Were I to learn I would live 1000 years, would the urgency with which I write slack?

And it occurred to me…

If not for fear of death, life would – in it’s innate sloth – slack and then cease.

The only known path to immortality is division or procreation… and so we do.

It moves the great organism that is the universe. Kept in motion by pleasure and fear. Ying yang. whatever. There are no more great ideas left, but I hear what was old is new.

The talkers on NPR say that, before agriculture came along, we were a fairly egalitarian species – with regard to gender equity at least. Agriculture, coming on the scene, apparently led to the greater physical strength of men gaining a significantly larger share of social capital – in the form of grain. This would seem to be the first great energy grab in human history. Every once in a while, there would be some powerful women, but mostly men ran stuff.

This went on until some smart guy invented industry. Vacuum cleaners and electric washing machines gave women time to think. And, as women were thinking, thinking started to become a much more valuable tool than lifting.

So this whole gender role thing is on its head compared to the last lots of years. Men used to know what they were about. You know, hunting, clubbing, shooting, ploughing. We had rituals for it; festivals for it; all manner of phallic stuff laying around… Fuck, I’m going to go hang my head in shame, in my fucking man cave, and wait for No Shave November. Women weren’t different, cooking, making babies, milking themselves and other mammals. Everyone knew what was expected.

Today, people lack valid archetypes. Man, woman, penis, vagina. At most, we have polar opposite caricatures of stereotypes. We are fed a steady stream of images which seek to outdo one another by orders of grotesqueness. All balance and order have left Western culture. Hell, yes, I participate. Have you seen the shit you can get from stores?!?!?

We have exchanged inequity for excessive inequity. No longer the inequity of gender, but the inequity of geography. Never before has where you are born mean to much to how you will live. It is literally the difference between flying and walking.

I heard the normal order of things is to have several human species running around the place. I do not think we are all currently moving in the same direction. We have replaced geographical segregation with self imposed geographical segregation – a segregation for which the ability to travel greater distances, with greater ease, decreases the likelihood of mixing genes with outside groups. Call it intelligentsia, the meritocracy, Oligarchy, whatever you like, but those with money, certain physical characteristics, certain cognitive and emotional types, and other traits deemed favorable by this organism’s zeitgeist, are forming a distinct genetic pool, all connected by the internet and air travel. At the same time, the people from this very group are the most likely to have access to the potential advantages of genetic engineering. This may further increase the number of genetic differences between human populations. I wonder what it means to our sense of humanity if we are truly moving further away from one another.