We are the Cure

I saw the Matrix the first weekend it came out.  It was one of those rare movies where you know it's a classic as you watch and you feel lucky to be able to watch something of such quality.  Everyone should see it at least once but, for those that haven't seen it, it's a story about a struggle between robots and humans.  I won't say more for fear of spoiling as I only mentioned it because of a quote that stayed with me for years afterward:

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.

At the time I remember being upset by this quote and it is meant to do this.  The director wants us to hate the robots and I heartily cheered as the humans worked to defeat them.

As I've gotten older I find myself more upset by this quote for a different reason and it's the fear the robots might be right.  This seemed absurd to me when the movie came out because the robot was comparing humanity to viruses, non-thinking organisms that cannot control their actions.  Individual humans can and do control their actions.  The question is whether humanity has the same ability.

Let me explain.

Humans evolved into their current form no later than 200,000 years ago.  Since then there have been some cosmetic changes but most scientists agree that you could take a human infant from 20,000 years ago, stick him/her into daycare and they'd perform just as well as children born today.  Evolution hasn't done much to us since we first left Africa.

This idea has always fascinated me but it reinforced the fact of what we owe to our ancestors.  Take away our advantages of learning and we'd 10,000 years.  Every generation builds upon the work of their forebearers.  Fire leads to cooking.  Cooking leads to hunting.  Hunting leads to weapons.  Weapons lead to war.  War leads to organization.  Organization leads to cities.  Cities lead to shared ideas.  Shared ideas lead to rapid progress.

This is overly simplistic and skips a lot of steps.  For instance, I didn't mention the concept of farming at all.  Farming first developed in Mesopotamia about 8,000 years ago when drought forced the humans living there to adapt their surroundings.  I'm sure people discovered seeds caused plants to grow a long time before that but migratory hunting was the only way of life they knew.  Becoming a sedentary farmer was a last resort.

There are thousands of similar steps when you look at the long history of humanity.  Energy needs are a good example.  Europe was mostly forest when the first eastern traders showed up with their seeds.  Farming ensured people in a tribe were fed but to farm, they needed to clear the land.  Old forests were chopped down for firewood, for housing, and sometimes just burnt away to make more room.  This process took thousands of year but if you look at a picture of Europe today you'd scarcely see any forests.  The same is true of wild deer, boar, and fox.  They were all essentially hunted into a localized extinction.

Coal replaced wood as the forests were chopped down.  Whale oil then petroleum replaced coal and when we used most of those resources in we moved on to nuclear.  When that proved more costly and more dangerous than we hoped did we shift to renewables like wind and solar.

The story is the same where ever you look.  Humans take the path of least resistance.  We only act when we have no choice and that's because we don't have a choice.

Think about the energy path I mentioned earlier.  Humans cut down most of the trees in Europe not because they were evil but because they were there.  People knew that if they didn't cut them down that someone else would profit from the resource.  Capitalism has been a part of humanity from the beginning.  Survival of the fittest isn't just an evolution thing, it's a human thing.

Think about the trouble organizations like the United Nations have had to get global agreement on things like ending whaling, cutting out leaded gasoline, and eliminating fluorocarbons to save the ozone layer.  Most of these were agreed to in principle 30 years ago but we're still finding countries breaking the rules today.

Why do they do this?  It's because the rulebreakers only see the short term benefit.  It's part of who we are and we rarely act until to save ourselves until it is much too late.

Another movie I loved when I first saw it was Wall Street.  I was in college when it came out and I watched it with my business school friends dozens of times.  Most people remember the tagline but looking back the whole quote sounds like a better spin on the robot's view of humanity in the Matrix:

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good.  Greed is right.  Greed works.  Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.  Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Every year it becomes more clear the world is headed for a cataclysmically changed future due to global warming yet few countries are doing near enough to address the problem.  Why?  Because while they could change their actions, they know most of the rest of the world will break the rules anyway and gain an economic advantage.  It's these types of things President Trump is speaking to when he says the rest of the world is laughing at us and calls his predecessors suckers.

It's an understandable feeling.  No one likes to be the only one to make a sacrifice.  That's doubly true if you think your sacrifice won't make a difference.

Even more insidious is when you as a citizen don't have a choice.  Our current society is built upon the work of our ancestors and our ancestors invented things like the automobile to enable them to be more productive.  It made our cities larger and more spread out.  These days if you want to work in America, you have to drive.  You could take public transport but that wastes time and electric cars still use a resource that still used fossil fuel.

A favorite tactic of those opposing change is to point things like this out and pretend these people have a choice.  One airplane flight is multiple times worse than a daily commute but even environmentally focused individuals fly on planes.  They have no choice if they want to work in today's society.  Of course, this does look hypocritical and some look worse than others but it really goes back to the inevitability of everything.

Because humanity is a virus.

At the end of the Matrix and humanity has defeated the robots (sorry for a 20-year-old spoiler for those who haven't seen it did you really think the robots would win?), the hero says the following:

I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

We cheer this line but the truth is humanity never had a choice and really never will.  The world was doomed the moment we developed big brains and opposable thumbs.  It was all written before we climbed down from the trees.

I am not a religious person but if you look back at the long line of human advancement it could cause you to see the hand of an impish prankster creator leading us to our current state.  Seeds, trees, oil, and gas all existed when we first left Africa.  The path to our current state was inevitable.  We had little choice of where we ended up just like a virus has little choice when it attacks its host.

The only thing real answer is for the host (earth) to outlive its virus (us).

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