How to Save the Planet
The final solution to our perpetual degradation of the Earth
All of my life I’ve been driven to understand things. Insatiably curious, I’ve been a voracious and eclectic reader since early childhood. At ten I thought I’d invented the base-10 logarithm (my engineer father very quickly disabused me of this particular delusion) and as I grew older I devoured math, chemistry, physics as well as literature and history and psychology. For me, intelligence has always been a good thing and therefore the more intelligence the better has been my assumption.
As most people seem either uninquisitive or lacking the cognitive faculties necessary to qualify for significant intelligence, I believed that we need to find ways to help people develop their mental capacities as much as possible. Let’s all improve! That was one of my core beliefs.
Until now.
Let’s take a look at what we humans have managed to do over the last couple of hundred years.
We’ve over-fished the oceans and destroyed vast previously flourishing ecosystems.
We’ve destroyed most of the rainforests, which means about 30% of the planet’s capacity to produce oxygen and recycle carbon is now gone.
We’ve pumped so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere that the climate is changing and the oceans are acidifying, which will kill microscopic marine life and thereby remove the remaining 70% of the planet’s capacity to produce oxygen.
Guess what? We need oxygen. But apparently that simple fact hasn’t been enough to stop us from destroying the very thing we need to continue to live. Yes, we’re that stupid. Really.
We’ve exterminated many large mammals and are on track to exterminate all but farmed creatures by the middle of this century. Already most of the elephants, tigers, rhinos, and pangolins are gone. Chinese demand for magical dried animal parts shows zero sign of abating and so we can confidently predict that by 2050 the only large wild mammals will exist within the cages of zoos.
We’re poisoning the environment with toxic waste from industrial processes and from wholly unnecessary plastic straws and bags and wrappers.
Everywhere people go, the rest of the planet suffers.
This is because 98% of the human race is unable to adjust to the fact we’re no longer living on the margins on the African savannah or in the primordial forests of Eurasia. We’re hardwired for those environments in which we were so few and our technologies so primitive that we just couldn’t do much damage no matter how foolish and lacking in foresight we were.
Unfortunately the output of a tiny number of clever people has resulted in astonishing technologies that amplify our hardwired instincts. And that’s why we’ve become a cancer across the face of the planet, killing everything we come into contact with.
We can’t stop ourselves.
Indeed, we’re actively embracing those whose only goal is to amplify these harms. All over the world we’re electing howling incompetents like Trump and Bolsonaro and Johnson and Duterte and so, so many more. The policies of these populist demagogues are guaranteed to make everything much worse. But we love them, we vote for them, because they offer the simple-minded “solutions” our tiny ape-brains crave. As a species we’re just not intelligent enough to attempt to grapple with reality. As a species we’re just not intelligent enough to learn anything from past mistakes.
All our marvelous technologies have done is amplify our innate stupidity and greed.
Far from intelligence being a desirable trait and something we need more of, I think it’s clear that intelligence is something we should attempt to extirpate from our species.
There’s not much harm homo sapiens can do if there are only a few million humans on the planet and our most sophisticated tools are some fire-sharpened pointed sticks and a few flint axes.
We need to get back to this situation as fast as possible, while there’s still some ecosystem to be saved.
If we seek out and kill everyone who’s got an IQ above 90 (the average Trump supporter/Brexit supporter level) we can very quickly ensure that all our modern technologies cease to work. This will result in mass starvation and disease and a rapid reduction of the human population. Within less than a century the survivors will be living once again as our distant ancestors lived, and our capacity for global harm will be gone. Without the curse of clever people, nothing new will be invented and nothing new will be attempted. The drooling howling mob can dance its ritual incantations (“thoughts and prayers!”) and cut off their own fingers to appease their invisible magical gods and goblins.
Slowly, the Earth’s ecosystems can begin to recover.
So I say to you: if you really truly care about the fate of our beautiful precious Earth, seek out your neighbors and use whatever comes to hand to weed out anyone who seems capable of uttering a coherent sentence or reasoning from known facts. All sign of any kind of functional intellect must be eliminated without hesitation. The Earth can’t afford even a few clever people to survive because inevitably they’d start trying to understand things and invent things once more. And that’s what led us to where we are today.
Once our glorious work of intelligence removal is accomplished, we must turn our hands against ourselves to finish the job. Because we can read and we can reason and thus we’re part of the problem. But it’s a problem that is very easily solved.
In this way the intellectually weak shall inherit the Earth without having the capacity to do the great harms we’ve continually inflicted on the planet and on ourselves since the end of the last Ice Age.
Without clever people, the world will be a better place.
Here endeth the lesson.
