Numbed Down, Dumbed Down

Life is cheap here. People accept it or leave it with very little fanfare.
~ Ernesto Guevara commenting on the Bolivian peasantry, 1953

We have already looked at the plantation system and the way our current economic structure approximates it. Now I'd like to look at the natural world and the predator/prey relationship as a way of illustrating how things work in our society. So let's talk about herbivores and carnivores.

The herbivores are composed of the workers/consumers and the predators are the ruling class that prey off of them. Great big herds of herbivores roam the plains and forests, grazing on the fields of grass and browsing the branches of trees and shrubs. Their two primary means of defense against predators are either size or speed. The predators feast off the weakest and slowest, continuosly culling the herd. The predator prey ratio is held rather constant despite changes in population. The increase in the predator population is dependent on an increase in prey. The sytem depends on two main things: there is always a steady prey base for the predators and the prey base does not evolve new defenses that thwarts the predators. Although this is the natural order of an ecosystem in the natural world, it is not to be confused with being a natural order of human society. We have evolved past that!

In our society there will always be a prey base, those that can be sold things or made to work with the surplus value of their labor supplying the predators. So the system will not be evolved out of until the prey is able to develop new defenses. The development will include an increase in intelligence, in the same way that a certain species of omnivorous primate was able to climb to the top of the food chain. In order to develop that intelligence, we must apply ourselves and reject the torrent of cultural propaganda meant to reinforce and perpetuate the stats quo. If you have read this far, you are a suitable herbivore to begin evolving away from the predators. Kill your TV, develop your ability to question societal norms and economic realities versus the possibilities of a world with no one being preyed upon. Then you will have the predators on the run., screeching like jackals. Like they are in Bolivia these days. If it can happen there, we can do it here.