Sometimes I am inclined to believe…

It wasn’t always like this.

There was a time when we lived without laws and systems. We were uncivilised. And it worked. For 200,000 years it worked, simply because it was stable. We just took what we needed.

Then one day, about 10,000 years ago, a tribe of humans emulated the Mayans and Inca. Unlike them however, who walked away from civilisation when they saw it didn’t work, this tribe continued to pillage and overrun neighbouring tribes whilst converting them to this new way of living: full-time agriculture.

The problem with that though is this: humans were now doing something they hadn’t done before: killing off the competition for food so that they could have it all for themselves. As a result, more humans flooded the planet. There’s 6.5 (READ: six point five) billion of us now. As tertiary consumers in the food chain, it should be FAR less than that.

What would have happened had that one tribe not go on their rampage? What if Hammurabi never drafted his laws? What would we be like now, seeing as prehistoric humans lived on the basis of "give support, get support"? Would incidents like this be familiar to everyone? (Sidetrack: Which is more likely: policemen robbing or robbers policing? Clearly the former right? Why?) You could argue that these are "small" tokens to pay for expanding our development, but what’s the point in building the "Fortress of Human Achievement" higher, using the bricks that are part of the foundation? One day it will all come tumbling down.

Has it ever occurred to you that the poverty situation in Africa was never meant to be a problem? There always seems to be a lack of food there, and yet the population keeps growing. The population of all living creatures go in tandem with the amount of food available. The reason the population in Africa is rising is because we are sending TOO MUCH FOOD OVER THERE. The land was never meant to house that many humans in the first place. But Africa has always been rich in minerals. And when the imperialists came, they needed more labour to work in the mines. Hence…till today.

So what do we do? It’s like your house is on fire. You only have a dozen pails of liquid. Unfortunately, it’s all gasoline. Do you pour it anyway, because the impact of throwing it on the fire would at first have a dousing effect, but ultimately you’re making the whole situation worse? Or do you stand back and watch helplessly?

It. Wasn’t. Always. Like. This.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 2:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.