Requiem for The American Dream, The Brainwashing of My Dad, & Boom Bust Boom

One response to “Requiem for The American Dream, The Brainwashing of My Dad, & Boom Bust Boom”

1. “I didn’t anticipate the power of the reaction to the civilizing effects of the 60’s… the backlash…”

   – Noam Chomsky

   Predation (including parasitism) and cannibalism tend to regulate the growths of the various species we see on Earth today, because those are the only significant growth regulation mechanisms which have evolved so far, and species without such mechanisms tend to die off when they grow so large so quickly that they overwhelm and kill off their own food supplies and ecosystems irrecoverably. For example, I recall a PBS documentary of a river fish which, during drier times, breeds more cannibal offspring which even look different from their normal offspring.

   With that in mind, does the fact that humans have eliminated all significant predation upon humans by other species mean that cannibalism has taken a larger role in our species than in the average species? Well, first of all, the phenomenon of war, largely unique to and common in the human species, by itself means that the human species has by far the most intense intra-species conflict of any species. And second, according to my best recall of the abnormal psychology class I took, politicians, priests, cops, and CEO’s tend to rank higher than average on anti-social metrics. And, more generally, anti-socials tend to rise to the tops of human societies, regardless of the intents and structures of those societies; for example, revolutions historically consistently fail, and often even turn greatly into the things which they revolt against; the especially bloodthirsty Stalin rises to the top of the communist revolution, for a specific example. So I argue the answer is yes.

   I further argue that humans can find better ways to regulate their own growth- fair/ethical legal limits on number of children per person can, for example, be implemented species-wide- yet cannibals like things the way they are, because that’s the way they thrive, “it’s what they do”. So I think humans have generally, historically greatly underestimated both the need for, inherent difficulty in, and cannibal resistance to finding and implementing better growth regulation mechanisms, and that all such underestimations have played significant roles in why revolutions tend to be “revolutions,” in that they come full circle and, in other words, fail.

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