Sunday, February 29, 2004

posted by: copernicus on 2/29/2004 05:29:00 PM
The majority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste system. They also had sufficient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years.

We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority -- the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as 'the' Terrans. The six-legged majority and other life-forms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time.

The domesticated primates of Terra referred to the six-legged majority by an insulting name. They called them 'bugs'.....

.....The six-legged majority on Terra were never consulted when the domesticated primates set about building weapons that could destroy all life-forms on that planet. This was not unusual. The fish, the birds, the reptiles, the flowers, the trees, and even other mammals weren't allowed to vote on this issue. Even the wild primates weren't involved in the decision to produce such weapons. In fact, the majority of domesticated primates themselves never had a say in the matter.

A handful of 'alpha-males' among the leading predator bands among the domesticated primates had made the decision on their own. Everybody else on the planet -- including the six-legged majority, who had never been involved in primate politics -- just had to face the consequences.

Most of the domesticated primates of Terra did not know they were primates. They thought they were something apart from and 'superior' to the rest of the planet.....

.....Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a 'single' cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.

They also gave themselves, and one another, more blame than was deserved when things went badly. This gave them all jumbo-sized guilt complexes.

It is usually that way on primitive planets, before quantum causality is understood."

-Robert Anton Wilson-The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy-1979