Growth is Over... Here Come the Zombies!

I find it fitting that one of the crises converging on us here in Southwestern Ontario is a bedbug epidemic. Some blame climate change (of course), for not producing cold enough winters to kill off the bugs. Others talk about not being allowed to use enough pesticides to keep the bedbugs under control: a direct consequence of whining and lobbying by tree-hugging anti-pesticide environmentalists in this commie-loving province of ours.

I know differently. I know that bedbugs, like all other parasites, have a place in nature. They have a a real ecological purpose and this world wouldn't work properly without them.

The role of parasites

Parasitic and unwanted species aren't evil invaders hell-bent on destruction of God-fearing and meek human beings. Parasitic species are no more desirous of taking over the world than oak trees, tuna fish, or giraffes are. In fact, to believe this to be the case is to not trust that God is running things and that, therefore, the job is yours. This, like all false ideas, is a very tiring way of viewing the world because it simply doesn't work.

The ecological duty of parasites is to clean up waste. These crucial species are a "problem" only when we insist on accumulating so much waste that the parasite population explodes in the food-feeder relationship that provides the basic foundation of ecology. In other words, parasites are only a problem if there is too much waste in the system. The parasites are a symptom of the real problem, not the problem itself.

Inside our bodies, parasitic population explosions result from excess waste resulting from binge carbohydrate eating. Binge carbohydrate eating, in turn, results from psychological trauma of poverty resulting from binge spending. Accumulating heavy metals and other toxins in our bodies because we eat the same small variety of foods day after day, year round, without any natural spring detoxification by eating fresh bitter greens also invites excessive parasite growth.

In a forest, the parasites keep things clean by converting dead plant and animal tissue into soil and nutrient molecules that will be available to new growth and new life. There are parasites specialized to the entire process from dead cells to dead organisms to dead ecosystems.

In fact, whenever there's an excess of dead material or unused resources in any complex system because there is a significant change of circumstances (such as when a watershed is depleted, the ecosystem becomes arid, and the oak forest becomes "redundant"), you'll observe a rapid spread of what we identify as some kind of parasitic disease. Being modern humans, and therefore preoccupied with conservation of the monetary value of the forest resource, most of us will focus entirely on trying to keep the parasites from spreading, without understanding that the real cause of the phenomenon is over and done with and the parasite population is only there to take away the now-obsolete parts of the system from before, when it was a different kind of system.

The parasites will do their thing, regardless. They'll wait, and the moment they're able, the population will explode again. This is the Law of Life.

How waste is central to our way of life

The phenomenon of parasitic behaviour takes place in all complex systems, including - and especially - the economy. In fact, our global monetary system is based on waste production, because it is fundamentally based on competition for resources.

Competition is inherently wasteful. In a cooperative situation, everyone has a unique contribution to the whole, and as they contribute more, they become more unique and gain more beneficial abilities to give to their community. In competition, however, every individual competes for the one very best role... and then only one wins. The rest lose, and the effort they put into the competition is wasted effort. They move along in failure and disappointment, and compete again for the next-best position.

All that wasted effort adds up to a huge energy requirement, because people aren't meeting their basic needs in the direct ways that they could. Instead, we're all gambling on the long-shot of winning the competition for the highest positions of power. This is what the whole monetary system is based upon. And all along the way, in every competition, every transaction, there is waste and inefficiency that converts into a promise to pay interest on future labour. That interest filters down the funnel into the hungry maws of the parasites. The richest of the rich.

For over 99% of the history of humankind we lived as low-density foragers or farmers in egalitarian communities of no more than a few dozen people. Everyone knew everyone else personally, like extended family members. If you didn't like someone, you couldn't fire him or join a support group to complain about people like him. You just had to suck it up.

Each human produced an amount of power equivalent to about 1/20 horsepower per year. From this base of undifferentiated societies requiring very tiny amounts of energy, the development of complex cultural systems was, to say the least, highly unlikely.

But the cultural story handed out to the world for the lifetime of everyone alive today teaches something very different. It teaches us that evolution (or creation, if you prefer) has had a direction and destination all along, which is for human society to move toward greater complexity until we reach some point of technological perfection at which time evolution/creation can come to an end because we've taken our place as gods of the universe.

In this view of human history, we've seen increasing social complexity as a desirable thing, and the logical result of surplus food, leisure time, and human creativity. But there's something unexplained about this very recent and very vast increase of complexity in human society; why did 99% of our history function sustainably on 1/20 horsepower per year, and the last 1% of our history rocket us up to a point where we depend for our survival on the production of 25,000 horsepower per year for every woman, man and child on the planet (2008 global average)? Doesn't this monstrous energy demand of the human race indicate some kind of conflict with that vision of our angelic perfection above the natural world?

