Here is just a little speculative essay based on my disciplines in history and sociology. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

First of all, it should be noted that there are 2 dominant theories about the “emergence” of ADHD. Psychiatrists assume that ADHD has always existed, it obviously didn’t evolve in the 1980s, however, since about 2% of adults have ADHD, the question arose if it was part of the neurotypology of mankind, just a variety of normal, or some kind of “other” neurology. It’s debated quite hotly whether alternative neurologies, such as autism, adhd, bipolar, etc… are abnormal or malfunctioning brains, or simply part of the spectrum of natural neurologies. One school argues that ADHD actually represents the “norm” for humans. There is an argument that essentially all humans were impulsive, exploratory, creative, impatient, and strongly emotional, with personal initiative.

The imperfect identification of genetic markers that might demonstrate of genetic cause of ADHD has lead archaeo-geneticists, who get their DNA from the teeth of fossils, and who rarely can get enough to do any testing, so the sampling is quite limited, to test for such conditions in the ancient past. THe findings are striking.

The prevalence of the markers representing what geneticists believe are the neuro transmitter related “aberrations” is MUCH higher in the past. In fact, as high as 80-90%.

Try to think now about what characterizes what we call “attention deficit”. High energy, impulsiveness (exploration), creativity, and volatile emotional states. Including a tendency to anxiety and worry in general. Now, consider life, pre 10,000BC (shortly before the advent of ‘civilization’).

Meandering in groups, moving from shelter to shelter, possibly in makeshift temporary buildings, travelling with the natural migrations of food (delicious mutton!), no groups larger than a hundred people. No clothes. No permanent buildings. No domesticated animals.

It’s theorized based on textual evidence in the earliest civilizations in the near east that Kingship did not exist before civilization. This is… shaky evidence at best, but let’s assume for amoment there were no kings pre 10,000 BC. Groups probably didnt’ need kings (permanent, autocrats, with hereditary power). The differentiation of any social group included very few specialized jobs, and food provided no surplus to support full time craftsmen, artisans, artists, and so on.

Explain the need for the kind of “Attention” that neuro-typical people have. There is none. The amount of work required to subsist is only about 2 or 3 hours a day. The rest of the waking day is free. What to apes do when not looking for food? They play. Fight. Explore. Joke. Groom. Socialize. None of these skills requires the sort of “attention” that NT people exhibit. Presume humans are a kind of ape (that shouldnt’ be hard). SOme of our primate cousins are more curious than others. There is a type of monkey (i wish i coudl remember which) that is so curious, ti actually frequently endangers its life. It literally can not avoid going into any hole it sees. Its been tested repeatedly. Any place you can stick your hand into, or travel into, it will do that. It’s actually kind of envious

Now, evolution is interesting. It produces things at random, and beneficial things tend to predominate. However, things that evolve which do not give any benefit, or any detriment, can also persist. So imagine that “Adhd” is either natural, and beneficial, or, a mutation, but totally harmless in a society without writing, without school, without “jobs” of any kind. And its prevalence balooned to 80-90% of people alive.

Now picture the catastrophic change from pre-pastoralism to agreculture. Gathering fat grass seeds started after the final ice age. But planting those grasses took more time. Permanent settlement followed. One theory is that it was to protect the grass plants from herbivores. But the result was garbage heaps that continued to grow, and attract carnivores, like pigs and dogs. Which in turn were domesticated. Former pray animals like sheep and goats and cows could be fenced in and kept around, fed the grasses that were planted. Food provided a surplus that continued to grow, and soon people could actually work on other things than surviving, full time. The population increased, and the NEED for someone to spend their whole day making tools for everyone else increased. The need to have experts in building buildings, fences, twine, etc… developed. Some people were better at it than others. Society differentiated into people who were broadly more interested in one task over another. Maybe people shared work, but eventually, you have in mesopotamia, a civilization emerge.

the term “civilization” is used to connote a society that lives in a permanent, urban, setting. The earliest cities are on the euphrates, in the north. 8,000 BC, the land there was still very fertile and lush, not just by the river, but in what is now desert. Quickly, the settlements attracted copycats in the south of what is now iraq. By 5,000 BC, iraq and syria were dotted with cities, small things, with populations of a few thousand people.

Picture urban life in ancient iraq. There are a few times of year when strenuous effort is required to survive. Much moreso than before. CLimbing mountains and fording rivers is hard work, but, digging trenches and planting seeds for grass, (wheat, barley, etc..) takes all day. morning to evening. more than one day, in a row. Long work, boring work, and totally contrary to the nature of someone with ADHD. it requires focus.

In many agrecultural societies that planted and harvested as a community, rather than on large individual farms (As is the western pattern now), there are interesting glimpses as to how this boring work was made interesting enough. Planting songs are common around the world. Rhythmic music makes the repeated task a kind of game. Atually, its very similar to “biofeedback” therapy for adhd, where a rythm is produced, and you move your body in sync with the rhythm, swining your arms and touching a sensor on your hip ni time with the beet.

imagine singing, and reaching into an animal skin sack for a seed, and then pushing the seed into the ground, taking one step back, and repeating the task. A simple rythm might make the whole labor a kind of enjoyable hypnosis, where the song takes your focus.

