Read The Douchebag Bible Online
Authors: TJ Kirk
wherever.
But that's only my personal choice, because I
find that such feelings are useless within me. They
will not cultivate properly. Hope doesn't uplift me,
because I cannot truly believe it. Trying to hope only
makes me more dismal and withdrawn. But if I give
up on hope—if I abandon it—then I am happy. And
the world is no worse because I abandoned hope.
Dante was wrong. If those in Hell truly
abandoned hope, Hell would cease to be Hell! No
inferno is hot enough to hurt those who don't care
whether or not they are burned.
POLITICS AND
OTHER
DISGUSTING
HUMAN
BEHAVIORS
1. THE EMERGENCE OF POLITICS
My friend, scientist and philosopher Howard Bloom,
author of '
The Lucifer Principle,' 'The Global Brain'
and '
The Genius Of The Beast,'
is fond of saying that
no bacterium is an island.
What does he mean by that? If you put a
bacterium alone in a petri dish, it will begin to self-
replicate until it has built its own society. It’s not an
exaggeration to call what the lone bacterium creates
a society. It has all of the hallmarks of a society—it
has communication, it has resource-distribution, it
has division of labor. Do I have a point here? Let’s
fast-forward and find out.
We, human beings, are great apes. We are most
closely related to chimps, bonobos, orangutans and
baboons. And what social structure do these
creatures adhere to? Do they live in anarchy; a
lawless state of total freedom? Are they, as comedian
and former libertarian presidential candidate Doug
Stanhope claims, unrestricted by any laws but the
laws of physics? I’ll break the tension immediately
by feeding you a spoiler: No.
According
to
Jane
Goodall’s website
http://www.janegoodall.ca chimps organize into a
highly regimented social structure:
Within the community a male hierarchy,
ordered more or less in linear fashion, establishes
social standing, with one male at the top or “alpha”
position. Females have their own hierarchy, albeit
much less straightforward. All adult males
dominate all females. Most disputes within a
community can, therefore, be solved by threats
rather than actual attacks.
Bonobo social structure according to science
journalist Natalie Angier:
Males form a distinct social hierarchy with
high levels of both competition and association.
Given the need to stick together against males of
neighboring communities, their bonding is not
surprising: failure to form a united front might
result in the loss of lives and territory. The danger
of being male is reflected in the adult sex ratio of
chimpanzee populations, with considerably fewer
males than females.
Baboons also live in highly regimented
societies with clear dominance hierarchies, as
elucidated by studies by Princeton University.
Orangutans may be the odd ape out, as they can be
fairly solitary, but it’s been suggested that females of
the species do form loose social groups—they are,
however, not a species wherein dominance
hierarchies play a very clear part—though certain
males do wind up as preferred breeding stock at the
expense of the less desirable males. This means that
while a regimented social structure isn’t in place,
competition is still very much a part of life for
Orangutans.
Dominance hierarchies are with us from the
ground floor of evolution—from the most primitive
lifeforms we know of to the closest of our great ape
cousins.
Homo Sapiens
. We’re actually a much more
baffling creature in terms of our social evolution
than in terms of our biological evolution.
Anatomically modern human beings emerged in
Africa 200,000 years ago, but we’ve only been
industrialized for the last 250-300 years. We’ve only
had the internet for about half a century—and it’s
only been popular among consumers for 20 years or
so.
Let’s think about this. We’re a 200,000 year
old species who just figured out the steam-powered
locomotive 210 years ago. We’re a species who once
hunted wooly mammoth, and now we walk around
with gigabytes of information in the pockets of our
jeans. How did this happen? Where did this sudden
boom of genius come from? How did it spark into
being?
The earliest human beings were hunter-
gatherers (like their
Homo Erectus
ancestors before
them) who traveled in communities that lived much
the same way that the other great apes do—foraging
for food: mostly fruit, sometimes meat. The
agricultural revolution of about 10,000 years ago
changed all that. Human beings no longer had to
move from place to place. They could set up
permanent residence in some ideal location. They