OK, I’ve been picking at this for the last week here and there, expanding it quite a lot, making the integrations as wide as I can without tons more text. This is Part 1. I think I did a decent job incorporating most of the idea in comments. many were incorporated into existing theses.
Manifesto: A public declaration of principles and intentions.
Version 2.0
1. You must think yourself lean and thin, and strong and healthy…to a natural point of proper and normal regulation of hunger and satiation. There is no prescription or proscription that will necessarily work for you. You must craft your own diet, health and fitness paradigm from your own trial and error experience. Modern society only wants to sell you stuff. Look around you, to recognize that the burden is squarely upon you. They care not about your belly or health. They care about your buying power and where you are going to choose to spend.
2. Thinking and principles are paramount, because the TV commercials and press releases change daily and are wildly varied. Applications must be tested and critically evaluated, personally. Rigid and authoritative, one-size-fits-all plans and roadmaps are doomed to mediocrity, at best. Your best must come from you. You’ll be effectively left in the wilderness to fend for yourself, should you choose not to fill your cart with frozen and otherwise preserved boxes from your local market. That choice is yours. Health accrues as self determination and independence accrue.
3. Humans are animals. Moreover, the same sorts of physiology, biology, climatology, geology and sociology that hold sway over the life, death and prosperity of the entirety of the animal world applies just as soundly to humans beings; to you.
4. Humans, unlike non-human animals, can consciously and with purpose, act against their own best interest, even to the point of suicide. They can also command nature and their environment to a degree non-human animals can’t and don’t. Think fire breaks, dams, roads, cities, suburbs, airports, skyscrapers, computers, the Internet, division of labor and trade.
5. Generally, human ill health, unhappiness, sexlessness, sleeplessness, stress, slavery, drudgery, suicide, disease and decrepitude, years and decades before the eventual finality of death, are adverse manifestations of the human ability to work against his own interest by purpose or default: his ability to produce, and his ability to command nature, taken to irrational levels. Non human animals have only to concern themselves with the environmentally given, which they essentially do automatically.
6. The ability of individual humans to work against themselves and their own best interests so effectively — and even collectively — is the root cause of all human-created problems. The ability to “create reality,” by means of marvelously, powerfully creative human minds, can exacerbate the downside on many levels; when the creation of “reality” is taken beyond the pleasure of fantasy. It’s a double edged sword, a dangerous weapon: one which can be used in advance of breathtaking achievement in the pursuit of survival, happiness, and individual and civilization enhancing prosperity…or it can be used to destroy all of those.
7. Since non-human animals can’t be dishonest, and only act on their limited knowledge, dishonesty is a human-animal condition or ability — an adverse effect of “free will” or merely the product of super intelligence that’s owing to our ability to fake, simulate or “create” reality. Dishonesty is the failure to integrate sensory data into a logical framework or hierarchy of values worth pursuing and celebrating.
8. Unnatural human-animal disease, unhappiness, obesity, failed relationships, initiatory predation, and other adverse human conditions are fundamentally a consequence of dishonesty. For, non-human animals operating automatically have only the metaphysically given, and they always act accordingly and without culpability. Such failures and consequences in non-human animals are not moral failings but natural and environmental. By contrast, Human animals crate man-made problems where no insurmountable natural problems otherwise exist, either by design or default. By design constitutes initiatory predation via fraud, deception, or outright violence. By default is the failure to exploit obtainable values necessary for survival, which can leave one open to injury, death, exploitation by predators, or any and all.
9. Since human animals are the only animals with the ability to be consciously and purposefully dishonest, i.e., the failure to perceive sensory data data and further, integrate it, and even further, act upon it rationally — by self, with others, and collectively — in society is the fundamental root cause of all disease, inability to flourish and early, unnatural death. In time, this thesis could extend to recognizing, acquiring and implementing life extending technologies.
10. As with male and female non-human animals, human males and females are different physiologically. The nature that requires that we identify, choose and pursue values for our survival and happiness opens also the door to sexual values not driven by nature, and even explicitly counter reproductive ends. Human animals have the capacity to pursue and enjoy multiple sexual encounters daily, even with multiple partners, even mechanically or chemically thwarting reproduction. Such capacity evolved human values and behaviors that serve as a natural control: jealousy, social acceptance, the exclusivity, scorn for infidelity, empathy, the family unit, etc.
11. Non-human animals exist in various environmental niches they have evolved within to exploit, with no external purpose and yet, within a balance. Human animals purposely migrated out of Africa to populate the Earth from equator to arctic — and antarctic — and sea level to 16,000 feet, and everything in-between. Human animals evolved to migrate over eons of time by evolving hand-in-hand to exploit the environmentally given available along the way.
