TEACHING METASTATIC SUPREMACY
12. Modern Humanity's Ordeal and the Forging of Our r-Cultural Identity
The story begins about 75 thousand years ago, possibly in southern Africa on the southernmost shore where shell beds provided a steady supply of rich food the temperate land failed to provide, such that permanent settlements of non-nomadic humans were possible. And they were able to live in group sizes that exceed the hunter-gatherer norm of 20–50 (5–85) norm living interactively with 20–50 other groups to share memes (via a common language) and genes (exogamy is a biological need among evolvable animals that reproduce sexually).
The condition of more than fifty people living in one place as the millennia passed may have selected for hyperprosociality, a necessary mutation on the pathway to modern metastatic humans.
But hyperprosociality was not a sufficient mutation. The complexity of our verbal behavior was a precondition for ideology as a memetic mutation. Having technology, e.g. fire tech and tool tech, was a necessary but not sufficient condition. Homo erectus developed fire tech 2 million years ago, tripling the energy that had been available mostly in the food we foraged. Sitting in the sun on a cool morning did supply exosomatic energy, but no more than available to prior vertebrate ancestors. Fire tech did change conditions for both success and failure (with no evolved solutions for failure, e.g. overshoot).
Inside the body, food energy supplies an adult human between 1,500 and 2,500 kcal per day on average, or 2,400 kcal is usually plenty, equivalent to 10 MJ (megajoules), or per year, the endosomatic energy use would be 3.65 GJ (gigajoules, thousands of millions of joules) to help maintain our thermo-homeostasis, but the ability to burn biomass, to control the rate of burning, and to kindle new fire by friction, was the beginning of controlled use of exosomatic energy, even when and where (e.g. in a cave) the sun didn’t shine. There is no evidence, however, that Homo erectus nor H. erectus ergaster, from whom Homo sapiens evolved, were metastatic homininans.
All homininans, like their mammalian ancestors going back 225 million years, were species that made a high investment in a few (as many as needed, e.g. 1 per decade for whales, 50 or more per year for mice due to predation) offspring (e.g. by nursing their young). All K-selected species have the ability to produce more offspring than needed to maintain a steady population to allow for growth to recover after a depopulation event, e.g. a volcanic eruption, plague, or forest fire.
But exceeding carrying capacity has no long term benefit to a K-selected species making a high energy investment in producing enough offspring, none of which are intended to die, e.g. a whale may lose a calf to predators, then become fertile as soon as possible, but if food supply is scarce, their biology lowers their fertility rate to avoid overproducing offspring unlikely to survive. Mice and rats do the same (but domestic mice, rats, dogs, and modern humans do not).
Our Hominina ancestors also lived within carrying capacity because their ancestors had for hundreds of millions of years. Lactational amenorrhea (LA) causes normal human mothers, who learned proper nursing behavior from their mother, to avoid menstruating while nursing, i.e. they can freely engage in sex without risk (lower risk than modern women using modern birth control) of becoming pregnant. Normal humans nurse their offspring for three to five years.
To maintain a population, mothers have a child about every four years (normal child mortality is about 50% as needed to prune out maladaptive diversity that sexual reproduction creates to increase evolvability, i.e. half the time there is a slight to lethal loss of functionality compared to parents, and about half the time no significant loss compared to parental function, but occasionally there is a significant gain, e.g. immunity to a new disease, that can be selected for, hence sexual reproduction is selected for provided the less functional half of offspring DO NOT reproduce).
If environmental productivity is good, if women don’t have to forage far for food, food is relatively abundant, they become more likely to wean a child, and so again become with child sooner. If a population had been reduced by disease, environmental productivity would provide abundant food for the fewer than normal who did not die, who were resistant, and the population would soon enough be back to the norm of being just under carrying capacity.
If women must travel far to forage and pickings are scarce (men may have to travel far too, but their sexual biology does not change), then the women naturally (an evolved disposition in normal homininans) nurse longer, e.g. five years or longer (up to 12 years has been done). This significantly lowers the fertility rate and a population of normal homininans that has exceeded the lower limit of carrying capacity soon enough declines to a comfortable level of prosperity below carrying capacity where all preferred foods are on Nature’s shelve, the store is well stocked, the women are happy (not stressed), and the women naturally wean their children sooner, e.g. after only three years, which slowly increases their population until some items normal found on the shelves go missing or the distance travelled is distressing.
