| Observation: All human beings experience at times a haunting sense of existential loss. Hypothesis: Human beings are not adapted to urban environments. Evidence: 1. Urban environments are a result of agriculture. Prior to agriculture, cities did not exist. 2. Agrilculture is no more than 15,000 years old. Urban environments are no more than 6,000 years old. 3. Human species have been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. The vast majority of human evolution has taken place in a non-urban setting. What exactly is it we seem to be missing? The People's Entropy Research Front contends that human beings are in the process of struggling to adapt to an alien environment. We might as well be terraforming Mars. It's that new, that dangerous. That this environment is one we have engineered ourselves does not change the fact that we have spent hundreds of thousands of years adapting to a totally different lifestyle. The vestiges of that long adaptation are still with us, awkwardly channeled and violently misunderstood. Many of the things we learned in our long slow Paleolithic days are irrelevant now. But they still sneak up on our blind side. They define our behavior, our likes and dislikes, even though we have forgotten the context in which they made sense. The games we play now were once survival behavior. We are children compared to what we were. We mimic those long-dead adults without understanding the need for our awkward rituals. Because the need for the rituals of life and death is dead. We killed it. A dog is a wolf who remains a cub, mentally and spiritually, his entire life. An urban man is a human who remains a child, mentally and spiritually, his entire life. This is called domestication. |
| TREATISE ON DOMESTICATION |
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