It Is Time for Man To Crawl Back Into the Swamp
Humanity has peaked. It's all over—you just don't know it yet.
For millennia, humans—mothers and fathers, husbands and wives—have worked as hard as they possibly can to try to make their children’s lives better than their own.
Living through wars, famine, disease, and pestilence, our forebears saw, felt, and suffered through unimaginable horrors that we can’t even comprehend in the 21st century. Simply surviving used to be a remarkable feat in and of itself.
For at least several thousand years of recorded history, men and women have been able to maintain language, technology, art, and law to protect our progeny and enhance the chances of our offspring making it to adulthood, carefully passing down the torch of human civilization from one generation to the next.
The fact that I can sit here today in my air-conditioned office building and write this on a computer with a full-color screen powered by electricity is a testament to this success. So, too, is the fact that you are likely reading this on an even smaller computer or telephone with as much computing power.
Just think of how far we’ve come as a species!
Now, in terms of beliefs, I’m a Christian. I don’t buy into the idea of man crawling out of the primordial ooze on his own in the first place (and never have). The account of a miraculous creation ex nihilo by a benevolent God who loves me and knows my name is the only answer that makes any sense to me.
But boy, oh boy, what I am seeing with my very eyes today has me more tempted than ever to believe humans are nothing but single-celled creatures, barely evolved beyond the gilled fishes that some say climbed out of that ancient bacterial soup.
I’ve always taken the biblical view that Man is the pinnacle of Creation. But today, I’m starting to wonder that perhaps I was wrong… maybe there is at least a contingent of people who crawled out of the big pressure cooker of cosmic broth and have no more brain cells than a jellyfish, after all.
Let’s just pause for a moment and ponder man’s march of progress: in 2024, the monumental achievements we’ve seen this year alone should demand we all observe a moment of silence (or prayer) to celebrate just what an exponential leap forward we’ve taken in human development.
To wit: we’re flying helicopters on Mars, exploring and mapping the bottom of the ocean, sending human beings to and from outer space, modifying the DNA of living creatures with gene editing, manufacturing battery-powered vehicles (in the USA!) that can drive a family of five from Dallas to New Orleans on a single charge, making computers with artificial intelligence that are smarter than doctors and lawyers and can easily ace the USMLE and Bar Exam, and much, much more.
We are closer than ever to achieving the long-awaited Space Age dream of flying cars, robot waitresses, and personal jetpacks. Communication by hologram (at least in 2D) is old news by now and already exists in the back pockets of everybody who owns a smartphone that has FaceTime.
It’s not just technological advances worth honoring today and not just advancements in America. Globally, humans are enjoying better living conditions than ever before.
The bad is getting less bad:
The good is getting even better:
There’s so much good news everywhere, about everything. And yet…
AND YET…
By my purely experiential and anecdotal assessment (but which is clearly evident, and any smart person will obviously agree with me immediately), we are not only reaching stratospheric heights (and beyond) in order to make humanity an interplanetary species: we are reaching intergalactic levels of stupidity as a species right here on our own planet, as well.
And while we have been able, thus far, to outlive industrial pollution, volcanic eruptions, and the occasional outbreak of plague and the like, we will not—we cannot—survive stupidity.
Unlike polio, there is no vaccination for foolishness, and strangely, idiocy is on the rise even as fatal disease epidemics and catastrophic natural disasters decline.
Worse, the dumbing down of man is not happening to us. It is being done by us.
We are all—in societies, whole countries, and even the entire globe—suffering from a self-inflicted “dumbshot wound” to the head.
History will not look kindly upon the generations alive today who lived to witness the greatness all around us but subsequently snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
What do I mean?
Just take a look around you: 2024 is a banner year for showcasing that which now greatly threatens Western civilization. Forgive me for repeating here what is already so painfully obvious it barely seems worth mentioning here, but I’ll do it anyway:
We invented vaccines to cure the deadly ravage of disease, then poisoned them, not with mercury (this time), but with the toxin of political ideology. During the 2020 pandemic, governments coerced, threatened, fined, harassed, and ostracized private citizens and businesses for failing to adhere to a non-scientific (and ever-shifting) “consensus,” all the while protecting a trillion-dollar medical industry shielded by complete and total immunity for any damage or injury their products might cause to actual, living human beings.
