-Ambrose Bierce
I have thought more about what this crazy contraption between our ears is than anything else. Its a real mindfuck to try and think about the contraption doing the thinking, but I lack options. Recently I've come into some interesting facts about the human brain, and this gives me a cerebral itch that demands scratching. I read this article that talked about studies that seem to indicate that human brain size has been decreasing substantially over the past 20,000 years. One theory says that this is potentially the result of mankind being essentially domesticated. All the 30 some odd animals that we have mutated into our servants have had a very clear decrease in cranium capacity as they are selectively bred for various things besides intelligence; primarily being servile to humans. This really begs the fascinating question- what have we been selectively breeding for since the the Stone Age?
I would argue that we have been essentially working towards a human that is more predisposed to be subservient, or at least more willing to fall in line with the perceived majority. The violent rebels and psychopathic power mongerers tend to die before they can out breed the endless masses of passive people. This would correlate with the meteoric rise of authority that we see throughout the world. Taken in this context, European Imperialism and the subsequent spread of Capitalist ideals have merely been a social evolutionary leap on the path that the world was already on. Now I'm not saying that indigenous cultures the world over had to be conquered and brought to heel, but it was certainly not a new trend, just more ruthlessly executed and omnipotent. Now here we sit with a truly impressive number of people on the planet with smaller brains (probably why we can all fit) and highly questionable social behavior that might not be so clever in the long run. What I am really pondering is if the complex and environmentally insane societies that we've established are the top down scams I've always thought them to be, or possibly just the best suited to our needs as highly cerebral primates domesticating ourselves to better produce more of us.
It has always seemed vital to me to consider possibilities that contravene my own ideas. This one I've been discussing here however gives me a deep sense of dread. If we really are evolving more and more to be the play things of power and authority, what kind of people will this be? Is liberty, freedom and individuality all evolutionary traits that are being selected against in the crap shoot of human development? These questions are difficult to answer, and yet I think in my dread I realize that I know the answer. Human history is a long, relatively consistent, indicator that we are becoming more efficient in dealing with each other and less able to deal with other lifeforms. The part that gives me the feeling of uneasiness is that I feel like I'm on the loosing end of this trend, and that all my desires to make people more conscious of our past and our present are ill suited for the general populace, and if so, I am just an echo of what once was dreamed and not the reality that is appearing. But then this old 1300 odd cubic centimeters of neurons surely has a few surprises left for us. As a smart brain once noted- "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."