If we modern humans are so shit-hot, why do we need 500,000 times more than normal energy production to maintain our wondrous technological existence?

We've been tricked into creating waste just to feed the parasites

Our natural birthright as human communities belonging in the Community of Life is a resource management system called the "gift economy" or "sharing economy." Natural human societies, based on the laws of physics as carried through the ecological laws of energy management and into our very brain structure, function by this gift economy. In natural human groups, which are tribe-sized and comprise no more than about a hundred people, typically everyone knows everyone else in a familial, very personal way. There is no barter or commercial trade within these communities. Instead, social status is gained by being liked the most.

How do you get people to like you? You give them thoughtful presents. You care about them. You show them that you understand them and accept their quirks and that they are each and every one of them valuable human beings. You most certainly do not take all the food or other resources for yourself and threaten to imprison or kill your tribesmen should they take what "belongs" to you. Anyone who would do such a thing is an obvious sicko, a major detriment to peace and harmony in the community. A threat. An abomination, even.

In the gift economy, there's a huge amount of sharing. Everyone is as cooperative as possible. This makes people feel good. This allows human beings to "work" an average of two hours a day or less. The rest of the time is spent napping and partying it up. It's one, long gossip-fest and orgy. (One can dream)

The global financial system is designed not to benefit humanity, but to benefit the richest of the rich leaders of humanity, the owners of the banks of the world - a very tiny number of people, indeed. The remainder of civilized society is relegated to two roles: bondsmen and slaves. Bondsmen willingly give up their freedom in exchange for being dominant over the rest of the population in competition not for the very best positions, but for the better of the crappy, rich-people's-latrine-cleaning positions. The rest of the population, about 80% of us, gives up its freedom as well... but only because we have no idea how else to get along. We cannot get our basic necessities of life without getting and spending money to do so. We must compete for those "scarce resources."

The parasites of our society are the leaders, the richest of the rich. (You just have to Google "Who runs the world?" to get their names) They're those who play highest stakes in the money game, and are vastly rich and powerful not because of their good looks, their kindness, their high intelligence, their helpfulness to humanity... but simply because they go along and clean up all the bits and pieces left over when the rest of us throw all our energy (which is a vast amount of energy compared to that of gift economies) at "competing for limited resources (money)." They are the parasites.

Nature prevails

The laws of physics remain intact. People who understand finance usually don't understand physics - or at least don't want to - because otherwise they would comprehend the resource limitations that stare them in the face and would seek out some other way of doing things. After all, "unsustainable" means "the party will be over one of these days, buddy, and nobody likes you." However, parasites don't plan for the future this way. The richest of the rich in this world are no more preparing for resource depletion and the end of money than flies who lay maggot eggs plan for the depletion of rotting meat in a garbage bag.

While it's true that people who understand finance don't understand physics, it's also true that those of us who understand physics tend not to understand finance very well. That's the makeup of many of those of us who play the game of "low-finance:" trying to make a better world by earning our living through more conscious means such as providing local food, supporting local community resilience, and creating charitable organizations. We sweat and strain and struggle and sacrifice to scoop out these little areas of peace and harmony within the vast world of financial corruption. But we can only do so as long as we make enough money to pay for our survival and our extra giving. Which puts us right back into the competition game.

The monetary economy is based on fundamentally-inhumane and antisocial behaviours that always lead to collapse. Money-focused lives are lives dedicated to collapse. This is not living. This is undeadness. People who are undead are called zombies.

Nature does not respond to economic forces; it's the other way around. The global financial system has entered into the increasingly-violent oscillation that precedes a crash of the system.

It's as though world finance is a great big roller coaster ride, heading up the mountain to Human-God-Techno-Utopia, where we, the glorious human race, will eventually take our place as the rulers of the universe.

Only the train has started sputtering. With each stall, the machine slips precariously backward down the cliffside until last-minute deals and bailouts lurch the train forward again. The passengers exhale and relax back in their velvet-covered seats and return their attention to the entertainment and gossip magazines. Not many notice that the only thing coughing that train back to life anymore is the jumper cables hooked up to the nipples of zombie politicians who just pedal a bit faster for a few moments in electric jolt. They scrape a bit more fuel from the structure of the train itself to throw into the furnace. A bit more ether. Drop another car off to roll away back to oblivion.

How to know who the zombies are

Zombies are people who are interested in money instead of true value such as food, love, joy, and meaning. They act in ways that look like gift economy, but are fundamentally monetary. Zombies do not share and care; their primary interest is to compete and to waste the efforts of everyone else so that they can have more.

