Saint John and The Beautiful Ones

Wildcard Factors, Part 1

All of the scenarios I’ve explored in the foregoing installments indulge in the “If this goes on...” style of extrapolation that has been common to science fiction authors like myself for the last century. Usually in science fiction one factor is extrapolated while others are held constant, and feedback loops are minimized or ignored for the purposes of the thought experiment.

But since what I’m attempting to do here is not a thought experiment, I have been trying (with, I’m sure, varying degrees of success) to take account of the different feedback loops in our survey of the ground in which our civilization has grown.

However, in that attempt, I have committed the Science Fiction author’s pet sin; I have withheld some wildcards, any of which could, on their own, change everything. I’ve done this for two reasons:

First, since they could change everything in drastic ways, they’d ruin the fun. More to the point, the degree to which they could change things, and the unpredictability that potential introduces, means that, if conditions are correct, they could sweep everything to the side in a way that would turn the analysis monocausal—which isn’t quite fair, since both of the wildcards in this installment are actually the results of all the factors we’ve been hereto discussing. The question in my mind isn’t whether they are in play, the question is how strongly they will feed back into the system.

The second reason is that this analysis, thus far, has been a materialist analysis in the formal sense: I have been considering the material conditions in which less quantifiable phenomena (such as cultural movements, religions, etc.) grow, and so have only taken account of those immaterial phenomena (such as, for example, the Enlightenment) when their feedback loop has already been completed and its effects understood.

These wildcard factors are immaterial factors, and they are potentially momentous agents of chaos, and they have been in the back of my mind with every word I’ve written in this series, so it’s time to drag them into the light and get a good solid look at them. I deal with two in this installment, and a third in the next one.

This essay’s two factors are oddballs as well as wildcards—one of them because it is not obviously a driving force in world affairs anymore, and another because it has never been a detectable force in world affairs until recently.

And yet both of these are unarguably jostling for primacy on history’s stage as we speak.

The first of these is religion. Not “religion as a tool of the powerful,” or “religion as a vector for repression,” or “religion as a nostalgic shibboleth,” but genuine, heart-felt, worldview-substrate religion that absorbs the bulk of a civilization and provides the basis of identity, solidarity, and cultural direction. For those of you who are inclined to find the dispassionate analysis of sacred things offensive, I beg you to put aside your scruples and consider with me what your particular sacred totem might mean for the future of humanity.

The second of these is something much more obscure: the wholesale takeover of humanity by a shadowy, captivating, and growing population that we shall call The Beautiful Ones.

The Lifting of the Veil

The Greeks had a word for that moment in the theater when the curtain parts and you can see through to what is on stage. Ironic, as (so far as I know) the Greek Theaters did not use curtains in the same manner as does modern proscenium staging, but there we go.

The word is Apokalyptos, from which we get our word “Apocalypse.” Though we now take it to mean “the end of the world,” the true meaning of the world is much more akin to “vision” or “revelation,” hence why the final book in the Bible is entitled, in Greek, “The Apocalypse of John” (literal translation), and why we now call it “Revelation.”

Revelation. A lifting of the veil between what is, and what will be.

Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of religion that have risen and fallen through history.

There are the Pagan—the old Latin word for “rustic”—religions which, underneath their spiritual and magical practice, are chiefly concerned with social cohesion and passing on the best tricks for living a life worth living (i.e. “wisdom”).

There are the Gnostic religions, which separate the world firmly and categorically into good and evil, and see their spiritual practice as the way to reach correct knowledge about the true state of the world (i.e. that it is hopelessly fallen, corrupt, or evil), and hold that such knowledge is the key to salvation. Such religions are strongly dualistic (viewing the world as a struggle between good and evil), and feature hard categorical thinking in all respects. They tend to produce a lot of philosophers and intellectuals whose writings are geared not towards wisdom, but towards theology, politics, and other such things that rarely concern the hoi polloi.

Finally, there are the Apocalyptic and Hermetic religions (Hermetic religions are a sub-type of apocalyptic that has a particular kind of cosmogeny and magical practice), which view the world as both an interface point between different spiritual dimensions, and as a sort of holding-tank for the afterlife. The here-and-now, in these religions, is not to be valued because it is transitory. Instead, adherents look forward to a future heavenly dimension or time period. These religions often feature a path to transcendence that allows a believer the hope of transforming themselves into something higher, better, and/or free of the constraints of the tragedy of life. One way or another, the believer will eventually become a new creature, one whose being conforms to the demands of the spiritual/transcendent reality, leaving the limitations of the flesh behind.

