Our Modern Human Predicament Simplified
A simple statement of the modern human predicament/condition stated on a closed listserv (cannot be linked to)
The current world problem of over population and over consumption has only one solution when you have 7 marbles to share among 10 people and everyone MUST get a marble. The population must be reduced by 3 and yet those deciding refuse to make the tough decision because logic is in conflict with human emotion. Before humanity learned to overcome many of Nature’s rules of balance (for a time prior to overshoot), Nature made the tough decisions and humans had no choice. Now [modern] humans are trying to take long term control over Nature and are not capable of making the tough decisions.
Solve this problem and you will have solved the problem that humanity [Modernity ≠ Humanity] has struggled with throughout history!
Without fossil fuel inputs, the problem is that there will be 1 marble to share among 10 people and everyone MUST get a marble. A rapid reduction in population and per capita consumption is the condition that will come anyway, whether by humane rapid birth-off and reduction by natural death by old age to mitigate/avoid chaotic die-off, or by die-off as usual.
As an expansionist form of human, we were successful in eliminating almost all other hominins in Africa with the exception of (genetically in the case of Pygmy and Sandawe) some San and Hadza as the only remaining pre-expansionist humans with pre-expansion genome and cultures still mostly intact (numbering perhaps 10k in the 21st century).
The Khoisan-speaking Southwest African San populations have had apparent total displacement of the ancestral Y chromosomal lineages and mt DNA by Bantu-specific haplogroups (i.e. during Bantu expansion in Southwest Africa male San were replaced by Bantu males and San male offspring by Bantu women’s babies for a few generations which would achieve ‘total displacement’).
Even San who still live as normal K-selected human hunter-gatherers are a partial admixture (<10%) with Bantu expansionists whose attempted conquest of about 1500 years ago failed long term as conditions in parts of the Kalahari failed to support their agro-pastorialism (but they tried as San DNA tells us so). History does not record whether the San women agreed to be bred or have San male offspring replaced by Bantu babies (with Bantu mt DNA) to raise in partial service to their overlords.
Four other subspecies of Homo sapiens were partially assimilated genetically when some of their women were bred and offspring assimilated, and all other species of hominin were displaced out of Africa including those pre-expansionists that had adaptively radiated in the Americas prior to arrival of expansionist descendants 16k years ago, who had left Africa about 39k years before reaching the Americas.
Note that the ‘problem’ (aka ‘the greatest good’) of short-term self interested expansion and struggle with Nature involved only expansionist humans throughout the last 75k years. Expansionism is not a problem but a condition, a predicament, one that is ‘solved’ by ending the condition. The existence of a metastatic pancreas cell (soon many cells) is a pathological condition that the metastatic cells cannot solve in a manner acceptable to them.
Their dynamic selects for their ending, i.e. they are not evolvable though they prosper (grow) triumphantly for a time. Unlike humans, cancer cells lack a potential to foresee the outcome their dynamic selects for. If some modern techno-industrialized humans recovered some foresight intelligence, the recovered capacity to foresee would change their form/pathway towards a potentially viable outcome (recovery of a K-selected culture).
The metastatic form of humans is the problem that is solved by their non-existence in futurity. To understand (grok) the context is the remotely potential solution as memetic mutation back to zero-order naturalism vs the original memetic mutation of ideology that forms the basis of zero-order humanism.
Our modern form of human, metastatic modernity, ends in extinction of modern humans, if not all humans. Some, after a likely 8 to 25 generations of intentional endeavor with all due meta-reflection, may be able to renormalize by again listening to Nature who alone has all the answers about what works to persist on her planet (not our planet, and no human choice or agency involved — to listen and understand results in systemic behavioral change, beginning with verbal behavior, e.g. the story of ideology (abstracted systems of belief) as a cognitive pathology (i.e. our modern capacity to believe in belief).
