I am on the record many times over, when it comes to the “evolution” of our species, as opining that to evolve is not to ascend. The greatest contribution to Twentieth Century poppycock was without doubt Jacob Bronowski’s assertion about ‘The Ascent of Man’. It leaves “if it feels good, do it” trailing in a very poor second place, and whacks “Keith Moon is the Karl Marx of pop music” right out of the park.
What I’m saying here is lifting yourself off four legs onto two is not prima facie evidence of intelligence. Nor is it a predictor of greater nobility to come. Mainly, it was the preface to over eighty five percent of humans having a bad back….a design fault we then exacerbated by growing a bigger brain, inventing the desk, and sitting in offices.
Evolution is an adaptation to changed environment, nothing more; and to set the ball rolling, natural selection chooses those best equipped to survive the change. If the volume of breathable atmosphere began to shrink tomorrow, every big chest would be culled, and we’d be gerbils again within twenty thousand years. Don’t nod off, I’m coming to the point.
I’ve just been to try and sign up for Instagram. That may seem like one helluva segue, but actually it’s smoother than a mink codpiece: for Instagram is run by people who have lost the ability to explain anything, while yet appealing to people who need to have it explained that fires are hot.
I abandoned the site after thirty minutes of trying to find out how to post shit. During that time – and this is absolutely true, no exaggeration – I discovered an entire new sector of websites offering to explain how to use Instagram. Not only that, they all charge for the service.
This is not ascent, it is not progress, it is the insane in pursuit of the inane. But on a broader canvas, it is a further symptom of a species malaise: we have lost the gift of elegant simplicity of explanation. Even worse, we have lost the emotional intelligence to design software in the first place that doesn’t require a six-year course in quantum anthropological physics to use it.
And believe me – judging by Instagram users – there is a zero correlation between IQ and posting on Big I. Here is a nail I knocked in the wall duurhhh, an’ it bent. These are my shoes, aerial view, including feet I put them on the wrong war round herrherr. Doh rae me an de guys havin’ a few beers yuk yuk. It’s like Facebook for amoeba. The only people likely to follow the users are germ warfare scientists looking for specimens.
Now the problem here is that we have these two sets of folks engaged in the deal: geeks who skip Page One because they’re just so fucking smart, and neets who skip Page One because they’re still struggling to put the kindergarden shapes into the holes.
The ramifications of that are truly horrific. And they start now.
First up, if you wonder why Remainers call themselves the 48%, 70% of Americans think Russia is hacking their grocery deliveries, the DNC chose Hillary over Bernie, a man with hair that arrives yesterday is in the Oval Office, a banker with no MPs is in the Elysées Palace, Diane Abbott put 8,000 on her majority in sympathy for her crapness, Theresa May hasn’t resigned, and Jeremy Corbyn says he won last Thursday, wonder no more: it’s because Instagram users have got the vote, and those who own Instagram have got the power.
You’re still not scared? Try the next one.
Second, look at the promises made by politicians before they got found out. Osborne said he was going to pull the bankers into line. Cameron said he was going to reform the EU. Sturgeon said she was going to swap London for Brussels as her master. Miliband said he could deal with any skin, any rice pudding, any place. Trump was going to drain swamps, build walls and clean up the Wall Street casino. Macron was going to cut overmanning, increase wages, increase corporate profits and slash budgets. Corbyn was going to make everything free, and shoot anyone who threatened our freedom.
All of them skipped Page One, because it simply wasn’t credible. They succeeded because the voters also skipped Page One, because aah it sucks. Duuhr, look at this shot of my bumhole. Heyee guyz, look – a still of the TV screen, dohwa awwesome. Dah, Trump tweets that is like so cool, Jeremy is gonna turn the wine into vinegar an’ shit like so we can all have fish n chips forever and never put on weight, Tory scum out.
Let’s just reflect for a minute about where we are and how we got here. We awarded ourselves this species name, and the clue is in the second bit: Homo sapiens. Forget the Untermenschen and Uberbau fantasy about IQ for a minute, and just ask yourself this: in all the foregoing, do you see so much as a scintilla of sapiens anywhere?
