Seed 10: The Necessity of Plagues

Sure as all stars return again after they merge in the light,
death is great as life     - Walt Whitman

As a species, we humans are notorious for being completely blind to our own basic problems with sexuality and overpopulation, while chipping away at all the other outmoded biological functions--i.e. vice, sloth, intolerance, superstition--with complete lack of hesitation wherein the 'best interest' of common humanity overrules the possibly dangerous but perhaps worthwhile endeavors of the few. For example, psychedelic drugs and marijuana are outlawed even though almost no one dies from them and the health benefits are proven and substantial. The reason is always the same, 'the kids.' Meanwhile as a kid I assure you pot was easier to get than booze. (Cigarettes at the time had no age limit, and I smoked at my first office job at age 16) and far less destructive.  Sports that might be considered dangerous meanwhile are not outlawed, as the concept of physical death defying becomes somehow 'healthier' and more universal than the internal skydiving of, say, an acid trip. But how much of this is fear of the unknown and how much is actual human compassion? How much is short-sighted empathy and how much is genuine 'seventh generation' wisdom?

I consider myself pretty compassionate and yet I'm troubled by huge problems that only a few of us 'enlightened' or 'misanthropic' people seem to notice, and any solution to these problems other than 'the more the merrier' is dismissed as hateful.

Few of us argue that domesticated dogs and house cats shouldn't be "neutered" unless specifically meant as a breeder, and through sterilization we not only prevent more kittens and puppies being born than we can handle, we also, as Cesar Milan the Dog Whisperer says, eliminate the aggressive sexual frustration of animals not often presented with opportunities to mate.

And yet, who is more domesticated than man? Who suffers more from overpopulation and violence and antisocial behavior born of sexual frustration? Who breeds and breeds even when he has no means of support or idea how to provide or where on this packed earth is left to forage in? And yet, thanks to Catholicism and fundamental Christianity's hysterics and our elevation of sex--nature's most sophisticated of genetic con jobs--to some great and wonderful pie in the sky, this outrage and imposition goes unchallenged. Then there's history, wherein population control advocates are inevitably linked to Nazis.  One can't even mention over-population without drawing hostile responses from journalists like this chick below at Fox News, in an interview with Californians for Population Stabilization's Rick Oltman:



This video makes it clear that we're--on a basic mass level--a species that's so squeamish about facing matters of death, population control, sterilization, castration, and so forth that if someone tries to tell us their views we leap all over them, like if we don't instantly stomp on their little sapling of an idea it will blossom into a Nuremberg rally within minutes. We can assume it's along similar routes of avoidance (and of course good capitalism) that we've gone ahead blindly with programs designed--it seems--to keep the  maximum amount of poor, sick, and elderly people alive, even if it means draining earth's resources, and the finances of their great grandchildren, to do so.

Consider as a parable the environmental catastrophe wreaked upon the Native Americans or other indigenous races throughout the world during the height of colonial expansion and through to today. In areas where humanity and nature co-exist in actual harmony, it is always through the same model, of small hunter gatherer villages separated by miles of hunting territory. In these environments, people are always having sex, and naturally occurring population control factors like disease and infant mortality keep the population stable. When old people are no longer able to function unassisted, they are sent off into the woods to die. Deformed children are killed immediately. When Doctors without Borders and Christian missionaries or whatever international team moves in, infant mortality and the abandoning of the elderly are eliminated, resulting in ever-spiraling health care costs, increased population, decreased resources, the arrival of mass unemployment and what the theorists call "bare life," which can only allay the symptoms rather than eliminating (through, say, mass sterilization in economically stricken areas) the problem.
 
My grandmother is 96 years old and can barely move thanks to a really bad hip joint, and she is really bored with being so dependent on everyone, but when she even mentioned aloud she might want to stop taking her pills and just die naturally, the assisted living team began an intensive suicide watch: "I should have kept my mouth shut," she says in her letters, knowing I'll understand. Her own mother--my great grandmother--died at 107, so my Granny still may have a good decade left to go, of just lying around in a bed wishing her eyes could focus enough to read a book, and that she had been a smoker. I mention this of course as a comparison to the above description of the elderly sent off to die or left behind on an ice floe. If you examine both solutions to this difficult issue, is the 'green' one really so hard to discern?

In past posts I've compared humanity's relation to the greys and other alien species with conservationists at an African wildlife reserve. To bring in the overpopulation element, I would say it's akin to an overly concerned environmentalist riding to the rescue of a baby antelope separated from its mom and about to get ripped to shreds by a pride of lions--maybe the conservationist's PETA girlfriend or whiny children are visiting, seeing what's about to happen through binoculars, and then crying and demanding he go stop it. It's an impulsive move, but he saves the antelope and dozens more, and now he just can't turn them loose to be eaten, and he has resorted to feeding the now-starving lions with tins of beef imported from the states (compassion is always relevant to proximity, so the slaughter of the cute cows to fill the tins isn't considered).