With that in mind, look at the big three monotheisms:

Christianity, as you might have guessed, blends all three.

Islam (excluding Sufism) largely lacks the gnostic component.

Judaism—especially ancient Judaism—is almost entirely pagan.

The last hundred years have seen the worldwide death of religion—sure, there have been periodic revivals, and late-Enlightenment upstarts gaining broad influence (like, for example, Theosophy), but the shape of modernity (in fact and in mental frame) leaves little room for the gods, little need for salvation, and littler still felt need for the thing which, traditionally, religion serves as the repository: wisdom.

Sitting, as we are, at the nadir of religiosity worldwide, in the failing light of a Christian civilization whose true religion has long been Progressivism (itself a mutant form of Christianity), it may seem odd to talk about religion as if it has a shred of relevance. Yet, historically speaking, it is shared religious identity and the norms and expectations that arise therefrom that hold civilizations together.

Religions rise during the seed-times of a civilization, and they are adapted very particularly to the needs and concerns and survival interests of the people in that time and place. A religion that lasts does so either because it was founded upon an accurate enough picture of universal human concerns that it can be continually re-invented in the ages that follow, or because it has a feature that allows a certain open-ended and syncretic evolution. For example, the three Monotheisms, by positing a supreme god of the universe are—despite having their holy sites—not tied to a specific place or temple, unlike their predecessors who tended to disappear when one civilization was conquered by another. They have thus lasted longer than other middle-eastern temple cults.

But longer does not mean forever.

Some forms of Judaism excepted, the great monotheisms do not stand up in the modern world. This is not a value judgment, but a statistical argument. Doctrinal coherence is difficult to maintain when the basic worldviews of those who formulated those doctrines are separated from the worldviews of those who currently adhere not just by centuries, but by several fundamental shifts in the nature of the world and of the way life works.

Moderns simply don’t have anything but academic access to the world of Muhammad, Moses, or Jesus. Jews have dodged this bullet by transforming Judaism from a religion per se into a dialectical conversation tied to an ethnic identity. Muslims and Christians are less lucky in this respect—their attempts to pull this same trick have led to the sects in question being quickly subsumed by the late-modern Christian child-religion of Progressivism.

We are now once again at a change in ages, and it is likely that, as with other historical age-changes, we will see the rise of a new religion (or a new version of an old religion) that allows people to cope with, make sense of, and live a good life in a world of high technology and largely bereft of children and families. Would it be a new version of Christianity or Islam? A fertility cult? A new deistic Americanism? A return to some form of nature-worship? Whatever it is, in order to last it would need to be able to do all the jobs that religion used to do, and without falling afoul of incredulity caused by familiarity with modern science and technology.

And its prophet would have to attract enough attention that people would rather listen to him than hang out on Tik-Tok.

The world is ripe for new religions. Europe, the Orthodox world, and China are all physically dying and spiritually desperate. America is slouching toward long-term demographic decline, though long-term economic decline on a per-capita basis might be staved off a while longer. Even the Islamic world is flirting with a broad-scale crisis of faith (hence the rise of apocalyptic Wahabbism and the hopes of a New Caliphate, and the renewed interest in the coming of the Twelfth Imam). A fire of religious innovation could have far-reaching effects that change the map on everything as surely as would a new technology that allowed fuel-free, instantaneous intercontinental shipping. In such a case, all prognosticatory bets are off. Things could get wild in a way I dare not even try to anticipate.

And, much as it grieves me to say it, this kind of worldwide religious sea change may be the only thing that can abbreviate the reign of The Beautiful Ones.

The Time of The Beautiful Ones

Advanced industrial civilization, with its focus on the market and on material development, selects for one thing. If you ask the average kid in an Econ 101 class, he’d tell you that thing is “efficiency.” In business, as the adage goes, the big don’t eat the small; instead, the fast eat the slow.

The first steam engines were deployed to pump water out of deep mine shafts, saving thousands of man-hours of labor per year and allowing the miners to dig deeper, farther, and faster for the same price as before—which meant a profit bonanza for the mine owners. The first tractors allowed farmers to till and tend and harvest whole fields with a handful of workers instead of the dozens that it had taken before. And this ability empowered the individual in ways that invigorated us all, and—most importantly—freed people up to seek their own interests. Everyone wants that freedom, and a good way to get it is by working for a successful entrepreneur (or becoming one).

