The Idiot Response

Introduction

Humans have overdeveloped dog-eat-dog survival mechanisms that would sooner see the planet die than suffer even the tiniest inconvenience or loss of special privilege. When confronted with global problems, mankind does some totally idiotic things.

Examples

idiot responese
Problem	Idiot Response
Greenhouse gases causing massive weather changes	Instead of moving to vehicles that have no greenhouse gas emissions, humans move in droves to SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles) which emit many times the pollutants, get poor gas mileage and are 40% less safe. They don’t even drive them off road or fill them with people. They use them to commute to work. The Hummer, a modified military vehicle, gives the most prestige because of its extreme cost and size — implying its desk-bound owner is masculine, virile and sexually potent.
Children playing with firearms kill themselves.	Instead of modifying guns to make them childproof, gun zealots successfully lobby to keep them the way they are. The supposed reason — to make it easier to overthrow the government should the need arise. The other reason, it would cause a slight delay for reflection before firing at an intruder — most commonly a family member.
Home invasions, mindless violence.	Today’s young people treat murder, home invasion and mayhem very casually — as a form of entertainment. So how do we as a society combat it — by subjecting every child to dozens of casual murders, rapes and psychotic tortures per hour on TV until they are totally inured to it. At the same time, we carefully shield them from viewing people behaving in a loving way toward each other. Even in supposed comedies, verbal warfare is the norm.
Broken families	We have Jerry Springer dredge up the trashiest people in America to put on an obscene theatre of cussing, promiscuity and punching. This is how we model conflict resolution to the masses.
Overpopulation	Thousands of children die of hunger every day. A chunk of the Amazon rainforest the size of Switzerland is lost forever every year in a vain attempt to feed these extra mouths. Humanity’s idiot response: the Pope successfully sends his people to disrupt the United Nations Conference in Cairo on birth control. We still don’t have injectable birth control, but we spend billions on fertility research so that mothers can have octuplets. We treat these bloated sows as heroines rather than the most selfish of the planet’s citizens sucking up millions of dollars each in precious medical resources to cater to their desire to procreate on a grand scale. We give both welfare and tax incentives for both wed and unwed mothers to stop working and stay at home to breed extra children.
Water pollution	Every time you do your laundry, you dump several cups of detergent into the local waterways. Try dumping even a tablespoonful into your son’s aquarium and see what happens. This kills the fish and indirectly those that feed on them. Do we find a solution? No. It would not be in Proctor and Gamble’s short term financial interest.
War	Diplomats works ceaselessly to bring peace to the middle east. Our idiot response: OK a 4 billion dollar arms shipment to Egypt. Even though the cold war ended, military spending is higher than ever.
Famine	At the height of the Ethiopian famine, Ethiopia was still exporting strawberries to Europe. Monsanto puts terminator genes into the seed its sells to Pakistan and India. If anything goes wrong with the supply from Monsanto, there is no grain to act as seed. In its relentless march to monopoly, Monsanto has been working hard to reduce the genetic diversity in food crops. The problem is, with climate change, new diseases etc, where do you find the raw material to search for resistant strains?
Greed	If someone eats ten times as much food as they need, we consider them a glutton and treat them with utmost contempt. However, if someone lusts for material goods are equally out of control, we admire them. We celebrate waste and conspicuous consumption.
Obesity	There is an epidemic in childhood obesity. Our response: more commercials that lie to children about the nutritional benefits of sugar and salt snacks. The Cheetos, Mountain Dew and Pringles commercials teach children to scarf these products in huge quantities like ravenous wolves. By showing only slim athletic people eating these products, they give the subliminal impression that you too can be athletic and handsome if you gorge on these products. Children spend more time watching these commercials than they spend in school.
Bacteria are developing immunity to antibiotics	Mankind’s response — no development of replacements because there is no market for them yet. It would be more economic to wait until the epidemics start, then begin the 10 year research program. Also, douse animal feed with antibiotics to increase weight gain, even if it accelerates the immunity process.
Education	Today’s children cannot spell or speak a grammatical sentence. How do we rectify the problem? We create special children’s programming on TV, a diet of puppets, people dressed in silly costumes and cartoons. Nearly always, the actors speak with incorrect grammar and pronunciation. A child almost never hears someone speak in a normal tone of voice, even in a supposed science show. Further, in live action comedy, the children are sarcastic to adults. To teach conflict relations we sit our kids down to watch WWF (World Wrestling Federation), and tell them the violence is real. We then wonder why they drop-kick their playmates in the ovaries.
Immigration	People who spawn giant families and drug dealers are welcome immigrants. However, homosexuals are not. Homosexuals take less from the economy and pay more taxes that other sorts of people. However, moralists are so keen on making lives miserable for gay people they want to make sure they keep same sex couples from different countries apart.
Tobacco and Alcohol	Tobacco is a highly addictive drug with known severe health consequences. Manufacturers of this drug are free to push it to children, both at home and abroad, with little interference. Philippino children learn it is medicine. We have even recently discovered that smoking tobacco during pregrancy triples the chances a male child will be involved in violent crime. We know alcohol is the drug that does more damage to society and health than any other. We tolerate it knowing that prohibition will not work. Yet we go a step further, we advertise it. We glamorise it. People drink alcohol in the movies at every possible excuse. Hollywood heroes flaunt cigars. We keep forgetting that movies and TV are the prime source of models of behaviour that people learn from. Doctors tell me that marijuana and opium are medically less dangerous drugs when prescribed in measured doses, yet we go to the most extreme measures to suppress them. Where is the consistency?
Promiscuity	We have a problem with promiscuity spreading the HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus) virus, especially in the gay community. Humanity’s idiot response: make it legal to discriminate against gays who live openly together as couples and refuse to recognize gay unions or marriages.
Environmentalists	Geneticist Dr. David Suzuki over the decades has been trying to warn humanity about the damage they are doing to the planet and the inertia those practices have. Like a giant ocean liner, it is not something that can be turned around overnight, no matter how hard you try. Greenpeace has similarly been fighting this battle. How do we treat them? Do we investigate and debate their concerns? No, we accuse them of greed! Talk about projection! If you knew what long hours and low pay those people put up with, you would see how utterly ridiculous that is.

Why?

Why are humans collectively so stupid? The problem is an overdeveloped survival urge. People will act in ways that increase their short-term survival, even if the marginal benefit is almost negligible, even if it hurts their own long term survival. Humans have a very local focus both in space and time. At any point in time, they are totally fixated on some tiny aspect of reality. They don’t care about global problems or the big picture. The ultimate fate of the planet is in the collective hands of humanity, so each individual human feels no responsibility to do his part.

Any intelligent species that can’t find a way to eradicate that attitude burned into the genes, left over from pre-technological life where it was relatively harmless, is doomed to extinction.

Ways Out

There are some signs that humans are more co-operative than they once were — the European union, the UN (United Nations), the Internet and the rise of environmentalism. However, the changes needed are deep.

Through the human genome project we will learning to modify our genes to make us less warlike. Unfortunately, with the fear of criminals and the popularity of the WWF cult we may use it for the very opposite purpose.

Some talking heads on TV are predicting artificial intelligence as good or better than a human by 2010. If this happens, those intelligences may take it on themselves to start forcing or seducing humans into behaving in their own long term best interest, to start modifying humanity’s selfish idiot genes, or possibly even gradually to eliminate/transform humanity entirely.

Contact with non-human intelligent life (which would include terrestrial whales and dolphins), could have the needed effect. If a clearly superior intelligence gave us a good talking to and was able to tell us the history of other technological civilisations that went the same route we are on, perhaps we would listen.

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