By John Ward: Here’s
a dark thought with which to kick Sunday off: in the natural order of
things, we’re told (by the libertarian Right) all human beings want to
be free.But 90%+ of apes are tribal followers/joiners who subject themselves to the protection of he who has the dominant reproductive gene. So if there are 100 members of the tribe, 1 will be the boss, 9 cheeky monkeys will be out to knock him off the perch, and 90 will buy tickets to the fight. Getting tickets to the Fight Game isn’t my idea of being free.
Most successful bosses stay boss for two generations (in higher pack mammals). So the 9 usually get wiped out, or join the 90 and accept their role as involving strict celibacy. Then Top Guy’s sperm produce the next nine.
Of the 9, some among the 90 wimps say, before the big bout, “I think you can take him….and if you can. I’ll be right behind you”. When he loses, they bow down to the boss. And bosses of this nature, I’m here to tell you, only very rarely display libertarian tendencies: more often than not, they approach dissent with intent to murder.
“LIfe,” as the most infamously anti-libertarian of them all Thomas Hobbes said, “is nasty, brutish and short”.
Although speaking live on the subject a hundred years before Darwin, Hobbes described the survival of the fittest to a tee.
So why is libertarianism the idee choisi of the Blogosphere intelligentsia….lovers as they are of the ‘natural order of things’?
Well, perhaps it’s because Man’s big problem is that he went beyond the natural order. You see, the clue’s in the name: Homo sapiens. Except that – if latter-day evolution evidence is to be believed – it wasn’t Man’s fault as such…..he got a thinker’s brain at least partly (in my view, mainly) because, following his descent from arid, collapsing trees, he needed to run very fast for a longer time from predators when necessary. This was fairly important, in that it helped reduce the chances of being eaten.
The idea, however, was to give him the cranial capacity to pump out oxygen, adrenalin and happy chemicals for longer – through more and more veins in the head to those in the chest and legs. It wasn’t to have him win Animal Eggheads week in, week out. Oh dear me no: the main thought here was to help him found the Olympic Games.
Now in doing that, evolution not only paved the way for drug abuse, bribery, satellite tv athletics coverage and countless other evils: it also created the greatest evil of all, Big ‘ead. And Big ‘ead is who we are today.
We’re not all evil of course; a few of of us think to make things better for all, and most of us (with training) for both all and self. But the brutes in the ten per cent think to make things better for them alone, without exception. This abuse of thinking is busily destroying the natural order of things. Here’s why.
In among the original ten, once Man got off his front legs, there were one or two (using the accepted cockney form here) Jeremy Hunts. Weedy but cunning, they thought, ‘This big bloke with the club has the rules all his own way. He shall verily beat me to a pulp if I so much as look at him in the wrong tone of voice. But if I recruit ten numbskulls with big muscles, then yea, shall we together marmalize him. Well, they will – I’ll hold their coats’.
So began the social class system, with weedy twerps ruling over thick, muscle-bound peasants living in tied pigsties. But within the unnatural disorder of Man-made things, Aristo Man just couldn’t keep his dick in his trousers for long, and invented droit de seigneur, by which His Lordship awarded himself the right to shag lots of peasant girls.
And within this aberrent practice were (f’nar, f’nar) the seeds of his own destruction. Because having inherited the Master’s genes, Ms Peasant’s offspring also became something of a thinker – albeit, for safety’s sake, on the quiet. And as the Hunt at the Top had been at most of da women by the end of his days, pretty much all of the peasant boys and girls got to thinking.
Via this route came the American and French Revolutions, and the Trades Union movement. On surveying the effects of this, most of the Hunts had a bowel movement. The Franco–American takeover having had mixed results, the British aristocracy nevertheless noted that, respectively, the King had lost a prairie-load of land, and the Hunts had lost their heads. Their very wise initial response was thus to ship any budding Scargills off to Australia.
But then some politicians in the Liberal Party got to thinking.
The thinking politician is, without question, the lowest, nastiest and most dysfunctionalistist of the thinking ten per cent. Let’s remember that nineteenth century Liberals were about as liberal as the lovechild of Ronald Reagan and Theresa May: the only thing they saw in the nascent trade union-supported Labour Party was a way to knock a dent in the Tory Party’s braindead* majority. [* Author's note: the Tory Party was braindead because its basis consisted of inbred shire Lords as MPs, those open to bribery in rotten boroughs, and those peasants who, in the genetic past, had been too ugly too attract the attention of the Hunt at the Top. This is really all quite logical: do try to keep up].
So they did a deal with the Labour Party not to contest some boroughs where Labour could oust the Tory – and vice versa. If you look for differences between this arrangement and that between Cameron Conservatives and Cliggdems in May 2010, you will I think detect a 100% similarity. I’m not judging here, merely making an empirical observation. Nah, f**k it – of course I’m judging.
From this unnatural cunning came very little of any immediate good. It didn’t stop the First World War, it accelerated American global hegemony, it led to silly ideas about the USSR, it destroyed the Liberal Party, it didn’t stop the rise of fascism, and most important of all, it put my Grandad out of work after 1926 – for good.
The longer term result was mixed. It reduced anxiety about healthcare bills, cut back Australia’s convict population explosion, contributed to the greatest ever leap forward in wealth across the global social spectrum from 1950-1971, and most important of all, helped me jump two social classes thanks to a free Grammar School education of world-class quality.
At the same time, however, it helped propogate the following weeds: acceptance of the sufficiency, homophilia, feminism, bureaucratic excess, economic idleness, sexual fecklessness, and social policy brainlessness…..but not Eliot Ness, who was an American and already dead by the time things got out of hand. In fact, we could do with an Eliot Ness on both sides of the Pond right now. Several of them, in fact.
So to sum up, those Rightist Conservatives in the UK who see themselves as restoring the Natural Order of Things are doing nothing of the kind: they are engaged in a brazen attempt to recreate the beginnings of that unnatural disorder created by Big ‘eads with too much brain and too little self-control.
I have yet to decide firmly WTF we should do about this. My thoughts in the early, dark hours involve castration on an industrial scale; but in more balanced periods, I hope that artificial evolution might try to give the left cerebral hemsiphere a 2:1 advantage over the right. This, unfortunately, would involved affirmative action – to which, as regular Sloggers know only too well, I am implacable opposed.
The philosopher’s lot is not a happy one. But I wish you all a delightful Sunday Lunch anyway.
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