e often read complaints about how the news media and social media
invent stories and misrepresent the facts to trick us into supporting
their political positions. These days, even scientific journals have
gotten into the act. But we're overlooking an even bigger problem: in
so doing, they're also conspiring to make us think humans are evil.
I defy anybody to spend five minutes on Twitter without coming to that conclusion. Whether it's intentional or not isn't clear, but after working in academia for three years I find it more difficult than ever to escape the gnawing feeling that they could be right.
Our cities may be smoldering piles of graffiti-and-excrement-covered rubble thanks to the recent fad of defund-the-police and let's-encourage-the-looter policies, but we rural folks have no need to feel left out. We're having a crime wave too. Here's what's happening around here, from a local paper.
Rural crime wave
Dog bites Last year one feller sued and won a judgment against the police because he was bitten by a police dog with titanium teeth, claiming that the dog was not properly restrained. It turns out that turning dogs into James Bond villains is not at all uncommon. You might think dogs possess inherent knowledge on how to bite people, but apparently not: they have to be trained. Dogs often break a tooth when practicing how to bite suspects, and space age titanium-vanadium alloy is more durable than those ceramic teeth we humans get.
Animals getting loose Two months ago, for reasons that are still not clear, a bunch of hamsters got loose in a local adult bookshop and police and animal control officers had to use thermal infrared visors to round them all up.
Weather problems Yesterday the local high school softball championship was called off due to thunderstorms.
Bugs In West Virginia last year, Governor Jim Justice contracted Lyme disease after being bitten by a tick.
Now, I hear you saying, is that last one really a crime, or was it his punishment? I don't know, but the point is that we're still battling nature out here, not each other. In places where humans have tamed nature, they battle each other.
Humans are essentially a large pack of wild animals with firearms, so keeping them a mile or so away is a reasonable strategy for us, as a mile is out of range for all but the most powerful firearms. Two miles is adequate to escape from the noise if there are women around.
At one time I had a neighbor who was fighting an armed battle with animals trying to eat his chickens, and so he routinely fired off bursts of ammo with his AR-15. It disrupted my weekend reading until I realized that even with his advanced semiautomatic weapon, only once to my knowledge was he was ever able to hit anything.
Sadly, I am now trapped in a hellhole called “The Burbs,” where I get bitched at whenever a dandelion pops up in my yard. Even so I still stick to my old habit of wearing a bright red jacket during deer season. I remain in awe of the courage of those British folks who actually put reindeer antlers on their heads at Christmas without fear of getting perforated.
The point of all this is to say that the more humans hate each other, the greater their tendency to disperse and occupy more space. It appears to be a genetically programmed behavior: the higher the population density, the more the humans hate each other. It is the reason our ancestors spread across the globe.
Why would Magellan try to sail around the world, or the Norsemen sail across the North Atlantic, or Scott try to reach the South Pole? I suspect it was not fame or adventure as they claimed, but to escape from their gossiping neighbors and the complaining women and the petty bureaucrats and the hateful rules they use to get revenge on the world for forcing them to be bureaucrats. (And if you think government bureaucrats are evil, try working in academia sometime.)
There's ample precedent for this. We know the reason humans are afraid of snakes is that our ancestors who weren't afraid of snakes didn't survive. The reason we hate rats is explained by the devastating rat-carried plagues of the 14th century, where two-thirds of our European ancestors—mainly those who didn't hate rats enough—were wiped out. Hating rats was a valuable survival trait that we still carry with us.
If we think humans are evil, what we're really experiencing is our genetic programming to reduce population density. That is what the awful claustrophobia of Twitterspace is doing to us. If there is no space to move to, the humans will find another way and they will be unaware of why they're doing it.
So maybe the reason city dwellers constantly try to kill each other and refuse to have children on the theory that the Earth might someday possibly become one degree warmer is not that they actually believe it, but that they're looking for an excuse. Subconsciously they want to be like rural folk. And who could blame them?
oct 26 2022, 5:10 am