Then there’s the harvest. cutting the grass down, separating the seeds from the chaff, grinding the seeds, and eventually, making bread, beer, and other “civilized” delights. Again, that time is very labor intensive. You have to stay in one place for large periods of time to separate wheat from chaff, and then to grind it. A lot of sitting, a lot of repeated tasks.

Furthermore, in mesopotamia, which was watered by irregular floods of the rivers (unlike in egypt, which essentially has the same flood level every year), in order to maximize low floods, and prevent damage from high floods, an intricate network of the first irrigation system and dam system was established. These projects took weeks to complete, and were pure manual labor from start to finish. However, in order that the irrigation and dams not be haphazard, but actually mutually beneficial, some degree of planning was required. Some “planning” class emerged. If only temporarily, and during the “construction” period of the year. But, temporary or no, the first governors of thousands of people at once emerged. People whose ingenuity, insight, creativity and intelligence, personable personality, and other features, meant that either they easily assumed command of the project, or, they were elected. IN either event, the characteristics are those of ADHD. Sure, many people with adhd are not personable. But creativity, humor, and intelligence are common features of ADHD. as is anxiety. Anxiety is, according to modern neurologists, essentially the byproduct of civilization. If you are in a jungle, and you hear a noise, your blood fills with cortisol and adrenaline, your senses highten, your heartrate and respiration quicken, and you listen for lions and bears and things. You are only imagining the possible dangers, in this instance. You heard a noise, so you imagine the variety of animals that might be out there trying to eat you, and listen for signs of all those animals. Your imagination creates a list of potential dangers.

Take this impulse, and place it in a society where walls keep out all predators. Your imagination can imagine other dangers, and become equally anxious about them. In fact, some people are primed to constantly imagine things, and those who are are prone to anxiety. Anxiety is a creative person’s ailment. If you have no imagination, you can’t imagine society rejeccting you, getting diseases, falling down mine shafts, etc. The same feature that causes anxiety also causes forethought. Dangers imagined are dangers prevented. If you can think of everything that MIGHT go wrong, you can take steps so that they might NOT go wrong. Properly managed, the impulse to anxiety is beneficial for leadership.

According to sumerian mythology, the first mythology to be written down, they did not originally have any kingship. The earliest leaders were “managers”. LIterally, like a boss, hired for a task. There are mentions in the oldest legends of the “old men” and the “young men”, who had to agree to things that the earliest kings proposed. A kind of parliament, or at least, an ad hoc committee, where people’s will was consulted. The king was not an autocrat, and he was not permanent.

But imagine that its beneficial, on an evolutionary level, for people to lose their impulse to anxiety who are not leaders. Who will never be leaders. perhaps its beneficial to lose ones major imagination, and constant losing of one’s focus of the task at hand to imagine other things. It would certainly make planting and harvesting easier.

people who can’t focus when planting, it can be imagined, plant less. People who can’t focus when harvesting, it can be imagined, lsoe more grain when threshing, to carelessness, etc. Carelessness is another feature that defines ADHD.

At this point, society was developing the “Western model” of agreculture. Individual ownership of fields, surrounded by fences. A family being responsible for its own food supply, and paying a tax to the temple, which fed the priests, scribes, and king.

Soon, kings were hereditary. In fact, the sumerians greatly emphasized this concept of kingship as having been created at some point in the recent past, and being essentially alien, but beneficial. In myth, kingship was invented in the city of Kish, sometime in the 4th millenium BC or early 3rd millenium.

By 1000 BC, in the last Assyrian period, states were large empires, cities had up to 100,000 people in them, merchants who travelled form place to place, not merely to trade rare goods and crafts, but building entire commercial empires, had evolved. Religious prophets, artists, writers, sculptors, full time artisans, architects, musicians, poets. Everything we have today, except computer engineers, had been developed.

In mathematics, due to the lack of a system of proofs (which evolved later in the Agean), meant that new mathematical concepts came by insight. Individuals with creativity literally had a flash, and then tested their theory with as many possible numbers as they could, and if it held up, they considered it good. Usefulness would be the test, and insight would be the source. New techniques of casting metal developed, by individual mistake, or individual creativity. The adding of carbon to iron to create steel. technology, medicine, mathematics, science, all advanced by individual insight.

After proof theory originated in the aegean, mathematics had a new basis to invent new knowledge, and prove it. Infact, someone who wasnt’ particularly creative could derive a new equation and then prove it, procedurally.

By the 15th century, experimental science was born. by the 18th century, science was systematized into disciplines, experimental procedure was written down, then replicated by other scholars to test results, and observations were codefied mathematically. Infact, mathematics often predicted observations, and then the observations proved the theorizes trajectory of an obeject, or comet, or what have you.