You can recognize zombies by fake-gift behaviours:

•     Giving money as a gift
•     Wanting no gifts except money
•     Giving everyone the same gift
•     Regifting, or, even worse, giving a gift back to you
•     Selling a gift for money
•     Complaining about a gift for not being worth enough money or not being as big a gift as someone else was given
•     Boasting about a gift they gave to someone
•     Claiming that you owe a gift
•     Giving too generous a gift
•     Keeping a gift a secret
•     Demanding that children or marriage partners pay back the gifts of food, shelter, etc
•     Trivial, cheap, or high-maintenance gifts
•     Giving a gift to get one in return
•     Claiming that their gift to you is not doing something mean to you
•     Demanding payment for a gift
•     Reprimanding you for not holding onto or properly using a gift they gave you
•     ... and any other fake or icky-feeling "generosity"

Zombies aren't capable of generosity

Zombies don't have the ability to give or receive real gifts because they're trying desperately to fill a deep, burning hunger. That hunger is for fulfillment and meaning, which they desperately lack. Zombies attempt to satisfy this hunger with dollars. At best, if you are hungry and you eat dollars, you will feel like crap. Certainly your hunger will continue and even intensify, because you're filled with dollars instead of fulfillment and meaning.

Just as we don't demand that our children pay their share of the mortgage or pay us back for the food and clothing we "gave" them when they were small, we do not demand that our friends and valued community members pay us back for the food we shared from the garden or the time we babysat their kids... because this is psychotic, socially-maladaptive behaviour. People who behave this way have something wrong with them. It is against the Law of Life and therefore evolutionarily maladaptive to hoard resources for yourself at the expense of your immediate family/clan (around a dozen people) and tribe (up to around 100 people). In 99% of human history, after failed attempts at rehabilitation, such people would be handled like the zombies that they are; they would be shunned and avoided. They would have no social status, and therefore they would be very poor.

People who don't fit into a thriving human community, who make the motions but muddle through their existence focused entirely on getting their next dose of heroin or dollars to kill the hunger pains, are not really living. They're zombies.

Most of us are (at least partially) zombies

I'm sure you're familiar with many of the items on the list of zombie behaviours - maybe even tried a few of those tricks yourself. That's because our modern culture largely comprises psychotic, socially-maladaptive people. Yes, most of us are zombies.

The higher up the social pyramid you are, the more of a zombie you're likely to be... because the higher up you are on the status pyramid, the farther away from reality you are. Your peers aren't friends and tribesmen. They're other mercenaries who aren't capable of caring about you enough to sacrifice themselves for your benefit. When your death is announced, they'll scrabble amongst themselves to compete for the resources it will free up.

Why and how the zombies came into being

Zombie cult history begins with zombie Cain clubbing human Abel to death just to gain another few acres from which to hoard resources. "Why should I worry about Abel?" asked Cain. "Who am I, his caretaker? Jeez. Back off! I've got resource-hoarding to do!"

This, of course, took place after Cain's parents ate from the gods' tree in the Garden of Eden and became undead zombies themselves, cursed to walk the Earth searching for ever-increasing amounts of forests to chop, fisheries to collapse, oil to drill for, and brains to eat. Over thousands of years, the zombies have inexorably taken over West and then East until the whole planet was covered with zombies. The undead population grew by 14,000% in the process. (Tribal peoples continue to maintain tiny, sustainable popluations, and we freemen are minuscule in population so far)

Right now the entire global financial system is in the ever-more-violent wobble that precedes the crash of a soulless machine that has accellerated beyond the structural integrity and energy supply of that system. The world's money is primarily made of debt - promises to pay - and not out of anything of value. This has been going on for a few decades such that everyone has lost track of just how much money is based on actual value and how much is based on promises to pay interest in interest on interest on other promises to pay interest to nobody-knows-who.

While this dreamland of "vast wealth" has been playing out over the lifetime of everyone now alive, most of us have forgotten, had it trained out of us before we got to school even, that human beings do not need money to live.

We need food. We need clean, whole food. Food that comes from dirt. Clean, whole dirt.

The zombiest of among us are those so far beyond understanding this that we cannot tolerate a life centred around something so disgusting as dirt, manure, compost, and <shudder> worms, insects and fungi. Isn't that stuff the responsibility of country people? Not we, the people who hold this world together by sophisticated, complex, urgent activities such as "person-centred transition facilitation,"  "customer experience enhancement consulting," "molecular genetic pediatric otolaryngology," or "systematic high-frequency multi-asset block box trading." We are too important to dabble in the filth of Nature!