The least serious presidential candidate in my lifetime—or perhaps ever—was literally looking at Soviet-era price control programs and suggesting, out loud and in public: “Maybe we should try that here in America,” then subsequently convulsing in a cackling fit of laughter, while falling out of a coconut tree. (Thank GOD our country was spared from that certain death on Election Day 2024).
A pervasive culture of hating success and successful people is killing off innovation. The single greatest threat to building a profitable business today is no longer competition from monopolistic multinational conglomerates but the everyday, local citizens around us with a rabid sense of jealousy who vote to install politicians that hate us, tax us, outlaw and restrict our products and services, and bury us in an avalanche of regulation so thick it feels like it isn’t even worth fighting.
Doctors and other “medical professionals” have turned their knives on their own patients to now intentionally cause permanent damage for profit. Rather than using surgical instruments to carefully excise diseased, infected, or cancerous flesh, physicians are literally cutting off perfectly functioning reproductive body parts from men, women, and children, then lying about it and hiding their actions from public scrutiny.
They’ve not only betrayed their Hippocratic Oath; if Hippocrates were here today, they would probably murder him with their own hands.
Universities entrusted with the sacred mission of enlightening our youth with wisdom and imparting valuable knowledge for building societies have seemingly turned into ideological terrorist training camps where young people are taught to hate each other, hate authority, hate their country, and hate truth itself.
Harvard University, formerly the crown jewel of higher education for the entire world, whose motto once was—astonishingly—“In Christi Gloriam” (“For the glory of Christ” in Latin), has now become the opposite of everything it once stood for and essentially functions as the biggest political action committee in the country with $50 billion of tax-free money in the bank that will be spent to finally bring about communism, antisemitism, and anti-Americanism in America.
Employers are required not to be racist, but in working toward the worthy goal of removing subtle and unconscious racial bias, they’ve become even more racist, overtly creating job openings explicitly for people with one skin tone and explicitly not for people with another.
By fighting racial fire with fire, all it has done is inflame hatred even more than before, making the entire country dumber in the process, creating division where there was none in the first place, and installing a hierarchy of race, incentivizing everybody to find ways to be as oppressed as they possibly can.
Nonprofit organizations everywhere are rolling in enormous piles of cash. They are not financially incentivized to eradicate poverty and inequality from the world but to prolong it indefinitely, finding new and novel ways to expand and replicate misery elsewhere, including where it didn’t exist before. It’s become apparent today that the best way to ensure a broken system remains broken forever is to create a nonprofit to “raise awareness” for it.
Lawmakers are no longer in the business of making laws; politicians everywhere seek office for the express purpose of laundering money, enriching themselves, using taxpayer dollars to subsidize anti-social, immoral, and illegal behavior, and literally declaring war on countries that have absolutely nothing to do with us whatsoever.
I could go on and on, but there’s already so much written about the moral decay that engulfs us yet which is so clearly obvious and so normal a part of our daily lives that it’s no longer shocking: it’s just boring.
What is indisputable now is that nearly every institution of Western civilization is so thoroughly plagued with decay from the very top to the very bottom that they’re not only useless but have actually become dangerous and even opposed to the precise purpose for which they were created.
I repeat myself:
Hospitals kill perfectly healthy babies in the womb and maim children and young adults with perfectly functioning body parts, rendering them infertile forever.
Colleges make students dumber, more ignorant, more racist, angrier, and poorer than they were before they enrolled.
Nonprofits greatly profit off of human suffering and seek to have governments subsidize it even more.
Criminal justice systems have decriminalized crime and have criminalized justice.
Banks incentivize crippling debt and financial illiteracy.
Governments punish savings and investment through progressive taxation.
It’s enough to make you want to pull the plug to shut it all down and begin again.
But how?
I recently borrowed the audiobook version of “Humankind: A Hopeful History” (by Rutger Bregman) from my library and listened to it an hour at a time while working out at the gym and running on the treadmill.
While I didn’t end up finishing it (too long, too boring, too full of global-warming hysteria and social Darwinism, and it definitely didn’t make me “hopeful”), it did introduce me to one incredibly fascinating person and discovery.
