Amerika

Part of what we write about around here is the idea that success leads to failure, a cycle like most things in nature because they must be self-renewing. Since over time you will lose some animals in a species, for a species to exist, it must have a life cycle centered around reproduction.

Humans focus instead on time-denial and design their systems to be in the moment, yet eternal, in a static state of human logic based on rationalization from the idea that we do not want to be powerless. Humans are built of reality-denial, and sometimes it spurs us to invent things that maximize our position, but usually it simply makes us self-destruct.

We now have a model for this situation in Mouse Utopia. When mice are given adequate food and space, they die out from lack of challenges. In other words, removing physical want not only does not make them happy, but it kills them.

Extending this as metaphor, it seems that when struggle is replaced with plenty, people lose direction and begin to self-destruct. This even continues at a dietary level, where mice fed sugar have worse life outcomes than mice who struggle for nutrition:

When mice ate a diet of 25 percent extra sugar — the mouse equivalent of a healthy human diet plus three cans of soda daily — females died at twice the normal rate and males were a quarter less likely to hold territory and reproduce, according to a toxicity test developed at the University of Utah.

Even though the mice didn’t become obese and showed few metabolic symptoms, the sensitive test showed “they died more often and tended to have fewer babies,” says the study’s first author, James Ruff, who recently earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah. “We have shown that levels of sugar that people typically consume – and that are considered safe by regulatory agencies – impair the health of mice.”

Abundance creates death; scarcity creates life. With too many calories, organisms simply die from lack of purpose. Interestingly, those who struggle often have better health outcomes than even couch potatoes who exercise fanatically:

Scientists have concluded the group has the healthiest arteries ever studied, and that their brains age more slowly than those of people in North America, Europe and elsewhere.

The Tsimanes are a rarity. They are one of the last peoples on the planet to live a fully subsistence lifestyle of hunting, foraging and farming.

Less than 10% of their daylight hours are spent in sedentary activities, compared with 54% in industrial populations.

Humanity is dying of too much power. When given the ability to beat back nature, we promptly make a situation where we cannot thrive. The same applies to democracy, which by giving the power equally to every individual allows the worst aspects of humanity to dominate.

Tags: democracy, subsistence lifestyle, sugar