Waking up and smelling the smoking ruins

In the world of cultural complexity there's no free lunch. In the days before fossil fuel subsidies, increasing the complexity of a society usually meant that the majority of its population had to work harder. Throughout history, the stresses and challenges that human populations have faced have often been resolved by becoming more complex.

But greater complexity demands greater supplies of energy - cannot take place without it. So, for 99% of our history, we human beings lived with way less complexity. We just gave each other gifts and if people didn't return those gifts or hoarded resources, we knew they were zombies and that we should not form relationships with them. They disappeared in sad, lonely, evolutionary maladaptation. Life moved on.

And then there was an increase in the energy supply due to agricultural production at the end of the last ice age, and the population started to grow beyond the tribe's limitations. The parasites came into their own.

Global energy supply first began increasing dramatically in the time when Columbus (among others) sailed the seas and brought back gold and slaves and - most importantly - vast new areas of land to be exploited by the mother countries. This massive influx of new energy (in the form of acreage, timber, fisheries, slaves and so on) had the prompt effect of creating far greater complexity in European society.

The new, much more sophisticated, society had a much greater parasitic appetite for money and power, and, like Zombie Cain in the olden days, didn't just expand into "empty" areas and increase its wealth that way: it began deliberately destroying existing cultures all over the world. Zombies were born to do the mindless work of conquering human (and all other) life for the sake of pure, soulless profit.

Indian removal was one phrase for it. Colonialism and (religious) conversion were others. The hungry European zombies weren't in search of new sources of yummy nutrition like potatoes and maize, or new sources of friendship, knowledge, and cultural diversity. Now they had developed a need for power far beyond the 1/20 horsepower per year needed for a healthy, sustainable existence. Now it was slaves, new gold, great timber forests, vast cotton plantations that they sought.

Everyone needed in on the game. The middle class expanded so that most people could trade in stocks and financial instruments and the modern banking system was born. This led to corporatization of everything and everyone and all the people were declared dead, lost at sea, and converted, instead to corporate personhood. We were dead but still moving and consuming. We were undead. We were zombies.

By the 20th Century, the demand for power had increased to a purified heroin-style infusion on intravenous and World War I was fought between European zombies to gain control of the power supply of the Middle East. In 1913 the zombies took over every right we have by creating the birth certification process and the central banking cartel so that our governments are no longer by the people for the people; they are owned and directed by private corporations. Onward and upward!

The machine has run out of gas

There's been no more land to conquer for centuries. There have been no more forests to raze or cultures to conquer and enslave for decades. And now the purest heroin (cheap oil) has run out and all that's left is a diminishing supply of increasingly crappy oil that is hard to extract - especially for zombies. Cause zombies aren't all that smart.

Zombies are not going to wake up and smell the smoking ruins. Most zombies are going to keep on doing exactly what parasite-led zombiedom has been doing since the time of Zombie Cain: they're going to try harder to get their heroin. And where are they going to try and get it from?

From you.

Lishui's Zombie Repellent Formula

Garlic is a good zombie repellant, as are all fresh, medicinal, whole foods straight from the Earth. A great way to keep zombies at bay is to create a camouflage around yourself by looking like a self-sufficient human being who gets by on 1/20 horsepower per year:

• give people useful, appropriate gifts that don't make them feel like they're jerks because they can't pay you back
• wear the same two or three good-quality, functional sets of clothing all the time, make your own repairs, and wash your clothes by hand
• speak using a full range of human language, rather than filling the soundscape up with "like, um," "lol," and "omg ur a tard"
• have short fingernails and callouses on your hands, and prominently display your willingness to plunge them into dirt at a moment's notice, eschewing hand sanitizers and recoiling from the touch of disposable handi-wipes
• blow your nose on a cloth handkerchief, and then put it back into your pocket. Better yet, pinch it off into the bushes and wipe your fingers on your pants.
• prominently display practical non-electric hand tools in and around your home: spinning wheel, wood-burning stove with cauldron, tackhammer, loom, sawhorses, bow and arrow: items whose value can only be realized by application of human labour
• make a public display of eating food right off of trees, shrubs, vines, and out of the ground. Include such foods as day lilies from in front of the city library, burdock root, wild currants, and nasturtiums. For serious situations, consider beheading a chicken and plucking it on your front lawn.
• know how to heal your own sickness and injury and be loud about it, having no over-the-counter medications available, and instead having mysterious bottles filled with homemade herbal tinctures
• sport bare feet anywhere and everywhere, three-quarters of the time
• give all government enforcement zombies the response: "Prove to me that I do not have the right to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness and prove it within 21 days or be prepared to pay my fee of one million dollars for bothering me,"
• retaliate erratically

and, most zombie-repelling of all

• show no interest in money. Especially other people's money.