Monday, September 23, 2019

Humans As Herd Animals


   I've been around a fair amount of herd animals in my life, so I know that herd animals like to stay with the herd.     The only way you will see a herd animal alone is if the other members have bullied them out of the herd.   They won't do it voluntarily.

    So there is no point in getting upset about humans going along with the herd, or with humans happily submitting to the herd leader.  That's just how it is, as disappointing as it seems.
 
   I used to wonder about England, back when the kings and queens decreed what their religion should be.   Get a Catholic queen and everyone had to be Catholic.  The Protestant takes over, and, boom, everyone's a Protestant.     How did the subjects like that?   I would have thought that they would have resisted, or been resentful, but  looking at the present day subjects of Empire, I can see that most people just accept whatever the Emperor tells them to accept, and they don't seem to mind, as long as the rest of the herd goes along.

    The newest decree from our rulers is to tell us that
 1) there is no such thing as biological sex and (conversely),  2) people can change sexes, by thinking themselves into another sex and 3) since there is no such thing as sex, then men can enter the spaces, sports, services and provisions that used to be solely for women.

    I find all of these decrees insultingly free from Reality, but most of the herd has adopted them easily.  How is this possible?  I doubt that any rulers of the past would have had the audacity to make such  mind bogglingly absurd claims.  If there is anything that all herd animals, as well as non-herd animals, do easily, it is to differentiate between the two sexes.  Even if we humans can't tell the difference, as for instance, in geese, the geese certainly can.

   A few humans have objected to this new decree, but the Establishment cracks down very strongly on dissidents and heretics.   They couldn't do it, of course, without the help of the members of the herd.  As horses bite and kick, hens peck and goats butt, the little Eichmanns of the world insult and threaten the targeted creature.   There is no way that our overlords could police the thoughts and language of billions of people, but their willingly submissive minions are happy to do it for them.

    80 years ago, as fascism consolidated its power and the peoples of Europe happily adopted it,  a despairing W. H. Auden woke a poem called Sept. 1, 1939,  with these concluding words, which I dedicate to heretics, dissidents and free thinkers...

''Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.''

 

 

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