By the 20th century, city sizes had risen to a couple million at their maximum. Large mechanized armies of international empires were organized, like armies had been since roman times, into a large body of professional, volunteer soldiers, who drilled and drilled, lived a regimented existence, and who were lead by the few people who showed insight, energy, and creativty enough to successfully formulate a strategy that did not result in everying being quickly killed.

Scientists were men of discipline, but who still retained great insight. The individual theorist who sat and pondered and then tested their ponderings mathematically is sort of the classic example of the early 20th century scientist.

Most people farmed, or worked long hours in factories or clerical jobs, construction, or other tasks, while a small professional class of lawyers, accountants, administrators, doctors, psychiatrists, bankers, etc.. existed.

Men who touted their lack of education ran multimillion dollar empires, built on personal initiative, ruthless exploitation, and individual creativity.

BUT, the vast majority of people had “attention”, meaning, they were able to have extremely boring, sedentary existences without crawling out of their skin. Tha thad been the pattern in civilization for the last 8-10,000 years.

Today, the prevalence of ADHD in entrepreneurs and the wealtheist americans is significantly statistically higher than in the general population. Among politicians, despite their long work schedule and difficult lives, ADHD is also significantly higher than the general population. Energetic, able to switch tasks rapidly, leading people reather than waiting to be told wht to do, etc… seems natural.

Among artists, and leading scientists, again, ADHD is significantly above the general population.

However, the future is bleak. Adhd now represents 2% of the population (as adults). Clearly, the trend is to eliminate ADHD.

And what takes over, if that particular characteristic is eliminated? Well, natural selection is a funny thing. Society is now more productive in terms of food than ever before. only 5% of people work on farms, and provide food for the other 95%, including a large surplus. Society has systematized farming to the point where unskilled workers who simply follow schedules provided by managers of factory farms can provide all the food we need. Despite vast technological gains in agreculture, the farmers themselves, and producers of milk, meat, fruit, etc, are less experienced and less educated in those fields than at any point in histoyr.

Humans work longer hours than at any point in history. On average, susbsistence labor in the amazon basin is 3 hours a day. In north america, its 10+ hours a day, depending whose estimates you go with. Some are as high as 15 hours a day.

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, when factory workers worked 12-16 hour days, 90% of people worked on farms. Farms are labor intensive, but in phases. There are long periods of down time. So the average was much lower than today.

Anyhow. Society has invented an agrecultural machine that needs little ingenuity to run.

In science, the development of the think tank has given way to the “research industry”. The purpose of the research industry is to, procedurally, test everything. Gradually, to accumulate knowledge, in a very uncreative, plodding way. it’s almost like a system that is trying to count to infinity. It just ads one, then one, then one. And its able to provide results, with large teams of people, that previously 1 individual, insightful scientist could have provided on his own. A huge team of 50+ people can do the work of 1 truly insightful person, using the “precedures” of research, and get the same results.

In finance, the systems of accounting controls that have been developed over the 20th century have resulted in a corporate existence we take for granted. You can’t get something that’s not on the menu if you go to macdonalds. If you talk to the billings department at a phone company, they dont’ ahve the authority to change your bill. THey have to refer up to their manager. INdividuals don’t have any initiative, because corporations trust their accountants, who tell them that they lose money when people make their own decisions. instead, decisions are made by a few acocuntants, which are then written down, and disseminated in a handbook of policies, that everyone follows. There is some leeway, but you’ve probably been frustrated by the lack of empathy and creativity many times when dealing with the lowest evel of a corporation. Poeople who perform a perfunctory task, unable to stray from the limited dictates of their job and make decisions.

In this respect, society hs created a “system” for maintaining and growing its wealth. one moving further from individual initiative, and towards a group of technical specilaists, uncreatively developing controls in response to numerical data on a page. I used to be an accountant, so i’ve participated in this process. It requires no creativity. You literally look at the balance sheets, the departmental reports, and say “they are spending x dollars. In order to make it y dollars, we should take this away, or that away”.

Gradually, technology has reduced the use of creative people. And reduced the creativity of the average person at the same time.

Now, all of what i’ve said should predict that, gentically, humanity undergoes a change from one kind of thing to another kind of thing, about 10 thousand years ago. If my theory is correct, there should be some evidence.

Well, despite people thinking taht we’ve “Arrested” evolution by our sanitation and medicine, the truth is that humanity’s genome has changed more in the last 10,000 years than in the previous 50,000 years before that. This is the finding of archaeo-geneticists.

HUmanity underwent an evolutionary leap at the beginning of agreculture.

This also predicts that people who live in isolated genetic populations, in the amazon basin, on small pacific islands, etc., who have not developed any particularly intense agreculture, should have a higher prevalence of ADHD. Well, when placed taken from “the jungle” and placed in a modern society, this is exactly what is found. A tendency to have problems staying on task.

it’s now more beneficial to survival, for industrial people, to not have ADHD. ADHD is problematic today.

