. (Creasy)
- Sit still on this high rock, look closely and you can see the pub from here (Aboriginal Proverb)
- Don’t go near anything alive in Australia because it will bloody kill ya’ mate (Aboriginal Proverb)
These few simple measures, self evident and obvious, set the stage for a global renewal, not just of the land, but a healing of the collective mind. We have been poisoned but the poison is sweet and while the sweetness hides it’s fatal toxin, fatal it will be.
All but a few have forgotten the central truth of being, but it is still lying there in the pockets of those few, polished by soft hands and passed secretly from old pockets to new pockets, as they patiently wait for us to finish our feeding and move on like a great heard of bison, knowing that the wide trail of broken grass we leave behind will grow again as soon as we have gone.
If we want the best of humanity to go on, then the rest of us must “go quietly into the night”, so that the others can recommence their guardianship of this very special island in the cosmos.
“But how do 370m peacefully minded people force 7.4Bn people who don’t mind massacring all the peacefully minded people because it happens to be Tuesday and that’s when we do all our killin’ and butcherin’, to stay in the reservation Creasy?”
Ah! a crease in the Creasy solution. A crinkle in the Christmas wrapping paper of our Global gift. To a lesser man your observation might pose an insurmountable obstacle; a mountain range blocking our route to Nirvana (not the band). A chasm so deep and so wide that you could only fill it with the putrid dead corpses of Avarus Humanitas! And that, my little piranha, is why I have hatched PLAN B!
We’re going to need a Big Red Button….