Such was natural and normal for six million years among homininans (not observed, but as inferred by their persistence). No modern metastatic women, however, had normal mothers to learn from, and if the shelves are always full, normal metastatic women will maximize the number of children they have, and their r-selected culture will view any woman having less than eight children to perhaps be intentionally not doing her duty to make workers/canon fodder. Perhaps worth noting: No modern woman has had a normal mother to learn from, and most have never heard of lactational amenorrhea, nor “carrying capacity,” and the idea of living within limits is appalling, is an anti-human idea among the r-acculturated.
The denormalization of modern humans began with the rapid expansion of a form of human that had overcome its K-selected biology enough to not respond (via General Adaptation Syndrome, GAS) to negative/stressful environmental feedbacks (e.g. scarcity) and respond to them by reduced fertility.
Overshooting the upper limit of carrying capacity had a different response among r-selected humans — move on beyond one’s prior habitat, beyond the horizon, by presupposing the planet to be an illimitable plane with evermore resources for the taking just over the horizon. This became the foundational ideology of the expansionist form of human that all modern humans are descendants of, a metastatic form that has replaced all prior homininans, including those of their subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, except for perhaps 10k San and 400 Hadza with K-culture mostly intact, whose ancestors were pre-expansionist humans for their DNA tells us (the archaeogeneticists) so. Our DNA is; it is not as believed in.
Modern humans are denormalized humans in multiple ways. Renormalizing, however, could take less than 75k years if renormalizing were the as intended meta-reflexive outcome, the ending of the condition of being metastatic humanity. Modern men have been more denormalized than women, e.g. 64% of European men (mostly Indo-European) have three paternal ancestors who lived during rapid Indo-European expansion in the Bronze Age. The recent mass rape of a French woman by her husband and 82 other men he invited to rape her over nearly a ten year period after he had drugged her into an unconscious state, were not normal Hominina males, neither genetically nor memetically (culturally) as their behavior was not adaptive (selected for) pre-expansion.
Modern humans are the last Hominina standing. We are the victors who remain to tell the story of ourselves. It is a story of metastatic human supremacy. All cultures (except traditional pre-expansionist San and Hadza) tell variations of the same story of zero-order humanism, the ideology (abstracted systems of belief) of the necessary primacy (supremacy) of the human enterprise. All teach the same, with variations based on subgroup identity narrative.
The above image comes from the cover of a book that pretends to not celebrate human supremacy. Text was altered, but with variations on the image and changing a few words, the cover would work for hundreds of variant books that, without pretending not to, teach the myriad history of metastatic humanity while celebrating its myriad futures.
The book the Mother of Modernity is carrying has a title: School Book. All schooling books are variations on a theme of human supremacy, e.g. Fascist Supremacy and Woke Supremacy, with the exception of a few biology books of recent vintage that are tolerated as long as they don’t explicitly question the primacy of the modern human enterprise (to progress, grow, expand, occupy, to become evermore enlightened and dominate all that is just beyond the horizon — for the taking.
To be educated (schooled) is to know your place in metastatic society and the place of your people above red-in-tooth-and-claw nature. If you know nothing else, you know that humans are not mere animals (or animals at all) and clearly differ in kind from all inferior beings, including pretend humans who can never be fully assimilated.
That the figure on the cover of a recent book (September 27, 2022) is a melanin deficient woman, is because when metastatic humans left Africa about 55k years ago as Man the Hunter (Homo sapiens sapiens var. narrator), some went north into Europe and in the Caucasus Mountains encountered a different Homo sapiens subspecies that had adapted (evolved) to the temperate forests of far cooler than subtropical forests the expansionists had evolved in. By losing melanin to increase vitamin D production in their normally covered skin was adaptive (and by sexual selection, some had blue eyes, blond or red hair). Maternal DNA was added to the DNA of the expansionists (by killing the males and breeding the woman). The Indo-European expansionists came to take most of Europe and by ship reached the Americas in 1021 CE.
The Indo-European expansion became fossil-fueled, and soon took the Americas and much of the rest of the planet by the 20th century. Hence the name of the book, Teaching White Supremacy, the celebrated offering of a Harvard pseudoscholar and academic revisionist in sheep’s clothing, who combed through 180 years (1800–1980 CE) of US school textbooks to find content now deemed racist.
Racists are the oppressors, i.e. the colonists who were all white supremacists seeking to oppress/victimize their inferiors. Therefore only white people can be racists (called ‘white supremacists’, but actually Western Indo-European zero-order humanist supremacists which most Ivy League pseudoscholars are too — whom the White, Black, Latino, and Other global underclass hate if they look up and see them flying over).