Another separate but interesting notion is that creative people tend to like more elaborate expressions of creativity. A swiss study on humor found that people who were more creative were more likely to prefer absurd and surreal humor, whereas people who were personally uncreative preferred humor that dealt with stock situations, and stereotypes. Familiar things. Unfamiliar things were simply confusing.

Artists often lament how everything seems to be getting worse, tv is worse, films are worse, music is worse, etc. But the question i put to you is, in the future, assuming this entirely speculative essay above, will there be any artists? Will there be any need for art? I sort of envision a future where “art” is produced procedurally, like food, finance, research, etc. Where generic and uncreative people work in teams of 100 to write sitcoms by some manual or instruction set. That they completely lack any humor, but that the average person merely recognizes it as meant to be funny, and laughs. That kind of person would not only ACTUALLY find it funny, but NOT find funny anything we find funny.

Someone looking at some uninspired panting of a house, or a tree, loving it, ebcause it depicts, as realistically as possible, something familiar, unable to like anything modestly abstract or stylized. The definition of a good artist would shift, to someone who can be uncreative. Increasingly, creative producers of ingenious and authentic experience would fail to reach people, until they no longer exist.

Can the future be so bleak? What will th enext 1000 years hold for humanity?

What if the evolution continues to the point where humans literally become dumb animals, pulling the one lever that it is itheir job to pull, every day, without knowing why, or understanding how it affects anyone or anything, yet always having food, and clothes. until eventually, people are too dumb to know how to repair anyhting, and the system of automatons following their small perfunctory task, starts to starve…

anyhow… just some pure speculation and adolescent simplicity of thought. But fun nonetheless.

My teenage years

Check out this old map i drew when i was 19

Trumpuant old bratriarchs did aplutarp their friends,
when astrogothic misanlips were worply on the mend.
So Mantagorianius and Vilkar of the North,
extrafoluated, and on their horses sallied forth.
“Grelhere” he snaped his miterfork, grelhering all the while,
“I grelhere to utmost max, and yet perforce grelhere in style.”
The Bulwark of the North, Vilkar, was mightily impressed,
and on a wooden table top he scribed little vest,
a pair of slacks, and borlant straps to keep them all athwaite.
Maltruviantic periworts began to integrate
themselves into the dia-gram of gramo-dia-cloths,
the type defined by treaty as those victimized by moths,
the type that, when encountered carved upon a table top
must hastily erasured-be by table ‘rasing cops.
The force of table ‘rasers raced their tabular tontoons
toward the little sketch of vest and straps and pantaloons,
but Mantagorianius rose high his sabre’s spear!
And shouted in a voice both soft and low and high and clear,
“Dear sirs! Grelhere, grelhere at once, don’t rantipariate!
These scribbled scrabbles scrumbled ‘pon this table here of late
are little more than dendrophagographic vest-i-ments,
And gazing ‘pon them suddenly not 15 moments hence
you shall not see these clothes, defined by law as heinous things!
But wait and wait, vesperiate, ’till the moment-weasel sings!”
Waited they amongst the tables on the table trees,
A whistling, sitting deep in saddles, leaning at their ease,
until the weasel weaseled out to sing his weasel song.
Some moments had transpired, 15 full and aptly long.
Turning they their gazes down to oculate but good,
there somehow all the clothing drawn had eaten all the wood.
So Mantagorianius and Vilkar of the North
excused themselves from Hepstiburt and Amilcar the 4th,
those Erasing Cops who had this afternoon enforced
the dictates of the Lemon-Man their matriarch divorced.

You’ve heard the legends say that if you leave here, don’t look back,
keep facing to your destination down the trodden track,
don’t hearken to the snigglements of Periworts behind,
or turning round you’ll view a sight to nullify your mind!
Facing you a riddle whose solution no one knows…
why Maltruviantic Perwirorts are wearing little clothes

DUUUN DUUUUN DUUUUUUN!

As a university student, i remember this debate and how frustrating it was to get basic concepts across to people who just knew how to parrot the lines they have been fed. THis is true i guess for all controversies and conflicts, but this one raises my ire more than most. They argue that bank notes have no intrinsic value, that they only have value because people agree they have value, and that they are “based on nothing.” Its just paper with images printed on it. Gold, however, has intrinsic value, and a certain weight of gold is worth a certain amount. Objectively. Without referrence o anything else, gold has a value.

The problems with this concept are apparent immediately.

1) Gold has no intrinsic value. its just a lump of yellow metal, soft and heavy. Humans ascribe it value based partially on its visual attractiveness, partly on its utility as a non corrodible substance, and partly on its assumed rarity (gold ain’t so rare as people assume).
2) The value of gold is determined by what you can get in trade for it. For instance, 3 oxen for 1 gold coin. Or say, 160$ in bank notes for 1 gold coin. As a coin, its a medium of exchange, more valuable as a coin than as a metal for casting ornaments. Because as a coin, it has symbolic value. It symbolizes the ability to attain any goods you desire.
3) metal coins are surprisingly easy to counterfeit
4) Their value is not set, but rather, fluctuates like the values of all goods and currencies.

