Ruminations on Humans

Chester - Ruminations on Humans

I do not understand humans. I have been living with humans for well over 200 years now and I still do not understand humans.

It’s not a Republican or a Democrat thing, or a conservative or a liberal thing. It is a survival thing.

All actions derive, ultimately, from the survival instinct.

First there was pack alphas, then tribal chiefs, then clans, villages, families, houses, bands, kingdoms, kings, nations, generals, dynasties, republics, presidents, companies, corporations, CEOs, consortiums, to the point we are at now where humans are barely and possibly not at all even in control of the impetus generated by the corrupted greed that is driving .....

Republics and democracy was a real game changer, there is no denying that. Some weres feared, still fear, that humans are not ready for such sharing of power. Representation is not natural, say a lot of weres, dogs and wolves. For primates and canines, for millions of years, survival was about strong leadership, stability and loyalty to the pack.

But things have changed. Nations are not packs.

One of the key changes is inequality of resources. The pooling of wealth by small groups and the scarcity of resources for large groups is a recently phenomenon, starting back only about 10,000 years ago, when mankind began farming.

Before agriculture it was impossible for large groups of any species to form. Large groups were too hard to feed, required large amounts of food.

The only exception to this was when large groups of weredogs and werewolves came together for large battles. This was fairly common, according to werelore, for several millennia.

With agriculture came cities, then kingdoms, the ability to feed large numbers of people. City dwellers no longer needed to hunt or gather. They only needed to go to the dining hall or market.

Larger farms meant larger cities, and larger armies, and then kingdoms, and monarchs. And kings used the same logic that pack alphas used to justify their leadership - divine selection, that they were chosen by the gods.

All leaders are tempted to abuse their power, for themselves and their families and friends, their tribe, their pack. Few can withstand that temptation, often to the detriment of their own pack, tribe, or nation.

This is what mystifies all us weres. All weres know that there is nothing above the good of the pack, the many, the collective. Greed, corruption and dishonor hurts the pack and ruins the legacy of the transgressor. But somehow you humans have turned greed into a virtue. How did you do that? We were watching you, living with you, fighting and loving with you, and we still don’t know how you did it.

Politics does not interest us . . . most of us. All the talk of conservatism and liberalism, capitalists and communists, labor and management, debt and taxes, states and federals, I have tried to follow it, to understand it. But I can’t. And I have come to a deeper understanding of it, one that every weredog and werewolf who I have ever told this to agrees. Politics is not about governing. It might have been in the beginning. But not now. Now it is about the human love of conflict. And conflict has been the key to human evolution ad survival.

But that is for another post and night. And besides, what could a simple weredog possibly know?