MONDAY, SEP 4, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
God's Testicles
The greatest story ever told
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: HUNTER-GATHERERS, FROM THE WIRES, ARE THE KEY
Abstract: We could learn from normal humans. Doing so would violate no known laws of the universe, but it would end life as we know it, our form of human. Related to our form of human, I recall a study from about 50 years ago involving academic psychologist's favority lab animal, in this case human males attending college. They were given a hypothetical: if you could rape a beautiful woman and knew for sure that there could not possibly be any adverse consequences for you... would you? About half admitted they would. Sumitted: all normal human males are sexually driven, and especially in youth, so driven that forcing themselves sexually on another is possible. That half would rape if they could rape (without fear of being caught, consequenced) is not normal. That the idea of rape as temptation could arise and that some few could be crazy enough to act upon their complusions, given the adavistic sexual biology of males, makes rape/lust a potential problem in all societies. An adaptive culture would tell stories that involved this potential issue with information for at-risk males about how they need to frame their proclivities. In my culture, males are educated by pornography, and that men rape women is normalized [one young friend of mine, very high intellegence, was reading a book and was reluctant to let me borrow it knowing its sexual message might be considered questionable by some. It included a likely fake ancient Chinese saying that if rape was inevitable, the woman should 'relax and enjoy it'. So if she didn't, it was her fault for not being wise and cultured like the rapist, i.e. should accept rape as natural and normal]. The San tell a different story about men and rape.
COOS BAY (A-P) — We humans are different (if not in kind) from other animals. We are the storytelling animal. If our lives, our way of living on the planet, is non-viable (e.g. is not remotely sustainable and selects for our dissolution) and we are at high risk (>80%) of failing to persist as the millennia pass, one story is that we need to tell better stories. Good stories; better stories; the best-guess story (i.e. the greatest story, the one ring that unites them all) that may enable us to get right with Mother and thereby persist (the conquest of nature by omniscient males is another story, you know, the one that's not actually going to work for us much longer).
We will be known, to the next exobiologist that may happen by, for our ruins and landfills—
for our production and consumption of what we view as our planet for the taking.
We moderns tell stories we Like and can Share. How's that working for us? It's a crazy idea, but maybe we should tell stories that iterate towards being true, you know, like ones that actual evidence hints at (to those who endeavor to read the tea leaves of data) being true, maybe.
Maybe we should try to tell stories that have a faint ring of truth to them, which includes listening to the still small voice the trees speak when no wind blows. Or we can die a ghastly death. Nature doesn't care. Nature is unkind (oh, but we modern's don't like that story, so...).
Another story we moderns can't like is the one about how God, the Creator, Lord of Creation, came to be castrated. The inconvenient point of the story is why he needed to be (and by implication, why we Sons of God can expect the same outcome if we don't get right with Mother). We denormalized modern descendents of Lord Man cannot tell this story. Only non-modern, non-expanionistic normal humans (having an intact K-culture) could tell the greatest story ever told.
I'll end up sharing the story, but as no modern (denormalized) human can Like it, I will start with one they can Like and Share because it is about us. You'll like it in your own way. And as all modern techno-industrialized humans know, that's what is important.
"There be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." Matthew19:12
Could Jesus have been able to receive it? Ergo, he did. All self-anointed right-thinking (i.e. modern) humans want to be perfect. There are reasons (e.g. the mark of Cain, Original Sin, not having a nice car) for why we fall short of fully realizing our place at the top of the Great Chain of Being as the paragon of animals.
Who among us does not wish to perfect the individual Self by eradicating our shortcomings, those which lead us to miss the mark? Given that the forbidden fruit came in two halves, and that they became part of all of us (breasts of women, testicles of men), then removing them, as Jesus approved, is potentially one solution, albiet one few modern humans can consider.
Pointing this out, and calling upon the right thinking to agree to think about it, may seem like a crazy expectation, especially if the means of removing them (including the penis in males and labia minora and clitoris in females) involves using a red-hot iron to burn out the extra bits without using any anesthesia.