It should be apparent even to the most ardent supporter of a great leap backwards in currency to a fictional past where the use of gold as the basis for money meant that no one was ever poor, the economies of the world didn’t boom and collapse, and you knew that your money was REALLY worth something.

Consider this: A bank note is worth a specific weight in gold, and you can exchange your note for that gold. This is the concept of a gold based currency. Now consider this. Your bank note is worth a specific amount of chocolate, and you can exchange it for that amount of chocolate. I can take 1$ and get 49 grams of chocolate at any convenience store. what’s so special about gold? i can already spend 1$ and get a specific amount of gold. The fallacy is that by basing the value of the dollar on a certain weight of gold, you have a set value fo the dollar. Since the value of gold changes, however, based on its supply among other things, the value of the dollar is also fluctuating. Based on the cost of goods fluctuations, a certain amount of gold won’t have the same relative value to various goods, and so, in no way is currency based on gold any different than currency not based on gold. Ultimately, its only value is as a symbol we use to represent the conceptual value of goods and services.

Because what is money? Its a representation of labor. 1 unit of labor is worth 10 units of milk. 1 unit of labor is worth 2 units of bread. 1 unit of labor is worth 20 units of bottled water. We are exchanging our labor for goods and services, and rather than going into a store and saying “I worked 45 hours this week, i’d like to transfer my hours of work at 10/hr to your work storange facility, and gather food in your aisles in exchange,” we use money.

How does gold or silver currency differ? In no regard. Silver only has value in what it can buy, same as paper notes. Why was silver used as the basis for coinage? because it was rare enough that the market would not flood with counterfeit currency, its alloys were all easy to spot, and becusae people BELIEVED it was valuable.

That’s the real magic trick. In the past, people BELIEVED that only a currency based on a metal was a REAL currency. When Diocletian tried to move to a different system, making coins only a percentage silver, mixed with tin, people felt that the coins had decreased in value, and there was inflation. We know today that a nickle has no nickle in it, but we still believe its worth 1 wine gum, 1/5th of a gumball, etc. In the modern world when we moved from a currency based on gold to one not based on gold, we did not have massive inflation and economic ruin. We began a period of great economic prosperity. Why? Because people had been using bank notes for centuries, and were so far removed from actual metal coins that they no longer had to IMAGINE that gold or silver were part of the equation. The paper retained its symbolic value, which was abstracted from the symbolic value of the gold. One symbol replaced another.

To recap:
1) Gold has no intrinsic value. God does not decree that one oz of gold will be worth 10 oxen for all history. There is no edict from heaven on the exact prices of all things in relation to one another. Money based on gold is subject to the vissisitudes of gold price fluctuations, and can’t be divorced from those massive fluctuations.
2) Paper notes have no intrisic value either. In this they are the same as gold.
3) While the world used gold and silver coinage, massive economic upheavals were commonplace, as in the modern age. Economics is not based on the medium of exchange, but the nature of those exchanges. The medium is irrelevant, as it is merely a symbol. We dont’ even use currency half the time. We use bank cards. We don’t have actual money, we have electronic records of phantom values which, if we chose, we could exchange for paper currency, much as when paper currency began, you could exchange paper currency for gold. One symbol abstracts its value from the symboilc value of the previous symbol on which it’s based.
4) Basing money on gold is the same general concept as saying that in order to accept the universe as is, it has to be based on a creator’s efforts. Why do we need to regress one step? Why do we need to say “this arbitrary symbol has no meaning, unless it is attached to another inherently meaningless symbol”. If money has no value, gold has no value, but money based on gold has value? its irrational and a fallacious argument.
5) Why gold and not emeralds? Why gold and not 200 year old sections of redwoods? Why gold and not moondust? What does gold have to do with value? Nothing. Any of these alternatives would work. You could buy 1 trillionth of a gram of moon dust for 1$, say. Since you can’t get 1 trillionth of a gram, though, you’d accept the dollar as a symbol of the dust. The nyou’d just accept the dollar as a symbol of what it can buy (a chocolate bar, a can of pop, 10 wine gums, half a container of milk, a newspaper, etc…) and what it took to earn it (6 minutes of work in a call center, .5 minutes of work in a factory) Gold is as arbitrary a symbol as paper. (emeralds are rarer than gold, and rarer than diamonds. They would seem to make a great currency, of course, since emeralds are useless, they can’t be considered something to be bartered for intrinsic value. They would have to remain symbolic, like most currencies)
6) The only currency i know that was based on intrinsic value was salt. Salt was a) hard to mine, and b) necessary for the survival of human life in warm climates. The roman soldiers were paid in salt, becasue of its rarity, and utility. Salt has intrinsic value to humans. We can not live iwthout it. IN the dystopian post apocalyptic future, no doubt water will be a currency. The fremen used tokens to represent the volume of water that belonged to them, kept communally in vast tanks of water. Those tokens were money, but they represented a valuable object, water, necessary for human life.

