What you can learn from kooks
Reengineering your existence.
One of my favorite kooks is Rupert Sheldrake.
Sheldrake’s most appealing kook book is Science and Spiritual Practices, a book he completed in 2017. The thing that makes his kookiness so compelling is that he has a PHD in biochemistry from Cambridge and is a foremost authority on plant hormones, a subject he has spent most of his 81 years studying.
Sheldrake’s passion though is reengineering our existence.
Though he never says this specifically, it’s implied throughout his books and from a system engineering standpoint, his books are pure brain candy.
If you’ve ever read The Descent of Man, by Darwin, you know that humans have stopped evolving. More importantly though, this devolution is also apparent in the sciences. Darwin was the ultimate systems thinker. We are related to not only animals, but we are also related to everything from slugs to gravity.
Darwin recognized 150 years ago that domesticated animals do not act like animals in nature. We have been domesticated. And because we also create our own environment, our environment is fake. Therefore, we are (biologically) fake. (1)
Sheldrake’s kookiness is not in him being wrong.
It’s in his belief that we can go back to recreate what we “lost.” To a systems engineer this is like forward reverse engineering. We cannot recreate the past, only what we think the past was.
But what any evolutionary biologist will tell you, we are not designed to look back, we are designed to adapt to future environments. (It’s why your kids won’t listen to you but hang onto every word Taylor Swift says.)
There is a structured normal that eludes us because of our need to belong.
Belong to what?
I read an article where a woman was giving the plusses ad minuses of Gig work. Plus… freedom. Minuses… no health insurance, family structure, security, etc.
Imagine you choose the office job. You have…
A home near the office which gives you…
The same house payment as your neighbors, the same property tax bill, the same utility bills, the same snow days…
Your office job gives you…
The same salary as your peers, the same 401k, the same 401k investments, the same number of days off and the same chance of getting fired.
You can distinguish yourself from your neighbors by…
Putting pink flamingos in your lawn, becoming the neighborhood Karen, coaching T-ball, becoming a Jehovah’s witness or perhaps having an affair with your sons T-ball coach.
Your options are somewhat limited.
Freedom is a real motherfucker.
People in this trap, often called the Judas trap, change the definition of freedom.
The Judas trap was an idea conceived by the ad executive John Wareham in his book “Escaping the Judas Trap.” Written 1n 1983, it was 40 years ahead of its time.
Wareham’s thesis is that Judas was suckered. If Jesus knew he was going to be betrayed he could have pulled Judas aside and said, “Hey Jude, don’t let me down,” like the Beatles did. Instead, he let Judas fry in hell. In other words, Judas’ future was literally preordained.
Americans think bitching to no one that is listening is a freedom.
Having dangerous perverted sex and not suffering the consequences is freedom. Pumping out children you have no intention of raising is a freedom.
China’s president Xi once commented that having a roof over your head and 2 meals a day is a freedom Chinese people yearn for. Who could argue.
Let me introduce 2 more kooks.
The first is Edward Dutton, author of “Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species.”
“… we are witnessing the decline of intelligence, of what used to be called ‘moral character,’ (a pro social personality) of religiousness, of mental health, of physical health.” (2)
No rational scientist could argue against this point. Human evolution is so 1800’s. Irrational, illogical, narcissistic people who have no control over their biological function are reproducing 5-6X faster than rational, moral people. (3)
The next kook is everybody’s favorite enemy, Charles Murray.
The author of “Human Diversity, The Biology or Gender, Race and Class,” Murray is high on the hate list of most American universities.
The irony of hating on Murray is that his hate mail only strengthens his point. As any university professor will tell you, there is great danger in publishing results. Why?
The biggest reason is the people most likely to attack you are not smart enough to understand the concepts you are presenting. From the standpoint of systems thinking, there are few subjects (If there are any) more complex than the relationship between genetics, environment, culture and behavior.
Dumping these topics on the typical community college PHD (An LFS phrase) is just adding gas to a fire. Whacked out, nonsensical, narcissistic, bloviations explode out literally at the speed of sound.
What do Darwin, Sheldrake, Wareham, Dutton and Murray teach us?
