Thursday 30 March 2017

As the tasks of civilization shrink, human nature goes obsolete.

Baked in human behaviour for mating and resource capture is going obsolete.  This is not just for culture but for the human life form itself.   Life-time sex pairing doesn't mean the same when a lifetime is twice as long and none to two children with near 100% survival rates are reared.  Seniors' mates are chosen from a different pool than young singles use.   Sexual norms don't mean what they used to mean, now the food supply allows girls to reach menarche before 12 instead of closer to 18 and boys can impregnate much younger,too. In the past, kids weren't in a position to have their own to raise until they themselves were adults and "marriageable".     Even the pleasures of sex evolved to ensure successful propagation of our genes in the next generation.  The next generation is way less important than it used to be but sex just as much fun.  This helps explain the Gender vs Sex battling.  Again, because specialization has produced a welfare state to look after many needs, we don't need children to look after us in our dotage.  The result is we have consumed now and put debt onto future generations that matter less to us.  Hello deficits and governmental debt.  Indenturing someone else's offspring with our current consumption is a genius benefit of prosperity and specialization.


In resource capture there is food for calories and protected territory for hunting and gathering.  Who needs it when a day's office work can provide a week's good food and the problem is obesity, not hunger?  Most of us don't have neighbours who will kill us, steal our cattle, burn our fields, rape or kill our spouses.  We don't bother to put up fences around our homes and stone walls around our towns.  Men and women don't need to divide the survival tasks up by hunt/fight and gather/care but our baked-in nature still does.  

The etiquette of civilization is going obsolete as the tasks of civilization shrink, are delegated to specialists or simply passed onto software and automated devices.  The near future brings loss and unexpected change, though rewards will accelerate for many.  Our baked in human nature can't keep up but our tech-driven potential will surge, with or without us.   We're coming up on a world with many surplus but nonetheless well-fed and fairly content people on the sidelines of life.

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