This leads to the quest, why not base currency on something with intrinsic value?

The title of this article is gold double standard, because gold backers decry paper money as meaningless and having only symbolic value, value because we say it has value, fiat currency, but then don’t criticize gold for the same reasons. Even worse, immagine a currency sytem based on a truly finite resource? Imagine we had found all the gold there is on the earth, so all gold in circulation today was ALL THERE EVER WOULD BE. the population would continue to increase, but the arbitrary medium for all value on earth, gold, would never increase. Every person’s slice of the pie would shrink. Wealth would remain constant, while the percentage of people benefitting from it would decline. Black market currencies would inevitably surface (as has happened in recorded history when government coinage failed to service th eneeds of the economy), and yet another symbolic system of currency would arise to replace one where dogmatic religious conviction was allowed to ruin the world economy.

In the end, that’s what it is. Its dogma. No one is willing to consider these issues in the gold backers camp. They beg the question of whether gold has value or not. They ignore it. The assumption in the premise of the debate is that gold has value, objectively, so why not use it as the basis of currency? That’s the definition of begging the question. The debate is is not why we don’t use gold, but whether gold possesses the inherent value its ascribed. If it doesn’t, what difference would it make moving to gold? In this case, the only difference, if any, would be negative. The world’s wealth would decline by a factor of 10 or more. We’d all be broke overnight. In one swoop. Or, conversely, gold’s value would be artificially inflated so that 1 oz would be worth 70000 dollars, that way the small gold supplies held by each nation would represent the GNP the countrry had before the change. Then posessors of gold would be rich overnight, while possessors of money would be broke, unable to buy the tiniest fragment of gold. Only survivalists and catastrophists would benefit, while people who actually spend their money and support the economy would be screwed outright.

So yes, let’s switch to a gold coinage. I can think of no finer way to ruin the entire planet in one swoop.

For those of you who need a quick synopsis, here goes. Gilgamesh is a king, with a god to king ratio of 2:1 (meaning he’s 2 parts god, one part man). He’s the strongest man in the world, he’s lusty, loud, obnoxious, and above all, talented. He’s skilled. He has made Uruk the city of “the strong walls”. He, infact, had those walls built himself. he participated in it. he held off the enemies and so on so fort, and then, naturally, everyone hates him. Because, having no more wars to fight, he’s a neussance. he drinks a lot, picks fights with people, constantly tries to get laid (and always succeeds one way or another). So the miserable people cry out to An, the god of the sky, “send is some one to kill this guy!” So, An decides to oblige them, and he creates a man called Enkidu, who ends up running wild with the animals in the forest, in the nude. This is terrible, since he doesnt’ seem to have any interest in killing gilgamesh. So they send a prostute to find him, and do what women do. Ruin him. After a few nights of sleeping with him, he finds he knows how to speak, wears clothes, enjoys bread and beer, and the animals no loner accept him as one of his own. It’s obviously the source of the adam / eve story.

Anyhow, Enkidu arrives in Uruk, and he confronts gilgamesh, and gilgamesh basically goes “gtfo” and knocks him down. but during the one sided beating, he realizes that Enkidu came the closest to actually standing up to him, and so, despite his clear failrure, he falls in friend-love with him. they hang out and go on some adventures. When the Urukians need cedar, why, they go and kill a monster on the cedar mountain to get some wood. When the goddess Ishtar wants to marry gilgamesh because he’s so impressive, he and Enkidu enjoy bitchslapping her and calling her a slut. Then when she sends the bull of heaven down to destroy uruk, they take turns tearing of its legs. Then when the gods get mad that they killed the bull of heaven, who was a pretty good bull underneath his gruff exterior, i suppose, they decide someone has to die. They chose Enkidu.

Gilgamesh mourns and is basically all wet with tears and his beard is tugged alot and he puts dirt on his head. This is how they grieve in iraq. Finally, he decides he’s not going to put up with this shit anymore. This shit is over. he climbs into space itself, journeys to a star, i think Sirius, where the abode of te gods is. He goes into some tavern, hitches a boatride to an island in heaven where Utnapishtim lives. Utnapishtim is a man who, when the gods flooded the earth, put all the animals on a boat and saved all the species (no unicorns, no micro-pigs). THe obvious origin of the noah myth. Anyhow, he tells Gilgamesh “you think you wanna live forever eh?” And gilgamesh is all “yes” and utnapishtim is all “well, the gods let me live forever, but i dont’ think you can handle it. You cant’ beat death, my friend.” and gilgamesh is all “i can do anything.’”