The entrepreneur that can do things better, faster, cheaper, and in a way that’s more appealing to consumers will go home with all the marbles. For maximum profit, you want to be in a market where network effects are a hefty part of the picture, because that means that the market will seek a natural monopoly—and a monopoly position means that you can actually make money (over the long term, non-monopolistic businesses almost always break even at zero).

Obviously, profit maximization being the goal of any business, the selective pressure that defines the market is efficiency.

Except that it isn’t.

Efficiency defines commodity markets. Markets for no-commodity goods are governed by taste (also known as fashion, convention, popularity, etc.). But neither of these actually describe what the entire apparatus selects for. After all, the ultimate source of selection pressure is the market, and the market is made up of people, and people buy everything they buy for one reason, and one reason only:

Comfort.

Labor-saving devices. Entertainment. Nice furniture. Hot cars. Great food from exotic locations. Even status symbols. All of them are either largely or entirely designed to increase personal comfort, either in a material or a social sense (or both).

And what is comfort?

Comfort is anything that reduces hard contact with one’s animal nature.

Indoor plumbing—and the height of it, the bidet—is about separating us from our shit (literally). Daily bathing separates us from our odors. Perfumes insulate us from having to smell the world the way it really is. Cars protect us from the arduous labor of walking or keeping draft animals. Dishwashers and refrigerators keep us from having to deal with the decay of our food. Industrialized agriculture protects us from killing our own food animals (or even being aware that our food comes from the flesh of other creatures). Video games allow us to be violent without having to experience the mess and trauma of blood and guts and explosions and the scent of the rotting battlefield. Pornography allows us to get off without having to risk disease, emotional vulnerability, or the trouble of visiting a prostitute—and it further insulates us from knowledge of our own desires (which might be quite dark and primal and wild) by outsourcing our erotic fantasies. Zoom and Discord and email and Twitter allow us to have controlled relationships with people a long way away, so we need never risk being hurt too deeply when we give offense and someone responds in kind.

Even what we consider basic privacy (bathrooms and bedrooms) are a mechanism for concealing our animal nature. When other humans can’t see us when we snore, masturbate, copulate, fart, ruminate on dark desires, urinate, defecate, vomit, etc. we feel “more human”—or, more accurately, “less animal.” Because we are a social species, there is a palpable sense in which humans don’t believe something is real until another human also believes it is real, even if its personal reality is undeniable (this is why humiliation through the exposure of even open secrets is such an effective mechanism of social power). Thus, we put great store by this concealment; the plausible ignorance of others protects us from facing the sense of reality created by shared knowledge.

So, since “the market” is simply the collective spending decisions of individual members of a species who will go to great lengths to pretend they aren’t animals, the market selects for that which is pleasant. Even where it selects for the ugly, it selects for the pleasantly ugly.

And why not? Why, oh why, would anyone but a weird retro-pagan cultist wish to live in a world where every human is born in a storm of blood and suffering and shit (we have body horror movies to help slake our curiosity about that), where people kill each other over status competition (ultimately for access to mates), where every single thing ever born subsists on the death of the creatures around it, and where all of us, eventually, will die?

If only we could produce a world of hyper-abundance—not just of food, but of sense experiences that are even better than the real thing—we might be able to go an entire lifetime from one pleasant experience to another, never having to get into fights, fall off buildings, get scarred up and grizzled, have our skin damaged by the sun, have our tissues damaged by exposure to toxic chemicals at work, have our soul bent into submission to the demands of holding a job that also warps our backs and wears out our knees. We could live to old age retaining more youth and beauty than did anyone before us—hell, with the right medical innovations and a little bit of luck, we might never have to die. But even if we do, there’s no reason not to have as comfortable a ride as possible. The world, after all, is a dangerous place, and worth escaping from.

Such has been the end-goal of Utopians since the ancient world. The visions of Heaven, or of Heaven-on-Earth, the Marxist End of History, Peter Diamandis’s Age of Possibility, Cory Doctorow’s scarcity-free economics, the fever dreams of the Fabians, and visions of the Perfect Ethnostate enchant us time and again—not because we invented this desire, but because it is born within us.

It is not socially constructed.

