The Lunch Post

Prepare yourself for Andri Conspiracy:

I find myself, in contemplation over sociological patterns, reverting back to Darwin's model of evolution. Not so much that how we are today is on the path to the "most fittest" or whatever, just that there is a path at all. Stephen Hawking said that evolution need not be mistaken for anything but coincidence, but I disagree.

The thing I find myself questioning is human nature concerning our desire to eat. Sure there's the simple hunger that drives us to see everything as food if we're in dire enough circumstances. Yet even for those of us who have never known true hunger, who take the slight emptiness of a stomach as a full meal is being digested as hunger, food is one of the most basic and easily attainable pleasures. We may be able to move on to culture or intellectual stimulation as a pleasure source, which I believe to be the true luxury of living in a first world country, but there's something so satisfying about food. Something so satisfying that often we use it to replace our other emptinesses. You know, sadness, heartache, depression. Not getting enough Christmas presents.

This is why we eat, and this is why we have fat Americans. Very, very fat Americans. Fat Americans that get made fun of on the international circuit because we seem to have so little self control that we can't even control our animalistic hunger for burgers and fries. (Yich, by the way. Well, except for Wendy's fries. They're going "natural" so it's okay, right?)

Which brings me to the question--if there were---if if if, big if, I know--some guiding path that influenced human behavior (not a sentient guide, just a simple line graph or something. make that your visual metaphor), why have humans gotten to the point where something that was so necessary for us at the beginning of our evolutionary path, now kills us, now brings us to the point where it's a luxury to not partake in this basic survival instinct. I wonder sometimes if the African children--or Chinese, or Malaysian, it's not just Africa folks--know about couture culture that celebrates self-starvation.

So I guess that's where my rumination starts: something is killing us now which was once necessary for survival. Now, it's survival to ignore our animal instincts. Why? That's all I'm asking? Why do we enjoy eating so much if it's only going to kill us?

One answer, in the mind of Andri Conspiracy, is that "nature" created this in us so that by the time we were powerful enough to dominate the earth through agricultural, and eventually industrial, prowess, we would be so foodly affluent that we had no option but to die from it. Earth is protecting herself by installing a self-destruct button within the human program.

So that's conspiracy number one.

Which led me to create a guiding metaphor out of it. What if we consider this success-to-poison trajectory as a common theme among other human instincts. For example, monetary wealth.

Of course, this one goes beyond the animal instinct to stuff every berry into our mouths to quiet a grumbling stomach. It's I guess a more "evolutionary" developed instinct, to want to accumulate wealth. Cite social standing, or stability, or esteem, I don't care. People want it.

At first it was good, right? It took us away from feudalism and espoused the initially beneficial capitalistic instinct in the local blacksmith. "I'm working hard, so I should benefit directly from my own product." Good stuff. Brought us better markets, better demands, better governments, and generally considered better society.

However our modern day shows us something quite different. At least from my perspective, which is a perspective that tends to function in generalities and overarching trends (a fault of my own, I know. But I'm publishing on Blogger so forgive me for not giving a damn), extreme wealth has corrupted the system. The capitalism-democracy equation that brought us out of the dark ages is now something, ironically, closer to feudalism. The rich are getting richer, and they're holding the puppet strings over congress so that true democracy cannot be carried out, but something closer to a masked plutocracy--a plutocracy intent on enriching itself at the cost of the other 97%.

We've come full circle back to a system that oppresses more than it frees. One explanation could be that our selfishness has finally corrupted even the most well-intentioned of social structures.

The "nature" scheme could be, on the other hand, that wealth in such excess, which is good at first, has come to it's self-destruct button so that government (and by proxy, society) will collapse at the hands of the super affluent. Which will bring down the super affluent, hopefully.

And then anarchy! But isn't anarchy really just the garden of eden? Once we reach a certain point of social development, this eden cannot exist. Instead of existing in a state of anarchical eden free living happiness, we must be in a constant state of fluctuation. Oppression, freedom, becoming oppression, breaking back down to a nothing which is so nothing then it can be nothing but freedom. Visual metaphor: the compression, expansion, compression theory of how the universe is "shaped," if time is considered one dimension.

Simpler: water gives life, but water also drowns.

Don't mistake all this for my consideration of what is fact. Conspiracy, for me, is just food for thought.

Also, poison.

Harumph.