So utnapishtim tells him “then dont’ sleep for 7 days. Sleep is a little death, if you can beat that little death, you get my magic secret.” So he falls asleep almost immediately, and in order to prove to him that he slept, since he could wake up and say “i never slept” as sleeping is a void of all consciousness, Utnapishtim’s faithful wife bakes a loaf of bread and puts it next to him. Every day. for 7 days. Gilgamesh wakes up, and theres a lot of shitty bread sitting around him, covered in mould and flies, and he says “Yuck, good thing i never fell asleep” and they go ‘these shitty loaves prove you slept.”

“Boo hoo” cries gilgamesh, and Utnapishtim says ‘aw shit playa, just playin.” he then tells gilgamesh where to get this watercress stuff. So he goes back on the baot and ties a rock to his legs and jumps in the water and gets this magic watercress that lets you live forever. he brings it back to Uruk, almost. He stops when he’s about a day away. He takes off his kicks and sleeps. Naturally, a snake shows up and eats his watercress. And then the snake sheds its skin and, thus, lives forever (?). Gilgamesh sits down, sobbing, looking at his empty watercress shaped void and says “what the fuck. What was the point of all of this? This was the hardest thing i ever did, in my entire life, and i accomplished absolutely nothing.” At which point, the boatman, who had accompanied gilgamesh back to uruk, says “well, i mean. You are still basically the king. And you did build those fine walls in uruk. I mean. In your life, you’ve done some nice things, isn’t that right big guy?”

THE END

It ends with gilgemsh sitting outside uruk, weeping, comprehending ultimately that all his dreams are futile, that death robs us of our friends, and that piece by piece, the universe attempts to remove from us any sense of ability, and any talent we might have.

Here’s my interpretation.

Gilgmesh at the beginning: Capable, superhuman, confident, and fun loving.
Gilgamesh at the end: Totally broken, sees all activity as futile,

The process which brings him there is thus: At the beginning, he’s loved when he builds the strong walls and kicks the foreigners’ asses, but as soon as the same qualities people love about him are unleashe don his own population, they beg the cosmos as a whole to topple down on the poor guy’s head. And the cosmos obliges, creating an entirely new life form, JUST to fuck up this one person, whose only real crime is that he’s way better than everyone else. He’s stronger, smarter, lustier, and never goes to sleep.

Then they send this guy, and this guy can’t beat him, but gilgamesh makes his mistake. he befriends him. He starts caring about soe other guy’s take on life. he second guesses himself, increasingly, little by little, and listens now to what this Enkidu guy is thinking. Then they wipe out Enkidu.

Suddenly, Gilgamesh, who let himself be taken in by this man’s rugged charms, tastes of death for the first time. This is the first time he’s lost ANYTHING. And it breaks him in half. The gods did this to him. Not because how he behaved was wrong, but because a snotty 16 year old prom queen type goddess moaned to her daddy to “get that man”. And he obliged her.

So gilgamesh then is essentially ruined, until he conceives of a great enterprise. At this point, despite his sorrow, he still thinks big, plans big, goes big. he decides a quest, and undertakes it. he believes he can accomplish it. So despite his weakning neurology and his increasingly outwardly localized self schema, he’s still able to formulate his own goals and attempt them.

So then he goes through the trouble of journeying into the ocean of space, doing some impossible tasks, which he can’t do because they’re rediculous (do a really big workout, then dont’ sleep for 7 days, standing on one leg). But nonetheless, he gets the goods, and they are stolen from him. And he breaks. That’s it. From that point on, you get the sense that gilgamesh is no fun anymore. he’s just an administrator. he’s a principal of the uruk collegiate environment. He’s just a pencil pusher. Everything that made him capable of greatness has been killed. He doesnt’ dream big, instead, he dreams small. His goals are practical ones. how do i weigh in on this lawsuit, how do i maintain equitable borders with neighbouring cities, etc. He’s basically dead. He’s no a function of the state, not its master.

This is ultimately what the poem is about. little by little, we become shitty. We become boring. We get kicked repeatedly in the face until we crawl around on all fours, being meekly praised for our former glory. Every child starts off an individual, and all, even a king, are punched in the teeth a thousand times until finally they just cry.

I think this poem’s popularity in a state where half the population were lowly Ird, and the rest, the awilams, were just twats, if their law code is any indication of all the rough and tumble activity they got up to. (in the hammurabi code, you basically find out how many people are sleeping with their mothers, neglecting their ditches, and defrauding their customers, and in what astonishing variety these crimes are being carried out) is that you could not rise to any position. You could not leave your class.

In the middle ages, the stories that were most popular, or so we typically think, were legends of charlamagne and king arthur, of courtly love and other nonsense. But in reality, the most popular stories weren’t recorded in print, because they were the stories of the peasants. An entire CLASS of literature went almost unrecorded, because the people telling it could not rise to the class where they had access to scribes. Fortunately, many “fabulous” tales, (or fables) got recorded in france, and influenced up and comer “boccaccio!” in his pornographic epic “the decameron” and ultimately, through him, Chaucer. That means we can catch a glimpse of the kinds of things ordinary people thought and did. And we find the same sort of stuff. The most anyone hoped for was a pretty girl to have sex with them, or a robbery to go well enough that they could get some gems and move to an area with pretty prostitutes.