Instead, it’s the by-product of the evolved survival instinct to avoid unnecessary effort. In an ancestral environment of constrained resources, constructive laziness is an essential ability, and evolution selected for the instinct of following the path of least resistance wherever possible. It’s easier to buy your horse shoes from a farrier than to set up a forge yourself, just as it’s easier for the farrier to buy his horses from your horse ranch than it is to run his own herd and breeding program. This instinct is the foundation of all trade, which is itself the foundation of all wealth, and it has made us very, very wealthy indeed.

But what happens when you take a species that is supremely adapted to conquer scarcity and make the best of it, and you drop them into an environment where everything is super-abundant?

Ethologist John B. Calhoun studied this question directly in his “rat utopia” experiments in the late 1950s. He discovered that, when given unlimited food, water, and adequate private space, rodents spent all their time grooming themselves and engaging in trivial, solitary play. He called these rodents “The Beautiful Ones,” because they did not fight amongst themselves for status, and thus acquired no scars. And with this prodigious beauty, these little hedonistic critters proceeded to voraciously indulge their sexual desires with...no one.

Their sex drives completely evaporated.

They were no longer animals, they had become mere atavisms.

Within a generation or two from the appearance of these behaviors, the colonies were dead.

Calhoun characterized this end-state as a “behavioral sink,” because all behavioral instincts in these animals seemed to simply evaporate. He argued powerfully that this end state was the result of overpopulation and crowding, since these behaviors took a few generations to appear. This research has become foundational in studies of urbanism, and are the basis for the dogma in neo-Malthusian circles that overpopulation is the ultimate doom of humanity.

But Calhoun overlooked something crucial:

In his scenario, overpopulation did not lead to resource-depletion. These rats did not die of starvation. They simply stopped breeding. And, crucially, as space opened up through attrition, the younger rats did not resume breeding.

Calhoun’s basic mistake gives the lie to his conclusion. He was not just wrong, but obviously and catastrophically wrong. These rats did not stop breeding because of overcrowding.

Instead, consider that the lack of breeding makes much more sense when looked at through the lens of the universally selected-for, survival-based desire to avoid unnecessary conflict. Why bother to fight to accrue resources and secure access to mates when you have all the resources you could possibly desire? Why negotiate difficult social relationships—the entire evolved purpose of which is to aid survival—when you don’t need social relationships to continue breathing? Loneliness might be miserable, but it is not a very powerful motivator when loneliness doesn’t also mean hunger, cold, and death. There were no such spurs in these experimental biodomes. Calhoun’s rat utopias were well-provisioned, climate controlled, and supremely comfortable.

There are reasons from the human world, too, to believe that Calhoun’s conclusions were misguided. Humans have long lived, and bred prodigiously, in hyper-crowded conditions where there was virtually no privacy. The hellholes of Victorian London, the shanty-towns of 1980s Bangladesh, the inner cities of modern India, all these places had people stuck together cheek-by-jowl in conditions of horrendous, disease-ridden overcrowding where hunger was a perpetual threat, and yet none of them had anything less than a ruinously prodigious birth rate.

Instead, always and everywhere, it is only wealth which is universally causally associated with a sharp decline in birth rate.

Overpopulation is not the cause of the behavioral sink. Neither is urbanization.

Comfort is.

You can see evidence of this anywhere you care to look. Everywhere touched by globalization and material uplift shows rapidly falling birth rates (now far below replacement level virtually everywhere in the developed and rapidly-developing worlds).

The story unfolds thusly:

Initially—just as in the rat utopia experiments—this prosperity produced astonishing gains in population as sexual opportunities opened up as never before. In the case of humans, birth control curtailed the actual baby-making a decade or two earlier than one might expect, but regardless of whether or not babies follow this sexual bonanza, once the novelty of abundance wears off, something odd happens:

The generation so effected settles down to a comfortable life with a smaller number of children than their parents had. Then, within two generations following, wealth increases to such a point where the youngest generation, while lonely, depressed, and desperate for human connection, simply isn’t much interested in sex. Instead, the sex drive becomes subsumed in performative identity and social signaling aimed at nobody-in-particular, almost as if this is the human version of the rats’ pathological solitary grooming.

The social species becomes divorced from all material motivation to indulge the social drives, and this reduced socialization creates a loss of social skills, which renders social encounters more uncomfortable and anxiety-fraught than they would otherwise be, and people content themselves with pseudo-sociality.

And the next generation gets smaller.

And smaller.

And smaller.

