Taking Comfort in Our Stupidity
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You’ll see, MFers!
Today I came across a person on twitter making the argument that we shouldn’t get vaccines because she hadn’t. “Never been vaccinated and have never been sick.” (A clever commenter, @1980Dorothy, replied, “I’ve never been skiing and I’ve never chewed tobacco.” I do love the smart people on twitter.) My immediate reaction to this anti-vaxxer’s “logic,” as usual, a kind of shocked fury. Advocating risking her own life, the life of her children, and the lives of others based on this kind of ignorance is just … I can’t.
It reminded me of another time I came across something similarly dumb but far less dangerous. When my son was an infant, my ex- was advised not to eat Thai food because it would prevent my son from nursing. There are more than 69 million people in Thailand. Lots of them are moms. Lots of them are perfect healthy, nursing babies. My son has turned out just fine. (Quite a bit better than just fine, frankly. He’s the best of us!)
And then I remembered something a bit further back. It was, oh, I’d say somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 billion years ago. The world was ruled by cynobacteria. They could not communicate with one another via twitter. They didn’t have any voices among them warning them that changing the atmosphere might be a bad idea, because they didn’t have voices. So they changed the whole global atmosphere with their emissions and … wait for it … killed off most of the world’s cynobacteria. And most of the world’s everything else. The cynobacteria that remain have to hide out in weird caves or at the bottom of the ocean next to the mouths of volcanoes because they made the rest of the planet unlivable to themselves. This was a very stupid thing to do. Cynobacteria are not smart.
Now, fast forward 2.5-3.5 billion years, and this other species comes along who study the world and learn about what happened to the cynobacteria. We can communicate. We invent language. we invent this amazing technology to tell the story off the cynobacteria to other members of our species all around the world. And then we use that same technology to say, “Fake news!” and we go right back to doing the same thing the cynobacteria did to themselves. If the cynobacteria were dumb, we are dumber. This is stupidity on a global scale, and we are currently winning the prize for the stupidest species this planet has ever produced.
Oddly, I take comfort in this. This anti-vaxxer? People who think the world is flat or 6000 years old? People who think they are better than other people because of the country they live in or their religion or their race or sex or gender? They are very stupid, sure. But they are humans. I don’t share those particular beliefs, but I am just self-aware enough to know that, as a human, I have other stupid beliefs, but I’m too stupid to figure out what they are. So I’ll die right along with the rest of us.
That’s not the comforting part. Holding hands and singing Kumbaya with the great mass of the dumbest species ever isn’t that comforting. I feel terrible about all the suffering we will cause, not just to one another, but to all the other species who we will wipe out in the great mass extinction event we are causing. We deserve exactly the outcome we produce; they don’t. I take comfort in the theory that something else will come along after we’re gone. Probably some form of sentient cockroaches.
And one day one of them will be tapping away at their version of twitter (feeler? antennae? TM), and will want attention, so he’ll write, “Hey, everybody, what if we just made the planet into a place where cockroaches can’t survive? How does that sound?”
And the other cockroaches will respond: “Remember the cardinal rules, you stupid human-hole!”
(They won’t call them “cardinal rules,” though. Their religion will be organized in a much smarter way. And they won’t have the birds because we will have killed them all.)
The stupid cockroach will say, “Oh, yeah. Rule #1: ‘Never be as stupid as cynobacteria or humans.’”
The others will prod him. “And?”
“And Rule #2,” he’ll intone. “‘Vaccinate yourself and all 400 of the offspring in your ootheca.”
But maybe he won’t give in that easily. Every species has it’s outliers, their fragile double-downers. Maybe he’ll write, “Fake News! We can destroy the planet. It will be fine. And no one should get vaccinated. I haven’t, and I’ve never been sick.”
And then do you know what the others will do? First, they will kick him off social media.
And then they will eat him.
Because cockroaches are willing to turn to cannibalism if it will protect the survival of the species. They are smarter than we are. I just whine online about our inevitable destruction at our own hands. So take heart; the next dominant species will almost certainly be smarter. We’ve set the bar this low.