Let's Be Lunch

Though what we look like after is better not asked.....

How The Power Of Speech Breeds The Ego

'Survival of the fittest' was a phrase coined by Francis Galton,  
a cousin of Charles Darwin to summarise Darwin's ideas.

Alas Galton missed the point of Darwin's science.
Survival by adaption, via co-dependence, 
is far more positive as proof of fitness
than being, or believing your species to be, 
the apogee of a hierarchy. 
Saying you are fitter than everyone else is ego,
which is something animals don't do.

But Galton's world was built on ego.
Through coining his phrase he advanced the Eugenics Movement.
Galton's science was the competitive [mis]breeding of cattle,
then dogs for display, and making his profit from the shows.
What in the 1870's started out as selective breeding in animals
had by the 1920's became the mass sterilisation of the human poor
and thousands of women concidered to be mental defectives.
The idea would cause a world war before it was halted. 

False states of human superiority long predate Galton,
he just their latest servant. But even now many Capitalists
in their detachment see those whose labour they profit  from
as sub-human-the way Galton saw his animals. The main problem
for those who recognise their being seen as sub-human have
is deciding, as they vocally resist, 'Are we as egotistal as our accusers?'.

The Biggest Ghost Of All

From whales to plankton, lions to flies,
nature has always had it's economies,
which we understand as mechanisms
and then only in the barest of outlines.

The more complex the connection
between insect and beast the more we see
hierarchies we can dimly begin to respect.
This helps us to know to leave nature
as the fleshly but ghostly machinery
it is best left to be.

If we retrained ourselves enough
from harming others we'd prove
to ourselves that all the time
we were the hollowest
of all of natures fleshly ghosts.

The More Laws Multiply

they more they divide those they rule over.
The more one party or gender decides for all.
The more they will normalise exempting themselves
from the rules they make. The more they reduce
the the respect that the law would afford if equally applied.
But in an indifferent world none of us can know
how much law matters; human history is a dustbin,
full of how we misdescribe and are misremembered.
 

A Recent Example Of English Contrarianism

In 2009 our wonderful government
planned a major scheme down the finest detail.
At great cost to taxpayers and tax dodgers alike
it had to be cancelled, computer systems and all.

It was for a national identity card.
The Opposition to it said it was cost too much,
was too European (and therefore foriegn) and Orwellian,
and finally many too many people feared that the security
of the computer systems would eventually prove corrupt.
The memory of the failure of that scheme
may well have helped make the Brexiteers win.

But the more abstract huge corporations make money
appear to be, the more they make us dependent on them.
This makes us more dependent on using proofs of identity
that favor these corporations. Thus passports with us not smiling inside,
and the plastic cards in driving licenses are now used much more
to help money and goods travel between humans, than ever
they are used to validate humans travelling to different places.
 

How To Start A Cartel Without Being Seen To

Once the chain is started there is no stopping the end result that is not horribly authoritarian. 

Tokens Of Tolerance

When it happened, my 'coming out' to the straight folk
in my shared house was easier for them than it was for me.
They could take a break from my struggle to find my new self
in ways that I could not, but I liked their acceptance.
Their apparent ease was a tonic when I needed one.
My struggle was partly against how little I knew
of the minority community attached to my new choice of self.

When the worst of my struggle was over
it was clear that I had been a token of liberal tolerance
for those apparently welcoming straight folk;
any human token would have done for them.
The further I got into being 'out' the more I found
that real diversity lay in freedom from being judged;
real life was as far beyond the tokenism of tolerance
as the deficient community of my new identity.

I had to just trust that who I was would carry me through.