White race disparagers who are white, however, are the new racists. They presuppose that the 1980 to present period of increasingly wokeist textbooks are telling a better story than the white/wealth supremacist textbooks before 1980. All modern humans who are well educated know that wage slavery for all is better than chattel slavery, and that the erudite products of the economy serving Ivy League money-changers/wealth supremacists are so much better educated now thanks to the growing mountain of obfuscation being piled higher and deeper than ever by pretend scholars in sheep’s clothing who disparage their recent ancestors while pretending to be superior to them (i.e. as academic wealth supremacists/wokeists).
wokeism, informal term
(woʊkɪzəm IPA Pronunciation Guide)
Progressive or left-wing attitudes or practices, esp. those opposing social injustice or discrimination, that are viewed as doctrinaire, self-righteous, pernicious, or insincere. Hence: such attitudes or practices are seen as constituting a collective social movement or agenda; an ideology associated with left to far left leaning academics and cancel culture in the humanities; the dominant consensus narrative on most university campuses.And as ideologies progress (and regress), there is Woke 2.0 arising over the last ten years. A new Cultural Revolution for the 21st century?
Woke means to be aware of the dynamics of marginalization and power by social category.
An important distinction is made between Woke 1.0 and 2.0
Woke 1.0 raises awareness about these issues, but it does not moralize or police language and thought.
Woke 2.0 moralizes, polices language and thought, and leads to ideology-based cancel culture and worldview, i.e. a Maoist-like new Cultural Revolution that conservatives are currently canceling (US universities are rapidly divesting themselves of DEI elements).
If you think you are not a human supremacist, a product of an expansionist culture and ancestry, you are either San, Hadza, or ignorant (i.e. well educated). To begin to learn, know then thyself as expansionistic human supremacist, a metastatic form of human.
Or not, and keep on keeping on being what you are without suspecting.
Just in case I’ve been too circumspect: the progressive left-leaning ideologues who dominate higher education are among the most denormalized and metastatic of modern humans. There has been no dimming of human supremacy since 1980 when the dismantling of white supremacy was the firmly fixed noblesse oblige of all right thinking humans (righteous human wealth supremacists) who inflated their cultural supremacy (over the uneducated flyover people who could but hope to become like them) to the size of a planet.
It is they who could have (and may well have) read Catton’s book on Overshoot in 1980. They were tired of hearing about ‘limits to growth’ and the claim that there could be too many humans on the planet was dismissed as a racist screed of white racists (but I repeat myself because, as noted, all racists are white) who just want to kill black babies, especially boys who could make brown babies with white girls. Sorry, but today’s educated (schooled) are the greatest threat to posterity (the least able or likely to renormalize). If you live long enough and a 10 year old asks you why they are about to die, you can mention the decline of the schooling system after about 1980 when not listening to Nature became normalized.
If nothing else, realize that your r-cultural narrative merely alters the gender and racial variation of ‘your’ r-selected people. If you are Bantu, your school book will be proudly titled Teaching Bantu Supremacy that all good, right-thinking Bantu want their children to learn about, and will feature the likes of Shaka Zulu.
And if you are Māori, you will like reading Teaching Māori Supremacy.
You will read about your ancestor’s taking of Zealandia, and despite oppression of the Indo-European temporary overlords, of your people’s genocidal conquest of the Moriori in the 1830s.
And if you are Iroquois (or admirer) you will celebrate their fair and just genocidal conquest of the Hurons (one of my likely ancestors who managed to survive the genocide). To learn why, just read Teaching Iroquois Supremacy as written by an Iroquois elder (or academic who uses Iroquois oral history enshrined in wampum as authoritative source).
Add religious and political to racial supremacy, and multiply the number of books of a kind. Read Teaching Conservative Supremacy, Teaching Progressive Supremacy, Teaching Zionist Supremacy, Teaching Islamist Supremacy, and Teaching Woke Supremacy.
Replace the middle word with any word referencing any identity group of modern humans who are metastatic supremacists (whether Proud Wolves or those in sheep’s clothing pretending not to be). Some pretenders are better (obfuscate less, focus more on behavior than ideology) than others, e.g. Teaching Quaker Supremacy or Teaching Jain Supremacy results in no dead bodies filling pits.
If Teaching Metastatic Supremacy seems too straight up and honest, try:
Teaching Zero-order Humanism Supremacy
But know that your heritage is that of your expansionist ancestors going back 75k years even if you have some Neanderthal DNA that was assimilated (resistance having proved futile) perhaps 50k years ago, or if you are Bantu, perhaps you have pre-expansionist San ancestors from only a few generations ago. But culturally, you have been assimilated, especially if you have been well educated. Understanding your condition is the beginning of potentially being delivered from it. Know then thyself.
