But We're Apes...

I'm trying to finish 'The Female Eunuch' as what often happens when I read is I get excited until I've read most of the content and amazingly my attention always dwindles at the conclusion. Guess I'm a journey not destination type guy.

Anyway I was trying to finish it and gave up in my favorite park yesterday and lay back and looked up and I saw: life.

Specifically I saw a tree branch hanging over me and all the leaves hanging off of it. I remembered the session at RYLA I had on 'deep-ecology' which was the theory that we can't live off of nature until we can comprehend our relationship with it, which pretty much means meditating surrounded by nature.
The first time I did it, I was struck by how in the middle of scrubland, as far away from civilization as most of us can get these days, there was far more living activity going on than in the heart of the CBD.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway this is why a leaf is of interest to you. It occured to me that the hardest chanciest part of a leaf's existence is jokying for position, specifically a position in sunlight. Then it sprouts, it absorbs the light and grows until eventually it drops off.
Of course a leaf is not sentient, indeed a tree isn't really sentient, I think it uses that mathematical constant 'e' or something to actually decide where leaves will crop up in an evolutionary process that maximises leaf exposure to sunlight. So the hardest part of a leaf's existence is pretty much out of its hands to begin with.

Alas, this is how most people lead their lives. The hardest thing they really do, is swim up the philopean tubes in the number 1 position. For many it's the only race a person wins in their lives. So yes in a way we are all winners. But once that position is obtained, we just passively live a life of growing, until we drop off.

The structure, the tree that supports our existence is the economy, it is that rational framework that informs our decision making. We are yet to come up with one as beautiful and simple as the golden ratio based 'e' but basically you are born. Then the 'nuclear' script is you pay off a house for the entirety of your working life, and then you die. Relatively recently ie. the next generation coming up for retirement, it expanded to paying off your own home, an investment property or two and you travelled through tuscany in your retirement. Although it is a quantum leap in expenses, it isn't a quantum leap in ideology.

So really whilst leaves may represent no more sentience than hair in it's function of sprucing up a tree a bit, I feel it is an apt metaphore for the average human life. And furthermore, I feel more emotion at the loss of the hair around my temples than any tree ever did when it sheds leaves to survive the winter, reclaiming the nutrients that rot into the soil.

And that's pretty much how the economy was designed to treat people. You retired at 50 and checked out at 60, it could handle the dead weight of an old person collecting a pension and leading an otherwise non-productive lifestyle, as they would leave most of their assets being the house and land to any survivors, or it would be auctioned off and the proceeds going to whomever a judge sees fit to give them. People were leaves of a decidiuous tree. People still are those leaves. Because the economy is happy to sacrifice not just the little leaves out on its limbs, if the rot sets in, that is what it will do. It will wipe out everything those people have to show for their lives completely without emotion.

And I thought of my dog, a much higher, more complicated lifeform than leaves on a tree. It has a liver and kidneys and all that shit. My dog's life long struggle is not jockeying for a position in the sun, it moves around the yard effortlessly and 'lays doggo' where the opportunity for sunlight is.

And more curious than that, we are no more dogs than we are leaves (okay, technically we are more dogs than we are leaves, we are invertebrae, mammals and have much more common ancestors than fucking leaves have with us). We are apes, we are intelligent beings with opposable thumbs that can move around, manipulate crude tools, sophisticated tools, manipulate atoms, why the fuck can't we handle our crappy economy?