Thay Ruddy Great Cussyblog

How many of you own or drive a car? So how many of you know how to change a tire? How about the oil? Windscreen fluid? Radiator? Not so many hands up now, huh?

So why don’t so many people know how to do these things? Why don’t YOU? Chances are, you either thought, “because I don’t care,” or, more likely, “because I get somebody to do it for me.” It costs a bit of money, but you can go to a fancy service station and get your fluids topped, oil changed, and your engine flushed and a hundred other things you don’t know how to do or even understand. Why do you do this? Maybe you read Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and felt it contained a life lesson. Probably you don’t feel like you should have to know how to do this shit.

Here’s something else. There’s a common misperception among people today that humans are a terminal point in evolution. This idea holds that humans have stopped evolving, being perfectly adapted for the habitat they’ve created for themselves. Others believe that humanity’s next evolutionary step is into robotics and artificial intelligence and downloading personalities and belfhekhgfkdljd. Of course, these ideas are both bullshit.

Which brings me back to your choice to take your car to a guy for maintenance. You make this choice because you don’t know how to yourself. You never bothered to learn because it didn’t seem important. There were more important things to learn – like law school, or computer science, or how to be REALLY good at compiling porn links on your blog. You’re good at your own things. You’re specialised. Welcome to a shit life.

Humans aren’t favouring mutations with dealy bops or extra toes. They’re favouring those who succeed at specialisation. With each generation, social and technological progress pushes us further and further in the direction of an ant colony. In said colonies, each individual fulfills a specific role. Among driver ants, there are three distinct worker classes, each with physiological adaptations to support the responsibilities within the class. Humans aren’t born blind if their role in society doesn’t require sight, or otherwise mutate to succeed in their job, but they instead get help from technology. With the advent and ubiquity of mobile phones, wireless networking, bluetooth, GSP, and internet connectivity, communication between individuals is wider and more instantaneous than ants could ever hope to achieve.

Sounds pretty great, right? You only have to be good at one difficult thing, and everybody else will pick up the slack. Woo specialised society! Life is so fucking hilarious and sexy all the time!

…Except when something goes wrong. The machine with the fewest moving parts is the least likely to break, and modern first world society is a machine with a shit tonne of parts. We combat this weakness by building in redundancy. Aeroplane manufacturers do the same thing, but then, it’s not like an aeroplane component has ever failed. The probabilities of that happening are insanely miniscule.

The things you give up when you let yourself be a part of this kind of system aren’t immediately obvious, especially to someone living inside of it, but they’re big. The foremost is adaptability. That might stick out in reference to what I said about evolution above. Another, more obvious, loss is self sufficiency, and, as a side note, the satisfaction it proivdes.

Everybody I meet these days seems frustrated at a lack of control over one’s own circumstances. It never occurs to anybody you can take that control for yourself. But it’s not easy. It’s hard work. Maybe that’s where the problem lies – maybe it’s just easier to get somebody else to take your control for you.

Personally, I think I’ll keep up the autodidactism.