Tales From the Third Lobe - Join the Majority of One

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

Four hundred years ago the study of science was referred to as Natural Philosophy. If you read the viewpoints of the practitioners, the pursuit was somewhere between an intellectual game for the idle rich and a developing religion. Well ... a religion that had been developing for a few millennia. But developing by nature. So to speak.

There are many people making a study of science today who feel that every clue to How Things Actually Are that gets revealed shows yet another glimmering facet of the Face of God.

Apparently the aim is to be the first on your block to collect the whole set of puzzle pieces and lay them out correctly. And maybe then you can send off for the special prize.

But I digress.

In the earlier days of the Natural Philosophy tradition, it was popular to study animals, because theoretically the only reason God made them was so they could teach us lessons in how to act.

And you wonder why people have acted like animals for the past few thousand years. It was deliberate. Because, you know, the philosophers and priests were responsible for teaching the ruling classes....

*sigh*

Let's start with a snail.

For all the mucus and lack of spine, a snail is still a fairly complex entity. Even though it's largely just a tubular muscle with eyes and a shell.

Snails use their chemical hands to collect calcium compounds from their environment to pack together into a structure that can fend off the elements and the occasional predator.

If not a fork and garlic butter. Yum.

We use pretty much those same chemical hands to construct an internal structure to protect our internal organs. Also, we can anchor our muscles to that structure so we can move around. We use our actual hands to build clothes and houses and such to fend off too much sun and wind and rain and shit.

Does that make us any better than a snail that we can change protective gear as it suits our needs? Shrimps and bugs can shed their skeletons as they see fit, too. What of it? The puzzle is where and when to draw the line between the snail and its shell, or a shrimp and its exoskeleton, or us and our clothes, houses, and buildings....

My opinion, from the viewpoint of Natural Philosophy, is that you can't draw that line. Like you can't draw a line between individual bees in a hive or ants in a colony. Or between individual cells in a multicellular organism. Or between organelles interior to a cell and the cell walls. Or between those organelles and the plasma soup they float in.

More macroscopically, I believe that you can't draw a valid line between people and members of their family or groups of friends. Or countries. Or between nations. Or between people and their environment. And that includes outer space and the rest of the fucking universe.

We aren't who we are without everyone and everything else. You are your clothes, your house, your neighborhood, your nation, your planet—because you aren't who you are without them.

And there it is in terms of existentialist bullshit.

The issue is would you be better if you could edit out the parts of you that make you unhappy and/or unhealthy.

Well, yeah. That goes without saying. In fact, your cells do this all the time, by taking in material they need and pushing out waste products. They take what they need and pass the rest along.

Cell membranes are useful for this. As it turns out, good fences make good neighbors.

None of your little cells' organelles pillage each other's sucrose supplies. Cells self-destruct on their own when they can't get enough to work with, and it's very rare when the soldiers have to bust down the doors and go in. The system works. It makes you you.

If you care to draw the line.

I still say that drawing lines between individuals or between individuals and their environment is artificial. Unnecessary. And causes problems.

See, the problem is a religious one.

Priests and philosophers who are of the opinion that God made humans to be special somehow are the ones who are fucking things up.

The word "holy" means "special" or "set apart" or "chosen". And we're just not holy. At least, not in the sense that we are separate. They've got it all backwards.

We, as individual humans, act like animals—stealing, hoarding, and killing over resources that we keep artificially scarce so we can Darwinistically breed the best thieves and gluttons and murderers. We pattern ourselves after them. We define success in terms of them. Those are the ones we breed with preferentially. We suck their semen, figuratively and literally, into every available orifice on the off-chance that we might become more like them. Or, if not us, then our children.

Animals don't really do that. When resources get scarce, they first spread out and look for more resources, Then, if things get more desperate, they slim down their own numbers in an effort to select for the ones that can survive how things are. Until they can become more efficient at extracting resources.

The cells in your body do this too, but they wait until you're starving.

If you want a better goal than acting like animals, I suggest that we act like an animal instead.

By recognizing that we are all the same entity, one that is the sum of all of us and our environment, we can concentrate on maximizing resources and distributing them as efficiently as is necessary to keep us, as a single entity, happy and healthy.

So.

If you want peace, seek plenty. Give away what you don't need so another portion of your anatomy can use it. Stop hoarding and pillaging and killing in preference to looking for more food and water and air and shelter to go around.

There's the lesson we can learn from the animals.

From there it seems kind of anticlimactic to state that the Naturists—the ones that believe that Nature is divine and mankind is mundane—are just as fucked in the head. Because for some reason they draw the same impossible line between the "complicated" way we obtain energy for our cells to function versus the "simple" way that amoebas do it, or between the chemical hammers and crowbars that the cells of snails use to construct their shelters and the "mundane" versions of those same tools than we can buy at Home Depot.

As if one system is, by nature (so to speak), better than the other.

Well, one system just might be better than the other. But not by nature. Nature, when used in that fashion, appears to mean "the way bugs and trees do it." Which is nonsense.

The differences in the way we build shelters versus the way snails do it can be weighed entirely in terms of efficiency of the distribution of resources involved in creating the tools and using them—and the impact on the rest of the system/organism from which those tools are created and in which those tools are used.

Unless efficient use and distribution of resources is what you mean by nature.

If so, good for you. You have firmly established yourself in the majority of one.

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Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy.