October 31st, 2005
I don't "do" Hallowe'en any more. No kids to vicariously enjoy it through; and, as an adult, I lack enough interest. I see no point in dressing up as a mountain of sulfur, or a meat cleaver, or a diode and then attempting to work the rest of the day hampered by the costume. I think people look silly. I think I look silly. So although I am well aware that I am being a stick in the mud about this, and that I am in a minority ... well ... too bad. I yam wot I yam.
Hallowe'en as "celebrated" by adults is a sad reminder of how brief and unsatisfying childhood was for most of us ... and of how we pathetically continue to pursue it long after it is gone. 1
* * *
You know, I am starting to think seriously that humanity's evolutionary advantage is not our superior intelligence.
I think this for many reasons:
- Are we really that much smarter than any other creatures? Dolphins, whales, and gorillas (at least) are probably as smart as we are; perhaps smarter.
- All we seem to have done with our "superior" intelligence is develop a more sophisticated language and build tonnes of shit we hardly need to survive anyhow (and you can credit opposable thumbs with a lot of that as well).
- With intelligence comes another reason to kill ourselves (the religio-political lifestyle difference: Animals and humans kill for territory, food or other resources, and protection; but humans also kill for political reasons)
So I am seriously considering the idea that humans developed intelligence as a non-helping trait. Like tail bones or appendices. Just something extra from a useless path of evolution that remains behind and is non-detrimental enough that we haven't endangered ourselves into oblivion.
I'm starting to think that all intelligence does is give us more and cleverer words to justify why we don't like things, and why we react the way we do.
All we really use language for is justification of our knee-jerk reactions.
I mean it this way: If you study population density and violence, you'll see that as people live closer together, we get more violent (per capita too ... not just in numbers). And if you study how we become more violent and selfish around diminishing food and water supplies, or if you see how humans adopt amazing survival skills for themselves and their children at the expense of others' lives ... well you start to see a strong parallel to just about any other animal on the planet. Forget our brains, we do what we need to survive, just like all the other animals.
Once we're done and home and safe, then—and only then—do we rather embarrassedly retro-fit a story to our actions. We do what we do out of instinct, and then we attach words later to try and make a coherent-sounding story out of it.
And as soon as we start to apply intelligence to any bad situation, there are a few things that happen:
- The more we try to help others (which really means attempting to be more egalitarian), the more somebody's self-interested survival instincts will corrupt the attempt and result in more hardship for the people we are trying to help.
- Then, after intelligent people have behaved ("cold-bloodedly") like animals, we use our brain-power to frame up a set of words to "logically" explain why we did what we did. We'll use the power of thinking to argue black is white if we have to. Just to justify our survival instincts (which frequently gets labeled as "greed" by people who are themselves trying to justify their bitterness at someone else getting the prize).
- We're all in constant danger of killing ourselves anyway because we've invented the concepts of politics and religion, and subsequently we invented wars.
Where is the advantage of intelligence in there?
Finally: Maybe the reason we have not been able to find evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence is because intelligence is not needed to survive at all! There's an argument that says with intelligence comes self-annihlation because intelligent races become too smart for their own good and destroy themselves.
My argument is similar (though, surprisingly, not as harsh): Maybe intelligence ultimately neither hinders or helps races ... with the balance favouring those without intelligence. There are a lot more intelligent species right here on Earth that do not use sophisticated language and build the stuff we do than there are races that do do these things.
We are outnumbered.
(1) Emails have tapered off somewhat in the last year: I don't get the same volume of those peals of protest that I used to. That paragraph might very well bring in a few. By the way, I did recently get a review of my website, though: 4.5 / 5.0 with the comment I go "on and on sometimes". Heh. Yes, I sure do. If you want, you can totally anonymously rate my blog too.
Sign my guestbook - Email me - Back to the Rant-o-Rama index