Okay, if this was the only viable solution to our disjointed condition of dukkha, calling upon all good humans to do what might be difficult to popularize, even if it worked, even if the outcome is salvation, may not be thinkable to modern humans. Consider that only those seeking perfection will be allowed to consent to such self-improvement, and that not all who can consider doing so will end up consenting to a fiery baptism by red-hot iron. Given the intent, and the evidence that we modern humans do have serious issues with living properly on the planet, can you consider doing somethng inconvenient that might change our condition and end the greatest mass extinction event since the Permian?
You don't have to actually achieve perfection, but at least consider iterating towards perfection, towards real solutions, and supporting those who do something that might work (and even consider doing something yourself). In the late 18th to 20th century, some one million people were willing to at least think about doing the above proposed solution (there may be others).
But that was then and this is now, and in the 21st century I cannot get even one other human to think about doing what might work to maybe save posterity (humanity) from extinction via a likely ghastly death, or even the biosphere.
Those above did what they thought had to be done to maybe atone for humankind's error, ignorance, and illusion. We ultramoderns, however, do not even see ourselves as having missed the mark (which we obviously have). Those such as pictured above, and their supporters, numbered about a million. They were right-thinking (by intent) humans willing to do something to maybe effect a change in the human condition. We moderns cannot, and we feel superior to them for it.
And... is there a point? By 1866 about 15% of 5,444 members willing to perfect themselves by fiery baptism actually did what was not in their short-term self interest. Today, we are playing a higher-stakes endgame. The fate of the biosphere and posterity's (the human species') persistence is at stake. Doing what needs to be done (contract our population faster than consumption by making few babies so no one dies a Malthusian death), is far too much to ask a truly modern human to do, especially if delayed gratification is involved.
I'm not asking for 99% of human males to be castrated with a red-hot iron (a possibly sufficient if not necessary solution) to solve the biosphere's Lord Man problem. I'm noting that any "real" solution, any that could possibly work, are viewed by all Anthropocene enthusiasts (modern techno-industrialized humans) as worse than, vastly more unthinkable than, removing the testicles of 99% of human males using a red-hot iron without using anesthetics.
What if castration by fiery baptism was the only viable solution? Would you agree to do it if you knew that otherwise 10-13 billion humans would experience a worse fate and then die a ghastly death? Would you do so if the alteration was completely painless and without even any discomfort? The correct answer is you should, but you won't. Consider why.
When you are finished smoking that in your pipe, you might entertain the idea of wondering what the unthinkable but viable solution, the one that could work to avoid maybe 10 to 13 billion people (mostly those not yet born and today's 10 year olds or younger) from dying a Malthusian death this century, might be. What is the horror of all horrors, vastly worse than having your genitals burned off with a red-hot iron?
I could mention a few details, e.g. that about 483,000 healthy human babies will have to be born each year. The condition, however achieved, of 483,000 births/year is the solution. Assuming birth control (no red-hot irons involved) is free and freely available, there would be no limits on sexual activity. There would be only one limit: 483,000 women, if approved by existing Mothers, have healthy babies provided they love, cherish, and every effort is made to raise them to be happy, functional humans, more so than their parents and other extended family members. The pathway to get to the solution involves reading a story and understanding the implications of the story. Reading the story may be thinkable. Understanding the implications, however, may not be, as denial and obfuscation will be easier.
You can and likely will read the story since you read this far, but not because you voted for me to be world dictator. You may end up writing at book length about the implications of the bees and testicles story. But if you don't end up sticking a red-hot iron into your mind to burn out almost everything you think you know, all presuppositions, all epistomological/ontological/axiological assumptions and pretend values about what is right and normal; if you do not subject the content of your consciousness (and everyone else's but especially 'yours') to the flames of an all consuming doubt to see what, if anything, is left, then you didn't understand the implications of the story. Hence, you will do nothing. You will keep on keeping on. You will enjoy life while you can (to hell with posterity's overshoot debt; what has posterity ever done for you?).
God's Testicles
As told to Helga Vierich, anthropologist
Kalahari truffles
The Kua, a forager group, one of many San groups in the Kalahari Desert, had a concept of a single Creator, a kind of spiritual creator of the entire universe who sort of animated everything.
They said two things came from the immaterial, the spiritual, the unknowable side of reality. One was fire and the other is love.