Good and Bad Hedonism

Social conservatives have long decried “hedonism”—the pursuit of “immoral” pleasures—as the greatest threat to civilization. They are classically seen to fixate on sexual morality to the exclusion of all else. In an ancestral environment characterized by privation and struggle, this fixation actually makes good sense. The ungoverned sex drive can tear apart families (adultery, especially in the case of romantic affairs-of-the-heart), wound people (rape, molestation, self-inflicted trauma, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases), and reputedly even wreck entire civilizations (see Homer’s Illiad).

But if you look deep into the history of conservative moralism, you find that this strain of conservatism isn’t exactly suspicious of sex per se—instead, it is suspicious of transformative experience. Art of all sorts, drugs, alcohol, anything which might potentially fill the void generally properly serviced, in their view, by religious experience.

Transformative experience is, like sex, anarchic and potentially disruptive to social life. While I am not sympathetic to the moral systems that have been promulgated from on high by virginal ascetics, I nonetheless am forced to concede the point that a religion, commonly-adhered-to, is a useful stabilizing force in a civilization.

But, not to put too fine a point on it, I think conservatives are wrong on the subject of hedonism. In fact, I think they are almost exactly wrong.

Hedonism is not one thing. On the contrary, as the ancients spotted, it comes in two varieties. There is that which leads to decadence (literally, decay), and that which is vitalizing.

You can see the former sort all around us in how we have engineered our entire civilization around the goal of maximizing comfort and—more importantly—of minimizing discomfort.

The latter sort, on the other hand, is what you see among people who live by risk. Surfers, extreme sportsmen, entrepreneurs, tradesmen, rock’n’roll stars, artists, and soldiers are all renowned for their fecund and reckless appetites.

Every Olympic season, one of the biggest logistical issues for those who supply the Olympic Village (where the athletes stay during the games) is securing enough condoms to protect the village from outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases. Similar dynamics obtain among surfers and other extreme sports athletes, though rarely do they congregate at such a scale.

Factory and warehouse workers historically finished their work week with a good old-fashioned booze-up at the local bar.

Rock’n’roll stars often unwind between concerts with drugs, booze, and orgies with their groupies.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and high-ranking workers regularly blow off steam with parties that make Led Zepplin’s antics in the 1970s look positively tame (I know. I’ve been to a few of them).

Soldiers and sailors are infamous for their patronage of the world’s oldest profession.

These are all extreme (and in their extremity they are often destructive) examples of a healthy kind of hedonism: the pursuit of pleasure as a vector for connection, to solidify communities, and to re-balance a life that is out-of-balance in the direction of difficulty. Even when they are destructive in their extremity, these are life-affirming, life-embracing activities, and in this sense they have far more in common with a family dinner or a church picnic or an afternoon at the beach (and other such pleasures that many of us live for) than they do with the other sort of hedonism.

On the other hand, the comforting pleasures—the iPhone, the lack of hunger, the anti-depressant pills, the ubiquitous unthinking cigarette dangling from the lips, the plush seat that one forgets within a few minutes of sitting on it—are another species entirely. By satisfying desires continually, without rhythm, without occasion, and by insulating us from discomfort, these sorts of pleasures protect us not just from pain, but from distress—especially and including the distress caused by the great, wild pleasures that can move us to fight, to cry, to laugh out loud, and to reach out and hold dear those to whom we are most connected.

The ultimate bankruptcy of the social conservative view comes from this root error: we do not live in an ancestral environment characterized by privation, therefore ethics appropriate to such an environment are not appropriate to ours.

But it is not an accident that the social conservatives’ view is so mismatched with reality. That which we call “conservative” is the final step in a process that equates morality with middle-class propriety, a social signaling regime that takes hold in all cultures that develop a middle class. The distinction between healthy and unhealthy hedonism—between that which invigorates and draws together, and that which comforts and separates us—is erased when middle class propriety is substituted for morality, because middle-class propriety is entirely concerned with comfort, while the healthy pleasures are those which are wild, dangerous, and animalistic.

We live in a world of unthinking abundance and, like everyone else, social conservatives are generally quite supportive of varieties of hedonism that are not disturbing. They like tasty food, material comfort, and the trappings of the good life. They’re just as always-online as everybody else. They offer no coherent moral vision for escaping the behavioral sink. And, so far, neither does anyone whose voice has penetrated the comfort-bubble that shields most people from such terrifying thoughts.

This is a problem.

