Mental Breakdown of a Nation
Humanity 1.0: Our Birth
Humanity 1.0: Our Birth
As far as we know, we emerged about 200,000 years ago.
At this time we had no language, no clothing, no art, no religion. We
lived in the wild and ate what we could forage or hunt. We were hard to
distinguish from our closest cousins – the chimpanzees and bonobos.
What came to differentiate us from them – our
remarkable capacity for innovation – was still only a faint trace at
this time, a latent capacity. During the first hundred thousand years of
our existence, we were confined to a small area in the hot, dry savanna
of East Africa.
There . . . we roamed, sweat, and slept beneath the stars on hard ground. We lived like the animals that we are . . .
Mental Breakdown of a Nation
Humanity 2.0: The First Leap
Agriculture was like a secret code. Once we discovered
it, it unlocked a magical, controlling power over nature that until then
had only belong to the realm of supernatural beings.
We discovered our power to tinker with the processes of
life … that we could cull endlessly reliable sources of dinner by
cordoning off “our own” pieces of earth, and bending the environment to
suit our will.
We banned all other species from our space, except for those we planned to chew and swallow.
Everything we sowed and everything we reaped was aimed at maintaining a single species – ourselves.
Before agriculture, it took human beings 50,000 years to
move out of Africa. After agriculture, it took humanity a tenth of that
time to cover the entire globe …
Mental Breakdown of a Nation
Humanity 3.0: Project Total Control
Adbusters,
Mental Breakdown of a Nation
When humans figured out how to synthesize fertilizer
from fossil fuels, we suddenly gleaned two billion people's worth of
food from the same small piece of land – flouting competition and lack
of resources, and spreading across the globe like contagion. We waged
war on our microscopic enemies: bacteria, viruses, fungi, and all other
microbes. We conjured antibiotics, vaccines, water-treatment plants, and
continued to annihilate as much of our biological competition as
possible. In short: we were cunning.
Hunger led us to agriculture. Later, lust, pride,
beauty, cleanliness, power, order, and control drove us to even greater
discoveries: penicillin, ethanol, organ transplants, and silicone
breasts. And every new discovery harbored a secret prophecy, a vision of
future humanity – sublime and indestructible – promising to extend our
life spans, make us invulnerable, make things easier, more comfortable,
more convenient, and efficient.
In just these past two hundred years, the number of
humans inhabiting the earth went from one to eight billion. We've taken
over the whole planet, and we just keep growing …
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