And love was not just love. Love was the anime, it was life, it was what made things alive, and I finally got the name, but I can't even remember what it is now. The name is unimportant. We don't know the real name of the Creator, because how can we know it? It is immaterial.
So my next question was "is your god male or female?" They couldn't believe such a stupid question. They said , "what!?"
"Well [they said], if it manifests on Earth, if it's in a human form or any other species of animal, then it's going to come out as male or female, but that's just what happens in a material form. An immaterial being does not need genitalia, they don't pee, they don't have sex. What are you thinking?" And I realized how stupid that question was.
Here's the thing. There are a lot of stories that I was told were sacred, and one of them was the story of the bees chasing testicles. With that introduction, I had to ask that it be told to me, so they told me this sacred story.
This is a story of some antiquity among the San forager groups in the Kalahari, as they all know it. It was told to me over much raucous laughter, even from the children who joined our party by the fire.
And the story goes that God, this immaterial and unknowable Creator being, was looking down on the world, and he [she, it] was following a group of gathering women.
He was particularly entranced by one young woman in the group, and basically wanted to get closer to her, and as a result he popped into material existence as a small human male child.
At first he was very small, no more than the size of a praying mantis. He ran after the women, keeping himself hidden and watching the girl he liked and lusting after her. (the storyteller at this point put his hand to his groin and made a rising motion with stiff fingers and everyone roared with laughter.)
God followed her for hours, trying to get bigger but needing food. He watched as they gathered wild nuts and berries, and swallowed these. When they dug up wild onions and other roots, he followed their example. He ate and ate, and began to grow bigger. It was very tiring.
He saw a solution. When the girl he was watching put down her sack of gathered vegetables to dig out a large morama tuber, he crawled into her sack.
He began to eat the vegetables and beans and nuts and tasty melons and other fruit in the sack. After some additional digging, the girl dropped a huge root on his head without noticing him, and picked up her sack again, slinging the whole burden behind her back and putting the tump band across her forehead to balance the load.
The little man was knocked out. He came to as the women arrived back in camp. He was bigger now, the size of a ten year old boy. The girl slung her gathering sack down, drank some water from her ostrich egg, re-stoppered it, and made the coals of her fire glow with blowing, adding some wood, and cooked up the big root and two small onions. Her hand reached into the sack and the man quickly held these things up to her hand so her hand did not feel him.
The root cooked slowly with the onions in the hot ashes, bubbling. The girl left them to cool beside the fire and went to speak to one of the other campers, who had arrived earlier in a bigger family group. She asked to join them at their fire, and offered to share that big root. (note: these are some of the most wonderful tasting tubers I have ever eaten.)
The man, meanwhile, helped himself to the huge root and the onions. He grew to adult size, and hid behind her blankets as she returned to her hut, to find the root gone. She was very angry, and went looking for the thief. She roused up the whole camp but no one was found to have the root. Finally she came scowling back to her hut, having eaten some other things with the family party.
She sat down weary on her blankets and dropped onto her side, pulling her kaross of furred jackal skins over herself as it was nightfall in the early dry season and the chill was in the air.
At this point God saw his chance, lifted the blanket and placed himself on her body, enflamed with lust. He just wanted his way with her.
The girl pushed him off with one hand, while reaching for her knife. You are not !N/kai she said… what do you think you are going to find here? Still he tried to force her to spread her legs. (!N/kai was her “betrothed”, absent from that camping party on that day.)
She cut off the Creator’s testicles with one stroke of her knife. God felt such pain he disappeared immediately, leaving the two little balls behind to feel her wrath.
She called upon the bees to wake up and sting them, as they made their escape. (I mentally pictured this as a kind of sac race). The bees obeyed her, for all this happened in the days of the beginning of time, when all animals still talked to the humans.
A vast swarm of bees went after the balls. The two testicles, still together in their bag, disappeared into the distance… hopping frantically higher every time a bee stung. Each ball was soon covered in stings, and the seed of the deity ran from every sting, leaving a trail of drips behind them.
The balls decided that their only hope was to bury themselves deep in the sand, which they managed to do with their last strength.
In the morning the girl told everyone her story of the man who came to her in the night, and tried to take pleasure with her by force, to rape her.
