Humanity Saves The Planet
How ecological catastrophe can be avoided with one simple fix
Humanity is inexorably pushing the world past the point of no return. Our carbon dioxide emissions have induced climate change. Our oceans are becoming vast wastelands denuded of all life thanks to massive factory fishing fleets. Our wilderness areas are disappearing as farmers expand their fields and the last vestiges of rainforest are being chopped down to make way for palm oil plantations. We’ve already exterminated more than 20% of all species on Earth and at current rates we’ll have eliminated another 40% of species by the middle of this decade.
But hope is not lost. By making one tiny change we can save the planet, and it won’t require trillion-dollar investments in green energy nor developing a massive recycling infrastructure. In fact, we can accomplish our goal by leveraging humanity’s greatest resource: our core impulses.
Let’s look back several hundred years to the European middle ages in order to see the tremendous potential of ordinary human behavior. As the world’s most profitable business enterprise was furthering its lucrative dominance of the European religion market, the Roman Catholic Church was increasingly intolerant of any potential competition. This meant that the many village Wise Women who for centuries had been passing down knowledge of curative herbs, tree bark, and poultices, had to be removed from the picture lest their efficacy contrasted unfavorably with the ineffectual babble of properly ordained priests.
And so it was that the Catholic Church invented witchcraft. All across Europe, women in their thousands were burned, stoned, beaten to death, drowned, dismembered, and otherwise helpfully removed from the path of the Church so as to permit its ever-more-profitable domination of the minds of the ignorant, superstitious, and foolish. Today’s evangelicals and Islamic extremists can only wish they too could exercise such untrammeled power as they exploit their own herds of simple-minded and credulous know-nothings.
This persecution of Wise Women had a truly wonderful consequence. Thanks to some obscure bit of mythological tacking-on, it was believed that cats were uniquely malignant. They were portrayed as familiars, capable of shape-shifting and of inducing harm to the empty-headed peasants who were induced by the local priest to believe all the nonsense he spewed forth from the pulpit each tedious Sunday. So it was that inhabitants of villages all over Europe sought out and killed every cat they could find. This was a superb triumph of feline cleansing, the victory of Christianity over the animal kingdom.
There was just one tiny insignificant problem…
Cats were the only thing standing between medieval villagers & townspeople and an overwhelming infestation of mice and rats. Once the cats were gone, the mice and rats reproduced and reproduced and reproduced. The resulting superabundance of hungry rodents ate into the grain stores that would have tided people over the long cold barren winters. Rats and mice spread diseases because of the fleas and lice they carried.
And so the god-fearing people of Europe perished in their tens of thousands, succumbing to starvation and disease like the good religionists they were.
It is their magnificent and inspiring example we can now follow today in order to save our beautiful but critically endangered Earth.
For those familiar with the joys of Youtube, a few years ago there was an amusing video that became transiently popular. It showed a group of “Islamic freedom fighters” sitting around in some fly-blown village in Africa, bored, smoking, and clearly in need of some entertainment. But as entertainments are banned by Islam (aside, that is, from sodomizing young boys) they were in a quandary. It would be halal to watch some funny cat videos on their smartphones. Then one of them had what was almost certainly the nearest thing he’d ever had in his life to an actual thought: let’s give an AK-47 to the village pet chimp! What could possibly go wrong?
Fortunately for posterity the entire episode was captured by another enthusiast filming it on his smartphone for presumably non-halal purposes. For those of you who’d like to see the results for yourself, the video can be seen here.
We are those men and we are that chimp.
Thanks to the work of a tiny number of clever people, we’ve all been given shiny devices totally beyond our comprehension. But as we’re not actually capable of using our brains for anything more than as ballast to stop our heads bobbing about when we walk, we have as much idea what to do with these shiny toys as the men and the chimp in the video.
Which is why we’re destroying the world around us. Unfortunately, unlike the business with the cats and the rats, there’s a significant time-lag between our modern acts of destruction and their inevitable consequences. So we keep going, picking up speed with every turn, destroying more and more with the shiny powerful toys invented by the tiny percent of humanity partially capable from time to time of doing that strange thing called thinking.
But let us not lose hope, for the solution to all our problems is at hand. Indeed, perspicacious readers will already have divined for themselves the answer: kill all the clever people.
Let us imagine a world in which everyone with an IQ above 115 is summarily executed (we can bring back accusations of witchcraft, communism, blasphemy, socialism, and whatever else we need in order to help speed up the process). At a stroke (of a sufficiently sharp blade) our problem is solved. As only 14% of the population is in possession of such a lofty score, this means that a mere billion or so people must be written out of our ongoing sitcom without the possibility of appearing in a later spinoff. And what is a billion people compared to saving the planet? One feels sure Greta Thunberg will approve.
Furthermore, as everyone hates a know-it-all, the culling will give everyone else a warm satisfaction — for blood spurting from a severed artery is delightfully warm, at least initially. In the USA some 410 million registered firearms can be utilized whereas elsewhere cheap machetes and knives can be employed to good effect. Rwanda stands as a shining example to the rest of us to show what a little dedication and a few nicely-worded radio broadcasts can accomplish. Now that we have the incomparable advantage of the Internet, scaling up will be effortless.
Let us imagine a better world suddenly cleansed of people inconsiderate enough to utilize the brain’s frontal cortex. Not only will we see no more shiny new toys being foisted upon us, but our existing shiny toys will rather quickly become less shiny and reliable. With all the clever people exterminated, there will be no one to operate the power stations, the steel mills, the factories, the electricity grids, the pharmaceuticals companies, and all the other million-and-one things we all depend on for our existence in this complicated interconnected world.
Now obviously there will be some minor inconveniences here and there.
Everyone who depends on a plethora of modern medicines to manage their obesity-related hypertension, heart disease, and Type II diabetes will alas sooner or even sooner succumb to what will now be the inevitable consequences of a lifetime of extremely poor decisions such as eating McSlop and avoiding any form of exercise whatsoever. And yes, unfortunately most people will starve to death once the supermarkets and warehouses have been stripped of their remaining tins and packets. But there will be great satisfaction among the people because for the first time in their lives there won’t be an elite keeping them down and preventing them from cutting off their own limbs when the mood takes them. Populism will thus be an even more powerful force than it is today, and its benevolent effects will thus be even greater.
These benevolent effects will include a great many unpleasant deaths resulting from the total absence of surgery and medical supplies, but let’s face it: we are born, we live, and then we die. It’s surely mere nit-picking to consider of any importance the actual duration of that interval twixt birth and death.
After a mere generation or so, whoever is left will be back in the condition we humans are best suited to: living in small groups, scavenging whatever we can, and defending ourselves with pointed sticks and sharpened pieces of flint.
As there will be only a few tens of millions of us scattered across the globe, and as our shiny toys will be rusting hulks incapable of motion, fish stocks will slowly recover. Forests will reclaim what were formerly farms and urban areas. Within a few thousand years the immediate effects of human depredation will be erased. And with humans in such small and ineffectual numbers, evolution will be able slowly to re-fill denuded habitats and ecological niches. Especially if the few humans remaining do what people do best: spend their time plotting to slaughter each other at the earliest opportunity.
So I entreat every reader who truly cares about the future of this delicate planet we are treating so very badly: don’t hesitate to do the right thing. Even in the most modest household a sharp carving knife, hammer, or crowbar can be found and repurposed to do good. Your neighbors, who have always been so annoying, provide the perfect opportunity for some early practice. What do you have to lose?
And besides, if you hesitate, they may come for you before you can neutralize them.
So be human: reach out and kill someone today.
