“Don’t worry. Many women learn to embrace this parasite. They name it, dress it up in tiny clothes, arrange playdates with other parasites.†– House
But my parasite kept looking over its shoulder. I guess it was a nervous tick.
I recall seeing a story about twenty years ago about a Native American tribe, the Pima. This particular tribe had gone through periodic famines over the course of their existence since they lived in a desert with little water and no Kwik-E Marts®. They had, through surviving those continual famines, developed a resistance to dying when there was no food for an extended period of time. This makes sense – those who were susceptible to starvation starved; those who were thriftier with their metabolism lived.
Nowadays, the Pima have the distinction of suffering from one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world. Those biological traits slowed their metabolism enough to save them from starving in a famine. Those same traits, in a food-rich world, are now killing them.
That’s one description of a trait that while good in an environment of scarcity isn’t so good in an environment filled with Twinkies™, Ruffles™, and two-liter Coke™ bottles.
What got me thinking about all this?
What do you call it when a diabetic won’t follow directions? Insulince.
Eaton Rapids Joe shared several thoughts with me a few weeks back in an email exchange. I’m certain I’m not taking this in the direction that he had originally intended, so don’t blame him for this piece.  For me to write about a topic, it has to come together in my mind. One of the ideas he shared sparked my imagination. Here it is, in Joe’s words: “Biologists make the case that periods of easy living followed by harsh purges accelerate evolution.  Their reasoning is thus: many features in isolation are bad for survival. But if several features are combined with other features that in isolation are counter-survival, sometimes that package is awesome.â€
If you’re not reading Joe’s stuff, you really should be (LINK). He’s thoughtful, intelligent, interesting, and funny. His comment resulted in me thinking, and although I wandered pretty far off of his original point, I wanted to give credit to him for the inspiration.
Is evolution overkill? Did it defeet the porpoise?
As I started thinking not about biology, but about society, and the traits that either make society work, or destroy it – rather than organisms, I wanted to think about group survival strategies.
Society is made up of individuals, so I thought I’d look at the individual traits that lead to a successful societal strategy. When I looked at positive human traits, two immediately come to mind:
- Altruism
- Empathy
These have been common throughout most of the history of the United States. They’ve been common in other places, too, but I’m going to focus on America.  These traits were the basis for and result of a “high-trust†society. A high-trust society is one where most interactions aren’t governed by regulations, or kin groups, or hierarchy, or law. Where I live, there’s no law that says you have to stop and help someone whose car broke down. It’s just something we do.
I heard that Shetland ponies are the least trusted horse, at least according to the Gallop poll.
Likewise, for most of the history of the United States, welfare wasn’t a government program – people were helped because groups of ordinary citizens donated their time and effort to help them. This had a benefit – it was a healthy outlet for the altruism, and empathy that most people felt. It was virtuous for the person helping, and the person being helped.
Government started to take over the role of private charity in the 1930s, and completed the job in the 1960s. The insidious part of government-based charity is that it does two things:
It turns the act of charity into taxation. Charity moves from being a voluntary program into a mandatory feature supported by taxes. Last time I checked, if I decided I didn’t want to support ‘charity’ by paying taxes, men with guns and bad attitudes would take my money and then give me free room and board at a Federal Camp for Wayward Wilders for five to ten years. This removes all virtue for taking part in charity. Forced charity isn’t charity, it’s extortion.
That’s bad enough.
But it gets worse.
Crabs don’t donate to charity. They’re shellfish.
The second thing that forced charity does? When a person gives another person help, they’re often grateful – it’s human working with human. When a government agency gives that same person help, they’re resentful. Why? There is no end to the needs an individual has – and when government doesn’t give them as much as they think they deserve they feel resentment. Let’s face it – nearly every government welfare program sucks – it’s just enough to get by in ratty conditions. Not only that, these same programs are designed to create an angry perpetual victim class by being easy to stay on and difficult to escape.
Add in the impersonality of the cities. Mix with a globalized economy and a country that has let in enough foreign competition to depress the wages in jobs ranging from manual labor to software programmers. Dollop in a bit a host of useless yet expensive college degrees. Toss in a diversity of cultures and religions not seen since the late Roman Empire while vilifying the common culture of the last 250 years through the government education system.
Stir.
The result is chaos. The altruism and empathy which worked so well in that high trust society of the past now work against society. Add in that the problems are actually in the process of being solved: as an example, the black poverty rate has dropped over 30% between 1988 and 2018.
What to do with all of that altruistic, cooperative, and empathetic energy?
Whoever had “go crazy in an orgy of destruction and violence†fueled by misdirected virtue is the winner.
Is it riot season or COVID season? I want to make sure I have the right decorations up.
I thought a bit about how Antifa® and the Marxist portion of Black Lives Matter™ grew. The traits of altruism and empathy, generally good, have allowed them to grow. Heck, even more than allowing them to grow, they’ve increased the growth rate. In any sane society, neither of these groups would be tolerated.
Why?
Though born of misdirected virtue, Antifa© and BLM® have their own traits. They contribute nothing to society. They’re destructive, and feed off of the energy and resources provided to them by productive people. In the long run, they may even kill off the productive society that created them.
There’s a word for an organism living in this niche. The name for that organism is parasite.
It becomes increasingly likely that Antifa™ and BLM® will leave city after city economically destroyed. Who would want to move to Minneapolis right now? Portland? Seattle? The governments of those forever Democrat-controlled cities has been tailor-made for incubating the parasite class.
Well, now that Antifa® has been named a terrorist organization, when will the Democrats start funding it?Â
The District Attorneys in those Leftist cities are crucial to this incubation – criminals aren’t charged with felonies, but are let off with the lightest of charges. Unless, of course, they are people defending themselves from the parasite class. If that happens, the greatest possible charges will be conjured up, and damn the circumstances. Defending yourself from a parasitic criminal mob on your own private property is something that simply can’t be allowed.
Parasites generally are quite healthy as long as they don’t kill the host. The mosquitoes I fed tonight didn’t kill me – just left me with a few bumps that will itch for a day or so. But it looks like the traits of altruism and empathy may have done more damage than the famine resistance of the Pima.
