Man, a cereal like Reese's Bites is poison! I had a bowl of it the other morning; it was a cereal I enjoyed in my childhood. Then I was sick and literally crazy most of the day.
To think, we shovel this stuff into kid's mouths and boot em off to school by the millions. Then diagnose them the next minute with ADHD and pump them full of Ritalin. We are absolutely nutzo.
But that's what any advanced form of life does to try to control its environment I guess. We just push it as far as we can possibly take it and lose balance. We take things out of the context in which they grow in order to repurpose it for some other task, oftentimes to correct some form of imbalance.
For example, maybe we get sick, possibly from some sort of chemical in the environment, or depressed from...well working some stupid meaningless job or other, and to correct this imbalance we take some drug to sort of, you know, redirect our biochemical systems. This drug was in turn created out of compounds found in nature, which are recombined in various chemical processes by equipment that is also created out of various compounds and minerals, inside laboratories that are built out of compounds, minerals and other materials also found in nature. And then these processes themselves rely pretty heavily on oil extraction.
So in that way a lot of our energy, transportation, food production, and I guess basically almost everything else relies heavily on the extraction of oil and its refinement into various substances. We use oil to fertilize our plants because a lot of the soil sucks because of the way we conduct agriculture, and we use oil for a lot of our energy needs, and we use oil to transport a lot of things, and etc.
If each of these processes works well and is repeated, we come to rely on the processes to keep things moving. It takes the repeated production of agents that are created out of repurposed natural compounds to continue to make the process work.
So you have a dual conflict starting to form here. As things grow more complex, it takes more energy and information to keep everything going as a whole, and the more interdependent everything becomes on a lot of processes that really don't take care of themselves, processes that need increasingly complex inputs that require energy and really don't continue on if you don't tend to them. On top of that, if you are mining out these raw resources on a large enough scale where the earth can't replenish them, you're going to run out.
Life systems are pretty flexible. They can take pretty substantial changes and then either revert back to their original states or continue on if the new state is sustainable. But the scale we are doing things, and the clusterfucked fragmentation we've gotten our living systems into...well.
All this is actually really really fascinating. It is too bad it is all happening under the feet of billions of people.
I mean, it would be nice if we as an organism formed leaner, more flexible organizational systems that were always changing with changing conditions. But we seemed to have developed this damning tendency to grow very large and complex...and attempt to freeze things as they are, the surrounding conditions be damned, until it all breaks down at once. Hopefully we can reverse this tendency before a mass extinction event.
There are those of us that are always thinking about the past, the present and the future, always wondering what is next, what lessons should be learned, etc. But then there is a greater proportion of us that follows the same conventional, authoritarian frameworks, stuck orbiting the same circuits, receiving pleasure after pleasure that was received in the same way by the generation before. I think of that rat in the cage that just keeps pressing the button that activates the electrode in its pleasure center. Just pressing the button, pressing the button, pressing the button.
Makes me think of Townes Van Zandt's lament:
Being born is going blind
And buying down a thousand times
To echoes strung
On pure temptation
All the while with the entire apparatus that powers the conventional pleasure machine hollowing out the earth below, until one experiences a Wile E Coyote moment where one realizes the floor is no longer there.
There is a way out of course. It just takes a lot of thinking and the will to change.
What does this have to do with Reese's Bites? Everything I suppose.
