Cons & Chills

Animals always, and humans until quite recently, preferred to make tools from abundant, easily worked, flexible wood —not difficult stone or metal. But the fossil record rarely indicates this.  Wonderful then for a major, major discovery of a wood structure built 500,000 years ago.  Particularly as it suggests it was built, at great effort, to overcome seasonal changes in the location of where land joins lake.  Changes most creatures would have accepted and gone with the flow, deciding to spent their energy on food and fun. These early humans instead used lots of their energy to haul trees to the current lake edge and notched them together to form an interlocking structure, to act as a year around dry platform over an area that would naturally be sticky mud or surging water, depending on the season. Half a million years ago, in present day Zambia, an early branch of humanity was already determined not to be controlled by Nature…

 Its too easy today, with chimps outnumbered by humans 32,000 to one, to unconsciously confuse the power relationship between the many tree-dwelling species and the single human species at the time of our split with the chimp 5 million years ago.  Tree dwelling forest lifestyles was and remain a major and successful ecological option for life forms.  It was our lifestyle that was the odd one, whatever form it took. We do know that for a very long time, we had the anatomical choice to go back in the forest and swing from trees and presumably somewhat successfully interbred with chimps and bonobos, our closest cousins.  But at some point not long after the split, we came to think of chimps as food, enemies, aliens not sex mates or hunting partners. Or perhaps chimps first saw us that way, while we retained warm feelings for them.  And while we frequently slipped back into the forest for food and shelter, we never did decide to remain there.  And our numbers r...

 It has long interested me why the global reception for two hugely important scientific discoveries, that happened with a few hundred miles of each other at virtually the same time, were so different.  Amateur or scientist, the world was instantly transfixed, December 28th 1895, when unknown scientist Wilhelm Roentgen, from the little known university of Warzburg, in the small Bavarian city of Warzburg reported to the tiny local catch-all scientific-medical journal that he had generated rays that could penetrate flesh to reveal the bones inside. With days, over the quiet Christmas holidays, that report was telegraphed via the mass media onto the breakfast tables of ordinary readers and scientists around the world. And with extraordinary speed, again over the quiet Christmas holiday period, science bodies met to discuss the event, while many other, much more prominent, scientists rushed to duplicate it.  One such prominent scientist was Henri Becquerel, working in a global...

  The endless number of highly paid jobs, jobs , ,jobs for males in building & maintaining fission plants and fusion research centres reminds how profitable attempting to control the uncontrollable and dangerous can be. Versus the DIY clotheslines and solar panels successfully, easily, quickly, and safely put up by unpaid women amateurs…

   The  bible, viewed as a predictive science text, ‘proving’ that the universe was purpose-built only for man,     would be much more convincing to me if it were written 13.8 billion years ago, not just 3800 years ago.   I see the world as written by God , while the bible was just written by a couple of His followers…

 All humans have well developed Feardar, from those uncertain early days when we left the safety of the dense forests for the openness of the broken savannah. All of us have had our nerves jangling in the face of potentially dangerous uncertainty. But the passage of time and the absence of its close physical presence quickly reduces the jangles to nought. But a large minority of us has an outsized part of their brain to handle the sensory impressions of dangerous uncertainty, and these nerve ends never seem to stop jangling for these poor unfortunate souls. They only find comfort from actually physically controlling that potentially dangerous uncertainty - or more likely - they employ mental shorthands, heuristics, to mentally control that sensory overload. This emphasis on their need to control uncertainty at all costs has led me to call these unfortunates CONS and the fact that term is also employed to describe people who are conservative in political and social values is no coin...

  For me, WWII wasn’t the defining moment of the Twentieth Century.   Modernity, ever greater Progress defined as  ever greater control, dominated the century and the globe, from beginning to end, and its why both world wars began and how they proceeded to unfold. Modernity would still have soared & then crashed, would still have had its apogee and nadir, with or without wwii.

Unlike all other beings, humans didnt just flee or fight uncertainty, for a dominant minority has always sought to *control* it - even if they are only controlling it mentally. (* I will call control-oriented humans ‘cons’ and those humans more willing to let go and let Nature flow, the ‘chills’.) (Though I was awfully tempted to call the pair doms, for dominion, versus stews, for stewardship.)  This compulsion has made our single species of humans the most successful single species in earthly history - in global range and in total biomass, our numbers expanding 1 million x from our population low point about 800,000 years ago.  But now this unique drive among an aggressive minority of humanity to always control uncertainty, particularly by controlling it mentally, has brought them, us and the world to the brink of extinction.

 It is no secret I have always had a tough time satisfying myself that I had fairly laid out the ‘why’ that successfully explains wartime penicillin happened just as it did.  So years can pass between blog posts about the subject.  But this parrot has been sleeping, not dead.  Or rather privately thinking and privately reading, rather than doing original research and public writing.  God knows there have been thousands of ground-breaking ‘overview’ histories of WWII, all promising and delivering unique viewpoints on its what and its why. I can only hope my efforts here can add a little more to the never ending search. And to be upfront : I am definitely a Chill, not a Con. But I hope I will be fair in seeking answers as to why Cons are the way they are, why they have been so successful over the last million years and what threats they now pose to themselves and others….