two tangents

I offer two tangents to illuminate two topics mentioned in the past, which is represented graphically by what is 'down below' or 'on the side' and then 'down below' on one of its links.

First, the notion that people are a virus was the subject of a terse, misanthropic observation made by Agent Smith to Neo in the 1999 film "The Matrix." His point is simply that we're not of this world because we find no harmony with it. Instead we continue to exploit the resources of an area until we leave it uninhabitable, both by us, and by much of the life that once lived there. We exhaust biomes, ecosystems, and the like by the means of our resource extraction.

Now, without getting into some pop-philosophy discussion allow me to say that Agent Smith makes an astute observation, regarding not only the ecological impact of humans but of their identity by analogy to their activities. They are like viruses because they exploit that which is available. People, per se, aren't the viruses. They are the marionettes of viral ideologies. As noted 'in the past' people are untethered from their day-to-day realities by overarching narratives that inform their identities and give their lives meaning. Meaning seems essential and especially so since most of us have identities as individuals. The two are co-dependent. One anecdote will suffice. During the early to mid 1990s the rainforests of Indonesia went up in smoke at an unprecedented rate. What led this were slash-and-burn farmers reclaiming whole swathes of forest for agricultural production. What motivated this was state policies that encouraged it. And the state was, of course, motivated by a need to expand its economy. Two observations about viral ideologies are that 'the state' is an abstraction. People with identities find theirs populated by a notion of citizenship to a state. They do its bidding as a consequence. Second, the economy is an abstraction. That people would find no value in life as such and instead see it as so much to exploit for the accumulation of capital is a second, viral notion. The world is one grand resource bin, and we take from it as long as there's something to gain. Granted, at the level of subsistence humans must take from their environments. But we have something new added to the design--money. Money can store energy, value, wealth almost indefinitely. And in the rush to get our hands on this stuff we tend to rob from the world at an alarming pace to become rich because those spoils rarely spoil. What comes of the food produced and the land that was slashed and burned is another story. It's a short-term gain strategy that leaves destruction in its wake.

Hence, people are like a virus.

Finally, I want to suggest an analogy between the rodent's incisors and the human brain. A rodent's incisors must be used in order to keep them ground down to a manageable length. Incisors grow continuously, and to not use them jeopardizes the life of the rodent. Having been the proud caretaker of a hamster I know just what this does to the rodent in captivity. Sure, my hamster lived in a see-through castle, but his life of luxury came at a simple but overwhelming price. My hamster had to maintain the length of its incisors. And so it did by gnawing on parts of its cage. The maintenance of its incisors became a defining nervous activity. Such can be said for the needs of the human brain. It, like the rodent's incisors, is both a liability and an asset. It is a powerful tool for abstract thinking, but it is also can seal our doom if it has very little to do. Much has been written about the delirium of solitary confinement. The mind literally begins to fall apart, and with it the person's sanity. Likewise, the non-confined human tends to keep its mind busy with any number of things because an existential abyss is always just a second and a step from our current position. So the business of keeping ourselves occupied becomes a defining nervous activity.

So, we're viral rodents. In that we reveal our progenitors: life as such. Nothing symbolizes the oddity of the life process like an RNA plasmid in a protein shell bent upon pirating the replication apparatus of cellular DNA. That is the life of a virus. A virus is a solitary thing, which desires nothing more than to replicate itself. It reveals a rather abject definition of both existence and of life itself. Life requires violence done to others. Life requires the blurring of this and that, in and out. And life is simply the continuance of itself through time. These are the basest meanings behind all life--protein warfare over time. Rodents are simply one of the more resilient progenitors of the mammalian line, the ones that climbed over so many skeletal remains of the past.

I've said this somewhere 'in the past' as well. Consciousness is simply the coincidence of matter over time. Or to put it into a language that is more recognizable to the reader: we are all possessed by the ghosts of time. Time is what we are. We are temporal creatures.