I charge humanity with stupidity, try it, find it guilty, and sentence it to live with the consequences.
There, in one breath I have said what needed to be said.
This week-end I concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity is, collectively speaking, stupid beyond redemption. I went to see a really, really bad movie this week-end (“The Holidays”—please, save your money) and walked away in the middle of it because it was so bad. I had to return eventually because I was not alone in the theatre, but I had to get away for just a little time. I wandered into “Apocolypto” at the height of the dramatic plot of the movie—the time where the protagonist was about to get sacrificed to some deity but at the last minute was pulled out because an ominous event occurred (I won’t spoil it for you) and he got a temporary reprieve. He managed to escape being killed as target practice and got back into the jungle, where he was pursued by said captors. At that point I left the theater and returned to “The Holidays”, a decision I quickly came to regret.
“The Holidays” is hands-down the worst movie ever released. The characters were empty, vapid, plastic, lacking any and all depth. The script was plodding, pedestrian, and insulting to just about anyone’s intelligence (though Hollywood has never lost a dime betting on the stupidity of a movie; see the opening sentence). Yet it has been reviewed positively, consistently so, by people who should know better (eg: film critics, et al.). The audience for the most part seemed to like it. I couldn’t believe how bad it was. [I felt the same way about “There’s Something about Mary” too, but that is not on the block at the moment.] Most of the time I kept my eyes closed and tried to sleep, as it made the whole experience a little easier to bear.
Now after seeing twenty minutes of “Apocolypto” I decided to look into why the Mayans and more generally the Meso-Americans did what they did in terms of human sacrifice. I turned to Google for the answers and came up with some pretty wild stuff. Apparently the Mayans at one point believed that if they didn’t sacrifice warriors to various gods, reality itself would fall apart. The deadline was once every 52 years; if you didn’t give the gods enough in the way of human souls and blood, at the end of the current 52 year cycle, reality would come apart and everyone would die, or worse. Other lesser gods wanted human blood and souls too, just in a less-grand scale.
Now this idea didn’t last long but the fact that it came about at all is as much evidence as one needs of the stupidity of the human race. I suppose no one, not even the warriors, some of whom willingly went to the sacrificial altar, considered the fact that quite obviously for a very, very long time prior to the arrival of this idea, 52-year cycles had been coming and going all without the End of Reality showing up. Yet somehow a civilization that came up with the concept of “zero” before anyone else, a calendar and heavenly-body-tracking system that put the Greeks and probably even the ancient Egyptians to shame, and a rich and varied system of urban organization also came to believe that you had to kill lots of people just to keep reality going. Yeah, that makes sense.
Now it would be a different matter if what we were talking about was an otherwise benign ritual. Those same ancient Egyptians sacrificed as well, but they sacrificed animals and bread (which is where modern Christianity most assuredly gets the idea from). Now I am not saying sacrificing animals is a good thing. What I am saying is that at least they were not sacrificing members of their own society – ones that in fact served an important practical function. But just when you may conclude that the whole system was designed primarily as a means of disposing of captured enemy warriors (as indeed, many such people were sacrificed) or perhaps as a deterrent to cowardice in battle, the next historical fact leaps from the page: cities at one point willingly agreed to fight wars with each other just to capture one another’s warriors to be sacrificed to the gods, often the same gods as were worshipped in the city the captives came from. Failing that they picked from their own ranks and butchered them.
This is now where you pass from “bizarre, incomprehensible lack of critical thinking skills” to “just plain insane, stupid, and unforgivably sociopathic”.
As if to make matters worse, there are even to this day people who defend what went on back then as being “culturally advanced” and would readily condemn someone like me as being “insensitive, Eurocentric, etc., etc.” Let me restate the facts here:
Human sacrifice was practiced aggressively for the purposes, apparently, of keeping reality going. Failing anyone more dispensable to sacrifice to the gods, entire cities colluded to trade warrior-victims to sacrifice for fear that the world would “stop” if they didn’t kill enough of them. Many of the victims themselves rather got into the idea of being sacrificed and went along with this program willingly, believing, without any apparent proof, that to die in this fashion would guarantee a really cool afterlife.
To condemn this behavior is “insensitive”?
Now this is not the most recent example of this kind of insanity. In fact there are numerous such examples in the history of the human race prior to the Mayans, and very many afterward (need I mention the usual cast of characters?). Quite arguably, similar examples of such nutsery are on-going today.
Nothing quite so dramatic as “decoronated” Mayan warriors need be cited to show the inexorably stupid tendencies of humanity, however. I can’t even begin to list them all. And I would be inclined to cite ways in which human societies have done some fairly enlightened things as some measure of vindication. However these enlightened events occur as small glimmers in the landscape of stupidity. Like a bear market, the overall trend is most definitely downward.
I wouldn’t find the whole thing quite as disturbing if I only knew for certain the entire thing was a practical joke being played on us by some sort of alien scientist. But that would be stupid.