12. Each human individual has encoded within his genes the ability to survive and thrive on a wide range of food sources from terrestrial, to sea, to tree, to subterranean. And yet this was only to survive, reproduce, and carry our genes forward to future generations in a repetitive cycle. The human animal is perfectly capable of living a long and productive life without the decline typically associated with age in modern society. It is possible to experience health, vitality, and happiness right up until the last few days, hours, and even minutes of life.
13. Our large brains desire more, far more that pure survival. And so the human animal, by means of super intellectual capacity, trade, and division of labor, evolved the capacity to exploit and control nature to its own ends in terms of prosperity, happiness, and non-reproductive sexual pleasures.
14. Non-human animals don’t become unnaturally obese or die unnaturally. Humans become obese, as do pets and zoo animals under the stewardship of human animals. This is a debilitating condition rooted in dishonesty; that is, the failure to identify and implement a humanely appropriate diet. Likewise, humans become depressed, unfulfilled, unproductive, dependent, sexually starved, uncompetitive, and at large, unhappy for the same fundamental reasons.
15. Human animals should not have any difficulty eating a mix of the right natural foods suitable to them, when available, maintaining and enjoying natural health and longevity as a result. Good health is natural, by definition. It’s not something that needs to be man made, industrialized, or drugged beyond our ability to evolve. Industrialization comes with powerful advantages, and equally powerful disadvantages. Human advancement in knowledge, technology and profitable implementation comes with as much individual responsibility as does the technology to split atoms and light cities. That same technology can annihilate hundreds of thousands of human and non-human animals, destroy human and non-human habitat, and destroy the productive capacity to sustain more human animals than nature in the same environment.
16. Human animals, like all primates, are social animals that by nature, exchange values with others to mutual benefit, in small circles, where each individual can account for each other individual and take action when deemed necessary or appropriate. Human animals have gone on to develop complex collectivist, centralized, hierarchical and oftentimes authoritarian and dictatorial social structures to the extent that a few dominate all the rest. When the domination isn’t totalitarian and brutal, it’s nonetheless clever, dishonest and fraudulent enough to engender welcome cheerleading and hand-clapping from its subjects. It is such, that the few can cleverly and parasitically sustain an unearned livelihood through implicit or explicit threat of force, or more elegantly: promise of reward; or the most elegantly of all: promise of status, a “place at the table.”
17. Modern human animals, with a history of being subject to despotic domination, developed the political “technology” and consequent wishful propensity to believe they have Great Power through a Neolithic device known as a “democratic vote.” Where in reality, such trinket actually gives them about equal odds in terms of effective power as does buying a lottery ticket. Conversely, we know ancient humans were individually and socially powerful, because they survived on their own, without modern technology, as social beings. Nobody voted on it.
18. A domesticated animal can exhibit guilt and shame, but not to the extent that they can possibly sacrifice their well being over it. Human animals invented guilt and shame, and they went on to make a place for it being unbridled, and unearned. They invented religion: they conjured “reality,” got everyone to buy onto it, teach it to their offspring, and then taught them to replicate it, i.e., to reproduce and teach…to reproduce and teach. So whether it was oppressive primitive religion burning heretics, or oppressive political systems — that became religion’s perfect bedfellow — imprisoning, enslaving or kangaroo trailing the state’s enemies, the core mechanism had been established: tameness. And even that wasn’t enough. In today’s zoo human tameness isn’t an issue. The only concern is in keeping order between the two halves of the zoo that put on a fight between each other for the benefit of what spectators remain unknown.
19. Guilt and shame work hand in hand with religious tenet, dogma, catechism…that most notably involves: fear. In a primal and primitive world, there is plenty to fear, and quickly recognizing and integrating such fear was absolute key, part, and parcel to human survival success. But most never went on to realize that fear is so easy to manipulate. Others went on to realize that there is much power, profit, status and generations of unearned livelihood in manipulating fear. Guilt and shame, combined with irrational fear…all to to make a malleable, submissive, slavish, hand kissing “human animal,” who will then do his part to see to the livelihood of those same humanoid parasites. Anciently, it was the parasites of church and now, the parasites of State. The former is finally voluntary, but only because its chief bedfellow is compulsory, under threat of prosecution.
20. All humans have within themselves the ability to change everything on a dime. This is the most important realization of all of these theses.
21. Of self-destruction, of guilt, of shame, of fear: the worst of these is fear. While fear is natural, that’s the rub. The Neolithic, above all else, has been a story — fundamentally — about how to use it to advantage. The Neolithic is above all, a story about how our natural tendencies have been used against us in just about every conceivable way.
Alright, so can we have another critical go at it? Thanks very much. I hope you see how the first set of comments really helped.