It is not gold all that shines.
The ‘indefinite progress’ is an idea of illuminist origin, which was born in the Near East with the same civilisation and theoretical-rational legitimacy as it was sought during the French enlightenment of the 18th century. It is based on the notion that human beings come from a sick, dirty, ignorant and primitive past, and that little by little they move towards a healthy, clean, cultured and ‘advanced’ future. Archaeology suggests rather the opposite, namely: that civilisation has caused the fall of the human being from the state of grace, making him sick. The idea of religious traditions was similar: there was an Edenic ‘golden age’ (Satya or Kritta Yuga for the Hindus) in which the human being was more perfect, and after which a trauma caused human degeneration and the appearance of misery and disease, culminating in the Iron Age (Kali Yuga for Hindus). Despite this, the industrial spiral in which we are immersed continues to propagate that infinite economic growth is viable, that the Tower of Babel can rise indefinitely, that things are going better and, in short, that the human being ‘has improved’.
Throughout its evolutionary history, man ascended the food pyramid from the archaic frugivorous apes, becoming an increasingly effective predator and crowning the peak when, after the carnivorous revolution, he ceased to be the victim of other predators. However, with the end of the ice age and the advent of the Neolithic Revolution, man and the planet fell under a new form of predation: technology and parasitism of the Earth—two new factors that violated a hitherto harmonious holistic equation, and that forever upset the ecological balance of the planet and the biodiversity and genetic quality of the species.
The human being, or rather, a type of uprooted human, alienated, mixed and confused, believed that the reason for his discomfort and his fear was that the natural order was poorly designed. The glacial cold penetrates to the marrow, oppresses the heart, demoralises the timorous and does not allow thinking about anything else. The elements and vegetation whip and scratch the skin. The ground abuses the feet. The daily sustenance is only gained with atrocious sacrifice and bloodshed. Women, monopolised by the best hunters and warriors, are hard to come by. Every minute of life is a minute torn from death by struggling against the environment and against oneself. And to top it off, in every corner lurk the jaws of a predator or the sharp flint tips of an enemy tribe that has no qualms about cheerfully devouring whatever miserable falls into their hands. As for the tribe itself, it is a forceful, ruthless, cold and severe organism. It is not a mother in whose tender lap we cry for consolation and charity, but a strict father who imposes obedience, who rejoices with sacrifice and who does not forgive error. As military commanders, the wise elders marginalise the weak of the reproductive life, reward only good hunters and fighters, demand absolute loyalty and devotion and do not hesitate to let the less valuable elements of the community die for the good of the clan. Like it or not, these are the factors that made us rise above the ape-man and who wrote our genome as a novel with letters of ice, stone, blood, semen, flesh and sweat.
‘Evolve or die’, said the world at that time. But that law can be very hard for the victims of the voracious evolutionary machinery: to live like cannon fodder of natural selection is not life. Therefore, it is necessary to question this horrible state of affairs, redesign everything from scratch, reorganise the work of the gods—since they have not been able to organise it to the taste of man—flee from suffering and erect a messianic ‘new order’. The moral of the slave is born. A system (civilisation) must be built within the System (Nature), in which the daily sustenance does not involve so much effort and in which the search for pleasure and comfort prevails over the alchemical virtues of asceticism, sacrifice and willpower. The competitiveness must be attenuated and the ferocity of the predator must be softened to make it fit into the new pseudo-matriarchal social mould. To achieve such a goal, people of diverse backgrounds must be recruited, willing to work for a new common good—by persuasion or by force—and abolish their baggage of ancestral traditions and identity. Where previously there were only the professions of mother, hunter, warrior, fisherman, harvester and shaman, now there will be completely new occupations (potter, farmer, shepherd, merchant, prostitute, priest, miner, servant, slave) that will hierarchise society based to criteria that have nothing to do with the quality of genes. A weak and cowardly man can now be valuable if he is dedicated to moving objects along commercial routes. A promiscuous woman, once cursed by the tribe, can now sell her body. The nascent society must be a mass entity in which the strong pull the car, towing the weak with the sweat of his forehead. The brave ones die in the war while the cowards multiply in the rear. They do not need to hunt anymore; bread replaces meat and wine the blood. There is only one universal god: that of civilisation. All other gods are abominations. Those who belong to this kind of sect are the chosen ones. Those who do not belong to it are the pagans, the barbarians, the profane, the violent: the blind, savage and impure human mass that lives in darkness and that must be enslaved and integrated into the system so that the elect can live without working. This linear, rational and logical thought must grow monstrous until annulling the symbolic and instinctive thought. Civilisation will eventually dominate Nature, deciphering all its secrets, dissecting it and finally subduing it, phagocytizing and domesticating it completely, so that nothing escapes human control and for the system to be predictable, mechanical and mathematical.
This philosophy had to take root very early in the Near East and affected many peoples, among them the Jew—who is currently the human group that has lived the longest under civilised conditions. The Old Testament is dotted with testimonies about the dawn of civilisation, collected throughout the Fertile Crescent, from the Sumerian city of Ur to the Egyptian of Memphis.
It is much studied by eugenics that civilised social environments that preserve the lives of weak and stupid will be unable to perpetuate their ancestry. By throwing the strong and intelligent into fratricidal struggles or aberrant occupations that undermine their fertility rate, this irreparably causes the degradation of the genetic code of the human being. Nature has very twisted ways of taking revenge on those who turn their backs on it or pretend to dominate it. The fossil record shows that once man stopped hunting and embraced agriculture, he paid for it with a tremendous decline in his health and biological quality, as we saw in the article on the Neolithic Revolution.