She sought to find which of the men had tried to rape her (but all still had their testicles). Now this was just too much, and now everybody was really mad at her, and they were all telling her off, and so by this point she said, “all right,I will prove it,” and went to follow the trail of the testicles. She found them finally, but in the night they had died. They were both hard and soft.
Everyone was amazed to see these strange objects. Everyone smelled them. They might make a meal, they thought. So she cooked them in the ashes and everyone had a taste and they were the best thing anyone had ever received from the earth. They were the first Kalahari truffles, and others grow to this day, spawn of the deity’s seed.
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So, after the anthropologist heard this sacred story, she said, “wait a minute, people don't talk to bees, and bees won’t do what you tell them...” and they looked at her like she was mentally deficient. The storyteller says, slowly so maybe this pathetically limited human might be able to understand, “this - is - a - myth.”
The anthropologist got it (she wasn’t stupid, she was just mis-educated). The San are normal humans. They tell stories, but they don’t believe them. We tell stories too, but we believe that some (the ones we truly believe in) are true stories. We think we can know that there is a Creator being, and we think we can know “his” name. Such is the unfathomable depths of our error, ignorance, and illusion.
In other words, the story of God’s testicles is a story. Understand it as myth, as metaphor. Know that humans can tell no true stories, but some stories are better (contain more information than misinformation) than others.
Don’t believe any story. In this story the young woman calls upon the bees to sting the testicles for behaving badly (don’t rape women even if you are God or think you are), and that is a story worth learning from, especially if you are a human male. The bees, the whole cosmos, understands this. All men should too. Understanding is sacred, is love. Listen to Mother (the nature of things).
The woman also behaved badly. She thought someone in the camp had stolen her morama tuber. She failed to consider the possibility she might be wrong (she hypothesized, guessed, told a likely story and believed in her conjecture). She made accusations.
She also thought one of the men in the camp had tried to rape her (it was night, dark, there were no LED lights). She made accusations. Wrong again.
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Helga's story as told for millennia continues:
This is a story that is also a story of the origin of the Kalahari truffle, one of the most expensive of all truffle varieties. When the storyteller hit that punch line in the story, I just about fell over backwards. I couldn't believe it, but that's the story. Okay, so now here you have to remember this story was told at one of the times that I had a bunch of families invited for dinner at my camp, and it was told in front of a whole range of children. It wasn't just an adult story, and the children were reacting to it, some of them may have heard it before, but I started thinking later about what are these children learning?
Well, for one thing they're learning that once you are incorporated as a material being, even if you are the creator of the universe, you can really screw up. You can really do silly things, and have crazy ideas, and all this that's a sort of trickster model.
But as a result of your mistake, good things can happen, like every little hole that oozed sperm right from from those balls gave rise to the Kalahari truffles to spread them all over the place.
So there was that, and then the other thing, that was really, really clear to me, is that the girls were learning that you share food. That's good. You don't accuse people of not sharing or stealing, or trying to rape you, because people in that society take that very seriously and it's usually a wrong accusation at least in that society it is. It's not the right way to deal with each other, for men to deal with women, and vice versa. so God the Creator didn't even know how to, didn't know the first thing about falling in love, or wanting sex.
God was so ignorant he completely screwed up and got his balls chopped off. So the children are learning that, and they were also learning that you don't rape women, or they'll chop off your balls. You don't. Even God can't do that.
Now this is a very, very different message from the story of little Virgin Mary who gets knocked up by God, and then is informed by his lieutenant, you know, some angel he sends down to tell her she's going to have this baby, and it's going to save the world, and everything will be fine.
Excuse me, but as far as I'm concerned, Virgin Mary should have just told God what he could do with his seed and his Son, and then we wouldn't be in the fine mess of messes we are in. The idea of God the Father impregnating a teenager without her knowledge and then getting her to go along with it, and marry some other guy so that..., on and on to the world we live in. All of this is so sick compared to the story I just told.
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To say what I see in front of my pug-nosed face, the San are the normal ones. They are smarter, saner, and better educated than we overschooled ones are. We modern techno-industrialized ones are not normal (i.e. we are the outcome of millennia of denormalization). The San (and Hadza and Pygmy) are the only pre-expansionist from of human left on the planet.
