When nothing is enough, nothing is safe

Throughout our history we have seldom been able to face reality and gratefully accept the priceless gift of life, as given, with its ups and downs. We always wanted something else, something more, resorting to wild, impossible fantasies to model our lives upon. One of the first major literary works ever written, more than 4,000 years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was already filled with all kinds of supernatural nonsense, gods and goddesses, quests for eternal life, eternal youth.

A good example of our flight from reality is our general reaction to evolution, one of humanity's most important discoveries. In one fell swoop it ripped away the thick webs of deceit woven by religions throughout the centuries. Finally we knew our true creator - nature - and our place in the world, as an animal among the animals. It should have been a moment of enlightenment, the end of all our false gods, a new beginning. We finally knew how life worked and could have turned it to our advantage by using it as our role model, to copy its awesome and enduring success. But … it would also have meant that we had to abandon all our convenient fantasies, our divine origin, our supernatural status and, our fondest and stupidest dream, the chance of immortality.

We could not do it. Even nowadays at this late stage, when Darwin's theory has been proven conclusively over and over again, almost half the people on earth still refuse to believe it, preferring to put their faith in fantasies.

In many other ways our delusions have worsened since the 1960s. Political correctness and its offshoots have created powerful new myths and taboos. Most harmful of all: the delusion of equality, something that does not exist and cannot exist, because it is biologically impossible. Every individual creature on the planet is unique, created different, hence unequal. It is called variability and it is an essential element of evolution. Simply put, if we were indeed equal, we would never have evolved into the advanced species that we are. We would not exist. It is therefore utter nonsense to call people equal, like calling them invisible or immortal. It just isn’t true.

Still, equality is embraced like a new religion, preaching the opposite of natural selection, survival of the un-fittest. According to its worshippers there are no unfit individuals, all humans are equal, must be cherished, kept alive by all means, even at the expense of all other life on the planet. This has made us unnatural parasites, insatiable, rabidly consuming our host, although we know that its death will kill us too.

A good example of the harm caused by this delusion of equality is the explosive increase of obesity the USA in recent decades.

It is a simple fact that obesity is a serious disorder for several reasons. Most important of all: physical unfitness. There are many things that overweight people cannot do well, which reduces their usefulness to society. So it is not strange that society has always frowned upon fat people. Until quite recently they were treated with varying degrees of disdain, mostly in the form of good-natured mockery, which was still very unpleasant for the victims and made it a powerful deterrent against becoming obese.

This changed in the late 1960s, when activists in the USA took up the cause of fat people. Although it is hard to see any merit in being overweight, the fat acceptance movement demanded that fat people should be respected and accepted as equals. It became quite successful.

Not surprisingly, this growing demand to accept fatness translated into an explosive increase of obesity in the USA. Without social control people felt free to indulge in gluttony and sloth. They ballooned, harming not only themselves but also society at large.

This is just one example. There are many more, all harmful, because they elevate the unfit to positions where they don't belong.

What we desperately need now are good, strong, clear-thinking and incorruptible individuals who can guide us out of the mess we are in. We should be actively seeking them: the best and the brightest, irrespective of race or color or gender or whatever else divides us, based purely on merit. But that is impossible if we allow ourselves to be blinded by the politically-correct delusion that we are all equal and that we must devote huge chunks of our dwindling resources to the impossible task of bringing the unfit to the same level as the fit.

Obviously this truth does not sit well with the unfit themselves, which many of us are, alas, but that does not give us the right to endanger the future of our whole species. That is an act of deplorable selfishness.

In our present state of delusion there is nothing ahead but ruin and desolation, steady decline, conflicts more brutal than ever, starvation wars, fought not to vanquish but to exterminate, in order to preserve the dwindling resources.

Ironically, our pleasure-seeking, reality-evading lifestyle has made us extremely unfit to face the fearsome challenges facing us. In need of courage and fortitude, we have been weakened and softened by our luxuries, fat and feeble, decadent, degenerate even, cultivating vices such as pride, greed, gluttony, sloth and lust, allowing ourselves to be led into the abyss by fools and villains because they promise us more and bigger stuff, still unable to face reality, stumbling ahead in a dense fog of ignorance.