Apparently, in the 1800s, a German zoologist named Ernst Haeckel looked at a pile of bones that today people would call a “Neanderthal” skeleton, but he gave it a far, far more entertaining name: Homo stupidus.
Of course, multiple humanoid fossils came before and after this particular skeleton, including:
Homo habilis (“handy man”)
Homo erectus (“upright man”)
Homo antecessor (“pioneer man”)
Homo sapiens (“thinking man” — that’s us, by the way)
But Haeckel, for some reason, decided this alleged version of a proto-human life form deserved his own special name.
Homo stupidus (“stupid man”), he imagined, was an idiot: a low-intelligence knuckle-dragging cave-dweller. Literally. (Thank you, Mr. Bregman, so much for introducing me to this wonderful “new” old idea).
Apparently, Haeckel’s contemporaries didn’t like this name at all, mostly because they felt he jumped to unfounded conclusions about this big ugly lunk’s intelligence.
Neanderthal, it turns out, wasn’t quite the Triceratops-hunting, club-toting brute Haeckel thought him to be.
(Again, as a Christian, I don’t buy into any of this nonsense. If some people want to believe their ancestors were primates, I won’t stop them. Although if I were them, I wouldn’t be so eager to claim such an unflattering heritage.)
But I am here today to say that Haeckel got it wrong.
It’s beyond obvious by now that he was right about Homo stupidus, but his timing was off. “Stupid man” still lives today! Far from extinct, he’s still here with us, hiding amongst the “thinking man” like a zebra hides within a herd of antelope.
Homo stupidus (or, as we might say in English, “Mr. Stupid”) is everywhere and relatively easy to spot. He even announces himself unwittingly for all to see. Betraying his ignorance with the most obnoxious of bird calls, he makes his presence audibly known with pronouncements about current issues, as follows:
“Public education has completely and utterly failed. The only way to fix it is to give public schools more money.”
“In order to fund social programs I like, we should raise taxes. But not for me—for everybody else.”
“The Department of Motor Vehicles is the most miserable and inefficient place on earth. Also, I want those same government bureaucrats in charge of our healthcare.”
“I voluntarily signed up for $150,000 in student loans I had no business getting for a worthless degree that adds nothing to society and that I cannot possibly pay off in my lifetime. I want other people—who didn’t go to college—to pay off my student loans for me.”
“Everything that’s wrong with the world was caused by rich people. Also, ‘rich people’ are defined as ‘anybody who makes more money than me.’”
“If my politician doesn’t win the election, I’m moving to another country!!!” (Note: he never actually does this—he only screams it out loud every four years out of desperation).
Mr. Stupid is a bold creature indeed! In addition to being easily identified by his screeching call, he can also easily be spotted in the wild by his adornments.
He fashions for himself garments that say: “I’m with her.”
He displays a multicolored cloth banner in front of his nest, which tells the world: “I love and support every brand, archetype, color, scent, and flavor of human being ever conceived of, except heterosexual white males. (Even though I, myself, am very likely a heterosexual white male.)”
He papers over his car with trite, single-word slogans like “COEXIST” and head-scratching tautologies such as: “Love is love.”
It’s this last form of the courtship display that is the most perplexing and, to me, the most annoying. All of this performative nonsense is so utterly trivial that normally, it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning simply because it doesn’t work.
This is no courtship dance: in fact, Mr. Stupid will likely never find Mrs. Stupid because no female is ever going to mate with a man like that.
Or, perhaps he may get lucky one day… but he is still going extinct for a reason: if he ever impregnates his female counterpart, Baby stupidus will never see the light of day. Because: “abortion is healthcare.” He even has a sign in his yard that says so.
As I was driving around downtown Tucson, Arizona, where I live, a few months ago, I saw a bumper sticker on a car that proves my thesis fully and completely.
I obviously couldn’t take a picture of it myself (since I was driving), but I’ve since found another one on the internet, and I’m sharing it here.
Behold: one of the stupidest statements ever expressed in the history of mankind.
Just take a moment and look at that. It is truly remarkable. Really, this is something to witness… don’t rush it: take some time to fully absorb what this means.
If you’re not one of the “very online” types who spend too much time digitally surfing across the four corners of the Earth, you may not even know that people like this exist.