For 50k years the expansionist form of civilization has selected for "omniscient conquerors" [Donella Meadows], who are typically male (with exceptions, e.g. M. Thatcher, H. Clinton) who serve the patrifocal culture as honorary men.
Atavistic male genes for dominance/submission and aggression/taking are present even among the San despite several million years of hominid evolution selecting for male cooperation and serial monogamy (Australopithecus) to multi-offspring long-term pair bonding (Homo). But after 50k years of selecting for alpha-male atavisms, the frequency of genes that serve expansionism, e.g. patriarchal/patrifocal expansionist (r-)culture, have increased. We are the humans of NIHM, genetically and memetically. The San (and perhaps some Hadza and Pygmy) are not.
We can renormalize, or post climax of our not remotely sustainable growth hegemon, be selected out of the future. Assume that we cannot possibly underestimate the difficulty of even mitigating posterity's ghastly future. We face, for the first time, a global endgame, one we cannot even be bothered to notice, let alone play the endgame in such a way as to maybe have a viable outcome. Chance will not favor our unprepared post-reality minds. Will there be any viable form of human that Nature could select for to persist as subsystems of Gaia, the world system?
"If we're going to save humanity, the hunter-gatherers are the key." —Helga Vierich
[The story of God's Testicles above is based on two versions Helga has told, one an article, and one in a video presentation. Some editorial changes were involved, so all words are not exact quotes.]
And to bring home, like a 2x4 upside a blindered head, the horror of what an actual solution would look like, I'll try to make this short enough to avoid certain brain death.
- No one lives in overdensity groups (i.e. >50) within a region containing more than 50 groups (communities) where 80% of the area and environmental productivity excludes human usage/occupancy to leave room for Nature to recover.
- If any region's population is attacked, or attacks Nature's 80%, then all communities within all other regions, as needed, will end (with or without extreme predjudice) the expansionist human outbreak (as an oncologist would end a metastatic cancer).
On average, 28 people will live in a community, and each region will have 28 communities (range 5-50). Without any fossil fuel inputs (to turn fossil fuels into food, etc.) and leaving room for Nature (80%), the sustainable environmental productivity of 20% of an area WILL NOT support the current population of humans (there are about 230 times too many humans). The horror, the horror.
Within the average region (i.e. a WMU; a Watershed Management Unit, which could be a subwatershed area within a large watershed), 784 people would be prosperously supported by local environmental productivity (range in population, 400 to 2,500), but not initially because there would be far more people than any area occupied could support. You can pass a law that Nature must provide for more people, but you can't inforce it. Bummer.
If all humans agreed to live within viable limits, then for several decades fossil fuels would be used for food production only (to produce vast amounts of storable dry foods by diverting animal feed, luxury crops, and ethanol feed stock production to storeable food production). Each community would have enough stored food (plus what can be produced within their community's agroecosystem) to support the population during its contraction to a viable population (i.e. nobody starves to death, unlike today).
In the average WMU (population of 784 people) there would initially be few births (not being born causes no injury), but in 50 years there would have to be 11 births each year (2.1 live births/woman assuming a low childhood mortality) to sustain the population. The population would rapidly contract without anyone dying due to a shortage of food or conflict over scare resourses. As the population of each WMU decreases by natural, insofar as possible, old-age related death, WMUs with too few people would combine to maintain a viable population on twice the land area. Within 50 years there would be 230 times fewer WMUs that are 230 times bigger, large enough to prosperously support a viable human population even during the one-hundred-year bad year, while leaving room for Nature (ending species extinction and allowing new species to evolve to replace those lost during the Anthropocene mass extinction event).
In the meantime, no one, insofar as possible, dies by scarcity induced conflict or starvation. During the rapid population reduction to avoid die-off, fewer will die a Malthusian death per capita than are now (not to mention the 10-13 billion likely to die a Malthusian death this century if nothing is done to rapidly degrowth the human population). But the right of humans to reporduce would be violated. The HORROR! THE HORROR!!!!!
To do nothing, all you have to do is not believe that the idea of overshoot and collapse doesn't apply to modern humans (who have decoupled from Nature). Have a nice Anthropocene, O hubris ones.