Currently, the increasing proliferation of degenerative diseases, allergies and mental disorders (‘The investigation of diseases has advanced so much that it is increasingly difficult to find someone who is completely healthy’, said Huxley) is a clear signal that we have not been dominating Nature, but it continues to dominate us as always, only this time it attacks us, because we are not obeying it. Disease and degeneration are Nature’s ways of protesting and making us see that we are not exercising our human functions, that we ignore reproductive wisdom and that we are breathing, drinking and eating things we should not. If civilisation is like a snake that bites its tail, it is because it is the result of genetic quality and depends on it, but like a curse, it turns against the same substance that feeds it, closing the circle of its own perdition. This biological boomerang effect is the true reason why all civilisations collapse sooner or later, and raises a logical and disturbing question: if the next human civilisation will be global, what will come next?
Civilised man has not experienced the hardness of the real world in his flesh nor has he ever adapted to Nature. On the contrary: his actions are aimed at adapting Nature to him, even if by hammering. Therefore, he tends to have a big ego and a small spirit, and considers that he is the peak of evolution. This new artificial creature, this new domestic animal that is the modern human, for its isolation in the bubble of ‘well-being’, ignores the humility before the Creation, and is therefore the only way of life on the planet capable of deviating from natural laws, reverse the correct order and incur in the sin of rising against the work of the gods. To this sacrilegious and self-destructive pride, the Greeks called hubris or hybris. [1] It is the reason why, despite the fact that civilisation has been totally, absolutely and indisputably catastrophic from a strictly evolutionary, biological, spiritual and environmental point of view, man has become a ‘satisfied gentleman’ of his work.
Is civilisation a war to the death against biology and, therefore, a revolt against life, by the sickly, malignant and antithetical forces of the world, those who are resentful of suffering? Is man running the risk of becoming a slave to his own creation, in a simple productive factor, a number, a statistic? Have we created a system with a life of its own that has subordinated our good to yours? Is technology dehumanising and mechanising the species, exterminating its biodiversity, causing its involution and taking its domestication to chilling levels? Is modern society an immense concentration camp, a mass zoo in whose cages languish, domesticated and castrated, the degenerate mutant descendants of the free man and hunter? What kind of natural selection are we promoting? What human type is most favoured by ‘progress’? What will man become the day he has definitively lost his adaptation to Nature and instead is fully adapted to the industrial, commercial and technological world? Has the human species arrived at senility? Do we suffer from Alzheimer’s? Is the modern world in general and Western Civilisation in particular self-destructing? Is civilisation still that jealous Eastern sect that demands the submission of life and that to achieve that, like every sect, it removes the individual from its ancestral framework, annihilating its identity and dynamiting the loyalties it may have outside the sect (nation, people, race, class, sex, family, religion, guild, etc.)? This is the kind of questions that could be asked by the authors that we shall see in this article.
Civilisation has meant the overwhelming advance of inert matter (technology, commerce, consumerism, comfort), and the absolute regression of living matter (health, body, genetic code, mind, sacrifice), not to mention the fall of spirituality. Until the human power systems do not adopt a biocentric perspective in general and anthropocentric in particular, and while the top of the pyramid of world power remains occupied by the international financial elite (the shepherds who are domesticating us, castrating and poisoning us), the species will continue to degenerate itself, and the planet as well. Cutting down entire forests to print millions of copies of the magazine Telva make people sick so that they have to buy medicines from the pharmaceutical industry, charging maternity and births so that women work in order to earn money to buy completely useless things, or pulling millions of people from the Third World to feed the machinery of multinationals, are things that only in a wrong economic and rotten system could be beneficial—for a few, and only in the short term. As long as the states do not rebel against the free market economy and the stateless international trade, and as long as they do not resolutely and decisively intervene in human reproduction to stop the involution of the species and improve its genetic code, the human being is on the way to becoming an increasingly ridiculous being, uprooted in his lifestyle. The modern world desperately needs a series of popular revolts that overthrow the financial, global and consumer economy, and establish a multipolar, austere and simple economy based on self-sufficiency, the autarchy of each State, local goods that are strictly necessary and in which the State, identified with the working people, controls the merchants, the parasites and the usurious lenders.
The current lifestyle has nothing to do with the needs of the species, but with the demands of an economic system, which is in total contradiction with human nature, its innate instincts and the real role of the free man in the concert of life and the world.
The collection of quotations of the next post should not be understood as an argument against civilisation or against technology, but against a misunderstood civilisation, against misused technology, against the usurious, free-market, parasitic, consumerist and indefinitely growing economy, and in favour of a radically different kind of civilisation, as for example Sparta was in its day: a State, perhaps the only one in history, that with an unprecedented clairvoyance, realised that gold corrupts and that the Civilisation is a distinctly dangerous product that you have to approach with the whip in your hand. For centuries, Sparta was able to keep the nature and tradition of its citizens alive, but it was also able to defend the most vulnerable geopolitical environment in Europe against enemies infinitely more advanced, economically and materially.
Note:
[1] From hubris comes the Latin hybrida, from which comes the word ‘hybridize’, that is, the crossing of two varieties.