Simply, we are trapped in a non-natural system that is a future biological disaster. It did not evolve naturally; it was created out of thin air. (Not to mention thin skin) Knowledge is growing exponentially faster than intelligence and its endgame, wisdom.
How can we create a new future system that conforms to what we know about nature, with people that, as Dutton would say, “have high mutational loads.” That is, people in a real Darwinian world would not be passing on genes.
From a global macro standpoint, trying would be self-defeating.
Evolution doesn’t work that way. New systems emerge from system failures as small systems with specific qualities that large systems who went extinct didn’t have.
The best example would be what worked before, the monastic system of the Middle Ages.
The system that collapsed was the Roman Empire and what emerged was the dark ages. This left central Europe empty and lawless for generations as well as subject to repeated incursions of nomadic armies.
Few people understand the monastic system. It is widely thought of as the spreading of churches through dogma. It was the opposite. Monasteries were enclosed economic systems. Monks were not typically theologians.
Many, if not most were sponsored, usually by kings, but they went into areas that were unpopulated, cleared land that was considered worthless, grew crops, nuts and fruit, brewed beer, milled and stored grain, manufactured tools and housed travelers. In fact, many monasteries, mainly in France were the birthplace of modern markets called trade fairs.
To be sure, the monks were deeply religious, maniacally so, but in the end, they were successful. But as nature would have it, some like Monte Cassino lasted for centuries, while others like Glastonbury were ransacked by greedy royals.
But even as they failed, new monasteries replaced hem and repopulated a barren lawless land.
The point though is not to build monasteries, as such.
It’s that monasteries were closed systems that could be controlled and in effect, walled in. The monk’s main requirement was that you shut the fuck up and work. You could talk about God all day, but it damn well better be holding a hoe and weeding the garden or your ass was out the door. In one example, a traveler going through Avignon asked to see the pope. The monk told him, “He’s in the field cutting hay.”
One very successful monastery was the all-female system built by Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Although Hildegard is known for her faith, music and miracles, she was a very practical woman.
Her monastery was a hospital, but her methods were considered advanced for her time. She had one of the most intricate herb gardens in Europe, which she developed for healing. Her constant and incessant testing and cross breeding of plants is legendary. She brewed a specific type of high calorie beer targeted at exhausted, hungry farm workers.
Her journals were thousands of pages long and many still exist and are used. And ironically, Saint Hildegard has a bit of a cult following today, mainly from vegans and naturalists.
Glastonbury, the final resting place of King Arthur…
…was perhaps the most advanced monastery in the world. It’s been said that the destruction of this one city set England back 200 years. It was the only place in Europe that manufactured tempered steel. Its farms were huge.
Essentially English, with only the loosest ties to Rome, it represented the largest social welfare program in Europe at that time. The 300-pound King Henry the 8th ransacked it because he ran out of money.
What makes monasteries so compelling?
They were unlike anything that either existed or were likely to exist.
Most monasteries were so geographically isolated they were hard to find, much less travel to.
Most (Certainly not all) monks took oaths of chastity and poverty. In fact, many of the most committed took oaths of poverty so severe they didn’t eat much of the food they grew or used the money they spent on their own existence.
Hollywood’s portrayal of them as gold challis filled banks is nowhere near accurate. In the later years some may have become rich, but they didn’t start out that way. The Knights Templar, for all their wealth, wore simple sack cloth robes and gave their lives by the thousands protecting immigrants to Jerusalem.
In short, the creation of these new environments was not for personal gain.
In other words.
Reengineering your existence will be possible only for a very small minority that has the ability, foresight, balls, and opportunity. In a way, one has to become a kook. To do things no one else would do and thinking things few others will think.
Don’t expect it to be easy. And more to the point, you can’t do this alone. To reengineer your existence is to understand that we are not designed to BE alone. We are pack rats.
At Landon Fillmore we do not espouse creating systems but making small incremental systems that have already gone through the painful process of evolution. As the Bible says, there was no beginning and there shall be no end.
Regardless of what we plan, systems emerge. We are better to go with the flow.
- Some species of mammals are monogamous in the wild and polygamous when domesticated.
- Dutton, Edward. Breeding the Human Herd, page 24
- The average highly educated woman is giving birth to an average of one child at age 34. The average low IQ woman is having 3 and starting at age 16.