After doing this for a number of years, the besieged but good-hearted environmentalist wonders why the antelope are so overpopulated and polluting the grasses with their dung and scorching the earth by eating everything that's not nailed down. Meanwhile the lions have grown sluggish and diseased on cheap Spam,  they've forgotten how to hunt. Everyone is now completely  dependent on our environmentalist.  The once mighty beasts of the jungle are now mere rats and roaches, parasites, a movable plague. Could foresight of this problem be why we've been sent mass genocide, disease and famine by our unseen rulers?

There's a scene in the sci fi movie THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979, above) wherein the hypno-therapist asks his patient (who can change the world when under hypnotism-controlled dreaming) to do something about the horrible overcrowding of their rainy Portland Oregon of the future. When the patient wakes up, 2/3 of the world population has been killed by a plague. "Oh no! This is terrible!" laments the therapist. But of course all that grief is soon forgotten when the benefits of elbow room are made apparent. It's an interesting sudden shift from this humane universal concern to personal relief. After all, does it make us savages if we think of how overpopulated our world would be without the bubonic plague, or the endless wars and genocides through the ages? When examined with detached clarity, it's apparent we owe our mass murdering ancestors a debt of gratitude we're far too humane to ever acknowledge.

If we can for the sake of argument presume the hypothesis that aliens 'seeded' us into existence, then our lives and deaths are most likely the equivalent to them of the antelope and lions to us, only the greys are the wise naturalists that prefer to let the lions do their job, let nature take it's gruesome, bloody course and keep the circle of life revolving in good order. The alien "gods" think in terms of generations, epochs, not the little flickers of centuries, so the cry of "Why have you forsaken us?" are barely even heard, as biblical floods or asteroids wipe failed genetic experiments from the drawing board. The aliens watch generations rise and fall and wars break out and mass famine and plagues are brought down to 'thin the herd' so to speak. To them we really are like rats and roaches. But again, they are not as intolerant: their compassion is much more advanced than the average Hallmark cutesy superficiality. They don't stomp on one creature because it's slimy and then prize and love another because it's adorable. 

If aliens exist they are surely looking down on us and factoring in just what combination of ecological disasters must occur to get us back to self-sustaining level. When you watch or listen to WAR OF THE WORLDS (above) don't kid yourself that the ending isn't the other way around; it's we who die from the flu, the latest version the grays had to invent to keep our numbers down. In real life they would never stoop so low as to march around firing lasers at fleeing humans like a bunch of futuristic Mongols. They'd be so slick you wouldn't even know they were behind your crippling illnesses. Clacking and clattering the universe into existence like an old lady sewing circle, they discard plenty of thread. The thing is it's on us if we choose to identify with the thread to the point we insist on hoarding it. We're the thread but we're also the sewing, the circle, the needles.

We, underneath the illusion-maya blanket they weave for us, are like children afraid of the boogeyman, allowing them--the aliens-- to rule the dark side of the moon between death and birth, a land we're too scared to peek out from under the covers to map out and reclaim for ourselves. In a vague 'see no evil' strategy, we refuse even to acknowledge the dark ambivalence of our own third eye unconscious, turning much of the 'New Age' philosophy into death-denying "all is love and light" bravado. 

All can be light and love, and love is stronger than darkness, but you wouldn't even 'feel' the light if not for that darkness. You wouldn't know what heat was if not for cold. We don't even know we're alive half the time if we're not facing death and confronting our mortality at least once in awhile. If you're happy all the time, happiness disappears. When you finally find that obscure object of desire, it's suddenly just an object. The grail is just a wine glass once you take that first drink.

So instead of the commonly held and completely dopey notion that the aliens are waiting until we stop our barbarism before they land on the White House lawn, maybe we should ask ourselves if it's the reverse: they're waiting for us to develop a way of life and death far-reaching enough that we become less emotional and sentimentally attached to our disposable vehicles, waiting until we develop a clearer eyed approach to parallel reality, life beyond death, reincarnation, astral travel, and the creation of artificial means of preserving human intellect and energy beyond the physical body. For now, as we begin to let in the idea of advanced alien intelligences, we really need to move beyond our avoidance of death and examine what some might consider Draconian (but is actually the opposite): population control.

These alien 'gods' are forces to whom birth and death are nothing more than two of the hundred stops on a very complicated express train. If we want to truly understand the alien agenda, and the salvation that can be found beyond their grasp, then we have to begin to just let that idea in and stop being so defensive about reproductive rights. I'm not saying become a Nazi or a murderer and I'm not saying stop taking your medicine, I'm just saying what I think needs to be said and hasn't. I draw broad points because I'm trying to balance out the hysteria and irrationality of the other extreme. I do think that until we stop acting scared and holy and start owning up to our inner murderers we'll never be able to rid ourselves of modern society's stagnant hypocrisy. It's like in AA: you can't be helped until you admit you're sick.  If we can surrender to the inevitable, not demonize decay, and learn to stop struggling against mortality's sticky nets, not only will we be calmer and less antisocial, it might be just the thing that makes our keepers stir from their sleepy watch and pick up their clipboards... a breakthrough in the treatment! Maybe then they'll decide we're ready to finally be cut loose and released back into the wild.