And now the more challenging question: if most of us are happy taking snaps of grandad’s false teeth, using the phone to say where we are, fiddling with pointless apps while walking into lampposts, using Satnav and handing over our collective destiny to robots and arrogant amateur legislators, where is the evidence that we need to think any more?
The latest anthropology theories suggest we developed a bigger brain so we could run further and faster, not to use the additional brain material to think – that was just an unfortunate byproduct. I mean, apart from killing for fun, Barbara Cartland novels, civil wars, ozone holes, the internet, nuclear weapons, cyber attacks, religion, oceanic vandalism and deforestation, what have bigger bonces ever done for us? Hmm?
Would that Unthink was restricted to politics. It isn’t….and this is where things go from scarey to something approaching a Satanist app.
Thus – third – there is a mantra that has already gone around the world six times and been accepted by an alarming number of infidels: that Islam is the Religion of Peace. Look people, many Muslims are law abiding citizens. But as Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out (in her stunningly convincing and simply written book Heretic) there are three types of Muslim: Jihadists (tiny minority but well-bankrolled), peaceful Muslims who nevertheless tacitly agree with the fundamentals of Sharia Law (the majority) and those not prepared to stand by and say nothing (tiny minority, not bankrolled at all, but threatened at every turn by the Islamic establishment).
Muhammed was not peaceful, and the tenets of Islamic ‘conversion’ are anything but pacific: to be precise, they are murderous and merciless. Muhammed was a conqueror and a military senior officer. There is no known record of him ever suggesting for a millisecond that he might be a conscientious objector.
But the majority of liberals still cling on to the Religion of Peace tosh….including large numbers of radical feminists. Feminists FFS.
From liberals to neoliberals. This soi-disant “economic model” is blatantly self-defeating, socially dangerous, a threat to the Rule of Law and in its central pillar – that the wealth it creates ‘trickles down’ – an obvious case of abject failure, as adjudicated by every centre from the Institute for Fiscal Studies to the OECD.
Its monetarism platform has now used quantitative easing nineteen times in eleven States – and spent a fortune in public money doing so – despite the fact that it has done nothing to solve the twin problems of low growth and high unemployment. (The way round this was for its High Priests to refer to the “Jobless Recovery”. Utter madness. Let’s have the foodless meal, the drinkless pub, the carless motorway and the goalless penalty shootout.)
Both its supporters and detractors claim it is a form of capitalism, but the two elements of that system supposed to be ever-present – interest on capital and competition – are at zero and falling respectively.
Its chief output to date is strong and stable austerity. Hold me back, I’m tumescent. But its steady introduction into every major society is universally referred to as “reform”. Reform of what, the nomadic rainforest and oceanic dustbowl and overfishing model?
The willingness of citizen majorities to not only accept but actually embrace dysfunctional incompetence is, in 2017, apparent in almost every walk of life. We have sitcoms without the com, talent shows without the talent, police who don’t police anything illegal, prisons that breed crime, a European Union of disunity, democratic elections that don’t elect convincingly or obey democratic principles, regulators who don’t apply the rules, and banks that deliberately destroy businesses and shareholder value in order to survive and prosper.
What I first described ten years ago as the Wishful Unthinking Tendency (or WUTs) is no longer a tendency, it is a tyranny censoring the obvious need for something better. We are back again to the triumph of ineffective ideology over tested philosophy. The victory of process catechism over creative development. The crushing of risk experimentation by ROI expectation.
Ascending? Don’t make me laugh: the human race is slithering down a helter-skelter, heading away from civilisation and straight down to the sewer. Per adua ad astra has become sto ut serviam.
I am seized by an awful hypothesis this morning: that natural selection (the real Grim Reaper) is already at his grisly work. Dissidents are being hacked to death by jihadists, crushed by central banks, framed by intelligence agencies and smeared by tabloids. And you know what – as Mr Corbyn so often asks rhetorically – a disturbing number of the Good Guys are deciding to join rather than beat them.
The future is a stagnating Unthink. It’s only a matter of time before the first foetuses of Homo Caecus start to appear: no eyes, four legs, and a head the size of a walnut situated conveniently in the genitals.
The Slog 