For, while we are doubtless heading once again into a world of scarcity, that scarcity is caused by the attrition in population which is, in turn, caused by several consecutive generations of life in the behavioral sink.

And remember, the rats didn’t start breeding again even after their population declined. The transformative effect on their desires and aversions was persistent enough to cause extinction. Will it prove that way for us?

Maybe not.

The rat utopia was kept in a state of artificial material abundance even as the population collapsed. This will not be true for us. Privation, war, and threat will hit at least parts of the human race very hard, and very soon (it’s actually doing so in Ukraine and China now, but this will spread, and spread far). It is possible that these traumas will furnish the motivating force that fuels all evolution: threat.

It is the threat of hunger that pushes the forager and hunters out the door to face the weather and the wild. It is the threat of becoming a social pariah that pushes young men to fight to become the best they can be so they may attract the best possible mate(s). It is the threat of dying alone that pushes parents to negotiate difficult marital problems between themselves, and to work to maintain relationships with their children. I’m not saying that all moral acts are done out of fear—only that all acts which contribute to winning are only possible in an environment where losing is live prospect. Otherwise, why bother?

Certainly, there will be high-drive individuals (whether because of genetics or because they had to overcome a difficult upbringing) who will continue to shine in the behavioral sink. Perhaps the future belongs to them. And there will always be the underclass—the criminals and the poor—who will have less access to the deadening kinds of material comfort that form the walls of the behavioral sink.

But it is, in my view, an open question how well a country like the United States, which is poised to do relatively well in the new world, will pull itself out of the sink when its material comforts and behavioral insulation remain more-or-less intact.

One historical fact pulls me back from the brink of despair on this point:

We do know of one other era where decadence and material plenty led to the rise of a core group of disruptive people who, between their two factions (one of which was a loose confederation of apocalyptic sex cults, the other a loose collection of gnostic enclaves filled with contemplative and mad monks), provided the groundwork to pull another great civilization’s legacy out of the behavioral sink (though not before that civilization’s collapse).

The rise of Christianity in the early Roman imperial period saved the Roman world by preserving Roman Law and custom, by creating stability in the early medieval period, and by eventually recovering (from the Islamic world) the Greek Philosophy upon which Rome once depended. The medieval Christians steered their way between the two kinds of hedonism by relegating the elevated ascetic, intellectual, and spiritual pleasures to the church, and tolerating the bawdy, body-centric pleasures in the street (granted that they did not have to contend with temptations as powerful as social media). Because they believed God made everything and considered it “good” (or, at the very least, redeemable), these Christians survived the death of Rome and built a new and sparkling civilization upon her ruins.

It is possible that some new prophet will arise in the world of atomization and despair and proclaim a new religion (be it fully new, or be it dressed in the clothes of an older religion just as Protestantism was Enlightenment rationalism dressed up in Catholic garb) that will put the lead back in our civilizational pencil and make people excited, once again, about the business of being fully human (especially including that pesky animal nature). Such a religion would need, in the long run, to be able to foster a healthy balance between the desire for comfort and the heroism and superiority of those body-centric, social-glue-forming pleasures and survival behaviors that are distinctly uncomfortable, and it must be a vision that people can buy into.

This may seem unlikely in a culture that has lost its taste for transcendent gods, but then such a religion might not be founded around a transcendent god. Stranger things have happened in the religious world both in deep history (Buddhism) and in the past century-and-a-half.

We are, after all, in the midst of a mass religious revival right now. The Marxian faith sometimes known as “Wokeness” is sweeping through everything and filling the void opened by the loneliness that our spectacular levels of comfort occasions. But in my estimation, this religion is tailored to protecting the delicacy of The Beautiful Ones, and is not suitable as an aid to escaping the curse of sterile Beauty.

In the end, the hard fact of reality is that life is formed by Darwinian struggle. Organisms appear only to activate when there is need to struggle. Without actual difficulty in life, life itself may not continue.

When you consider the fact that spreading beyond this planet will involve closed-cycle life in space ships where every possible material need is met more-or-less by automation, where—in order to prevent conflict that could end the mission—behavioral norms will be constrained and psychological rough edges smoothed out with atomization, privacy, pornography, and drugs, it is possible that, unbenknowst to himself, John B. Calhoun might have unintentionally stumbled upon the answer to the greatest question of our age:

“Why, when we look out into the vast universe, instead of hearing the chatter of thousands of other civilizations, do we find only silence?”

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