Unfortunately, it is my solemn, awful duty to inform you of some very bad news.
People like this do exist… AND THEY VOTE.
It’s a harrowing reality, I know, to learn that there is a kind of person out there who:
Lives in the greatest country ever created.
Participates in the biggest economy ever created.
Has a large enough salary to buy a cutting-edge automobile made by one of the greatest companies ever created.
…and yet, he also somehow feels the need to make a public statement to every single person who sees him* driving this car so they know the driver of this vehicle doesn’t like Elon Musk, the founder of one of the greatest companies ever created that makes one of the greatest cars ever created in the greatest economy ever created in the greatest country ever created.
HE WANTS YOU TO KNOW THAT HE BOUGHT THE CAR BUT HATES THE GUY WHO CREATED IT.
(*Note: I’m going to assume this Tesla owner is a man because I respect women too much to be a misogynist by accusing a woman of anything so profoundly vacuous.)
But the bad news is: it gets worse! There are more than one of these people alive today. And that’s the entire problem.
It’s bizarre: on the one hand, we have a whole group of people who actually do things.
They invent new technologies, start companies, build cars and rockets, prevent the proliferation of diseases where we can, manufacture drugs to fight the diseases we can’t prevent, and automate mechanical systems to make everything in our lives better, faster, stronger, cheaper, and safer.
…and on the other hand, we have a whole group of people fighting against those people. A wriggling mass of whiny crybabies who have done absolutely nothing with their own lives but critique, ridicule, and insult the first group.
These screaming children have no talent, no experience, and no ultimate meaning and bring very little value to this earth (aside from buying products from the first group while making sure they loudly tell everyone in the second group just how much they hate the people in the first group).
When talking about inequality throughout human history, philosophers and politicians have sometimes divided various societies into two simple categories: the “haves” and the “have-nots.”
That’s useful if you’re fomenting a class struggle (which Homo stupidus often does), but I prefer a better, more useful dichotomy for dividing the classes. I propose a new method of categorization: the doers and the do-nots.
Concerningly, though, it seems the group of do-nots seems to be growing faster in number and influence than the group of the doers.
It would be exceptionally confusing to explain how this could be since, obviously, the do-nots are not replacing themselves through breeding. Yet their secret lies in one insidious method of replication: finding the children of the doers and converting them into do-nots.
This is actually fairly easy to do since, as I mentioned earlier, almost all institutions, including (and especially) universities—are completely rotted within and stand only as exoskeletons of what once was.
So the offspring of the doers go to the ironically-named “institutions of higher education” and learn to become do-nots who only criticize and, eventually, oppose everything the doers have done or built, including actually doing the building of the colleges they’re attending.
By now, it’s so cliché we’ve almost become inured to the ironic image of a socialist teenage girl in a coffee shop, typing “smash the patriarchy” and “destroy capitalism” on her keyboard… which is attached to a laptop invented by men who worked for a capitalist company (founded by men), as she sips her $7 latte in the capitalist coffee shop (that was also founded by a man). But it’s still true.
If not for everything that the doers built, the do-nots would have nothing to rail against, no cause to support, and no reason to feel good about themselves. They surely can’t (and won’t) actually start anything or build anything on their own.
They have only one skill: hating.
It’s hard to have time to hate when you’re busy creating. But hating is easy.
The doers who are creating things don’t have time for hate, but the do-nots who don’t create anything have all the time in the world because they aren’t doing anything.
And that’s why I’ve basically given up. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do aside from a hard reset of the human race.
Nikola Tesla, the namesake of Tesla Motors (including the red one owned by some random Homo stupidus with the horrifying bumper sticker on it above), allegedly once made a grave prediction.
“You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”
It’s probably good that he’s no longer here. If he were, I’d hate to tell him: “We have seen it, Mr. Tesla. That ‘man-made horror beyond our comprehension’ is man himself.”
There isn’t much of a solution, I’m afraid, aside from simply starting from scratch.
People, it is time for man to crawl back into the swamp.
We need a do-over. Whatever wriggled out of that slime needs to try again… better this time.
We don’t even need to get right to Homo exceptionalis — we can build to that over time. Just Homo acceptibilus would suffice for now.