It’s a bleak vision of life, ultimately, despite the prostitutes, becasue it bespeaks a sedentary classification of humanity, and a total ignorance of individual potential. In the story of gilgamehs, he’s not just a man of great potential, fortunately born into the position of king, he’s the BEST MAN IN THE WORLD, who could do literally anything. he could have united sumeria under one ruler, forged an equitable empire, faced off against a relatively weak egypt, conquored the upper euphrates and pushed into the medterranean, setting the stage for a sumerian naval empire 2000 years before carthage and the pheonicians! But instead, as he’s getting things rolling, EVERYONE begs to heaven to have his testicles cut off, and have him reduced to meaninglessness.

The moral of the story is, if you have any talent at all, you have to remain totally self centered in order to exploit it. The moment you look outside yourself for answers, listen to anyone else in any way, or care about other people, you die.

Now, in the field of politicis, we can see this amply explored. What do people who don’t think want? A strong leader. What is a strong leader? Someone who doesnt’ give in to pressure. or persuasion. or reality. Someone who steadfastly choses a course of action, and then never wavers from it. Especially if it turns out to be wrong. A legend is unaware of being wrong. A legend just goes forward, and the world is drawn into their wake, and is sucked into the engine of their boat, and spit out in chunks.

Essentially, gilgamesh is letting you all know that if you ever want to do great things, you cant’ really have friends and family. You really get basically one shot, and the moment you screw it up, its gone forever. You have to remain ignorant, pushy, and supremely confident. You have to be a douchebag.

To not be a douchebag, is to fail at life.

This is sad to me, but also, i think its true.

Also, that if you stop being a douchebag for a single moment, everyone will fuck you up.

But what bothers me most in general right now about bachelor’s degrees is the fact that any useful bachelor’s degree is useless, and vice versa. Say you take diverse majors and minors. A major in ancient history, a minor in physics. You have diverse disciplines to draw from solving any problem you might face. Broad general knowledge to support you througout life. Why then can you not get an internship, at say, an archive. A library. If you dont’ spend 4 years, narrowly focused on Library Studies, you can’t get an internship at a big archive somewhere. Why not? The intern at an archive spends most of their time literally filing things, and labelling things. You learn the arvhive’s system during this internship, which then qualifies you to be employed there, or at another archive. Your degree doesnt’ qualify you, th einternship does. And the degree doesn’t qualify you to do the internship. It’s necessray to get it, but it doesn’t give you the skills. Those you learn on the job.

Take an internship at say, MTV. You need a 4 year degree in how to be a radio DJ or sell a tv pilot, from Ryerson, to stand in front of a crowd and tell them “when the applause sign goes on, you clap! let me hear you toronto!!!” Not only do the things you learn at ryerson not relate to this internship, but, they don’t apply to the career path that you might follow after the internship. The internship teaches you skills ON THE JOB, and you learn from what other people are doing, and get experience. You aren’t qualified to do shit in TV before this internship, and you’re not really qualified afterwards, but its a step towards the step towards the step that actualy teaches you how to do things.

Why do you need to spend 4 years sitting in a student radio station to get the internship, which requires no qualification to perform.

Why has society decided that you need to narrowly focus your education, thus making you a worse person, worse at your job, crippling your problem solving by obscuring your general knowledge and interdisciplinary bag of tricks, in order to do a job that is meant to lead to a job where a better education will help you. How does taking 4 years of Audio editing in any way qualify you more than taking 4 years of earth sciences?

When our parents were our age, they could walk in somewhere with a resume, which only proved that they could hold a job, and work hard at it, and get an entry level position. If they showed ability, they got promoted into junior positions, where they learned from senior people how to do the job. Not given much responsibility, but eventually, taking on the full job. This worked. The myth that life got so complicated that we needed to ensure that all people entering the job world had specific training is nonsense. Today an accountant goes to university for 4 years, then, when they graduate? they get an internship. They call it articling. Its an internship. They get an easy, low qualification, basic skills, junior position. They learn from the senior people, on the job, with little responsibility, gradually accumulating skills, and then finding a senior position somewhere. And this is one of the most highly technical jobs in our society. The 4 years of school are relevant in this case. Doctors, the same. Lawyers the same. But audience coordinators?

We need to return to the concept that a hardworking, motivated person, can learn ANY job. Can do ANY task. Provided some experience on the job. We now require the stunting of aperson’s general abilities and diversity, in order for them to get a menial job that our parents would hav ebeen able to get out of highschool, and probably do better at than we could.

What does that mean? I wish i had the power to derealize things and demanifest things just be declaring them nothing. “You’re not actually dying. You’re not actually awake. This is not actually a kiss (leans in for kiss).”