The Infinite Plasticity of Man

Plastic Man. Mr. Fantastic. Monkey D. Luffy. There are tons of examples of men who can literally adapt to anything, take any shape, stretch or thin or expand or balloon to whatever the situation calls for. Luckily, these are kids stories just meant to be creative and fun, a 'gee wouldn't that be cool.'

Unfortunately, in our universities and media today, we are taught the exact same story, only this time EVERYONE is Mr. Fantastic, and it's supposed to be taken dead seriously. In fact, even questioning whether humanity is, in fact, plastic or rubber, is itself a heresy that can get you into jail, a divorce court, or fired. We are all blank slates, which you can write whatever you please upon. Each generation can be completely different from the last. If the world's environment changes, well we can just change children to suit it with proper indoctrination and education. Nothing to fear here folks, move along. If someone asks whether humanity was ever 'intended' to be equal, free, homosexual, single mothers, etc, the iron fist of the proletariat will come smashing down. Color-blind Man, Non-Gender-Biased Man, Non-Homophobic Man, is the new Soviet Man, who is himself just another Plastic Man from our fairy tales. Though of course, even using the term Man itself, should, properly, be banned. Perhaps 'organism' is more proper, since we wouldn't want to impugn any aliens or animals out there who by sharing our values are just as true participants in our community as ourselves. Indeed, in all our science fiction stories it's taken for granted that in the future, not only all races of humanity will be united under one world government, but an enormous United Universe Federation will have us interbreeding and comingling in vast diverse enriched dynamic floating cities with every bug-eyed-monster from here to the Orion Arm. I kid you not!

Are we really Plastic Man? Can we really just change our culture, or was it there for a reason? Did it, perhaps, best suit our human nature and thus, ability to survive? Does a changed culture have different survival outcomes and thus can be rated as objectively inferior or superior for its people? Do utopias commonly founder upon the basic realities of human wants, weaknesses, and needs that go completely unaddressed? Is our rapidly changing environment possible to keep up with? Can people adapt to the constant 'progress' our machines bring us in material comforts, or the dubious 'progress' in enlightened opinion our elites proscribe for us?

The myth of Plastic Man does not go away because it is a superpower we fantasize having, alongside Immortal Man and Invisible Man. But when the elites start fantasizing about what they can do with a whole world of plastic men, whose putty will of course be shaped by their hands, the shit really hits the fan. It killed 100 million people trying to enact communism, and is set to kill billions by race replacement to enact multiculturalism. Therefore it is vital to find out the true nature of humanity, what we are suited for, and what we are not suited for, no matter how good or 'nice' it sounds. The study of history and biology are key to this understanding, not philosophy, not dreamers, but the real cold facts of what humanity is. What men are, what women are, what gays are, what blacks are, what whites are, what asians are, what everyone IS. There are only two tools to ascertain this, history and biology, but both of these are of course maligned by the cult of plasticity as useless, dangerous, heretical thinking that kids at the least should never have access to. Hence the complete dismantling of history and imposition of a new, feel-good history that follows the party line. Hence the shutting up of nobel prize winners like Shockley and Watson when they dare to mention the truth to a public audience instead of keeping it to technical journals among themselves in some safe ignored corner.

We must go on to study the nature of communities and their biological underpinnings. Like a hive or an ant hill, people must live in communities and the health of the pack is the health of the wolf. Studying individuals is more like navel-watching, the insipid nonsense of psychology or Buddhism. Individualism is just one step away from nihilism and is always the eventual result, that is because individuals are not self-sufficient and do not in fact have any value. Being an individual, who is not allowed to care about anyone or anything else because he is supposed to complete himself, all alone because everyone else is just another self-interested competitor who cares nothing for him, is in fact a torturous Hell.

Truth only emerges in statistical groups, large numbers, patterns. And it is these large groups, patterns, and numbers that are the true 'living breathing being,' not its constituent parts. A man, left alone, quickly descends into insanity. Solitary confinement is considered a method of torture. And yet at the same time, our philosophers claim we are all individuals, self-sufficient, and owe nothing to each other except as mere tools to serve our own interests. Again there is a complete disconnect between reality and philosophy. It's shown time and again that the virtue of individuals depends on the prevailing norms of society at the time. Victorian England and Woodstock were composed of the same biological units, the same genetic stock lived in both eras, but the results were not random nor were they the same. Individuals, clearly, do NOT determine the values and opinions of their lives, or their actions, or anything else. They do not sit down with the clear light of reason in a darkened room with zen music playing and decide one by one all their values and opinions and morals and lifestyle preferences while in perfect meditation of the Rational Absolute. If they did, we should see a variety of conclusions all contrary to each other in all eras equally, or a complete conformity as everyone comes to the same conclusion. We don't see either case at all. The only time we clearly see patterns of human behavior emerging, are when we look at the community scale. Behavior does vary, but not over individuals. History is written by the changing patterns of communities--individuals just go with the flow.

Note I therefore agree with the premise of the utopians that men are plastic and can lead lives in a variety of different manners and ways, that a great variety of lifestyles have been practiced across time and space, and that nothing forces people to stay as they were before instead of becoming scientologists tomorrow. What I disagree with, is their ability to do this, WHILE ALSO SURVIVING, FLOURISHING, PROSPERING, or achieving any other well-recognized goal humans generally set for themselves. Yes, people are plastic and can be forced into any mold. Children will believe, largely, whatever religion their parents teach them. Whether it be cows are sacred, cats are sacred, or crocodiles are sacred, your culture can believe it and your kids will believe it and carry the tradition on. Yes, people are plastic and can be taught anything, that racism is bad, sexism is bad, homophobia is bad, etc, and they really will believe it fervently and do whatever they can to stop it in the world around them and in their own sinful hearts.

But as Horace said: "You can throw Nature out with a pitchfork, but it will always come back again."

Like a coiled spring, the cost of deviating people from their human nature keeps pushing down and down with greater and greater weight, until a reaction must occur. Either it violently pushes back and throws all the accumulated weight off its shoulders, or crumples under the weight and perishes. This is all that's left to Plastic Man and Plastic World. You can change some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you can never change all of the people all of the time. Those who fervently adopt your failed platform and try in all earnestness to fulfill it, like the Aztecs sacrificing people daily to keep the sun rising and not going out, will under the weight of their own enemy-making tendencies eventually be destroyed in turn by those who object to the practice. Plastic Man triumphed and made people start sacrificing each other by the tens of thousands in the most inhumane rites imaginable, Plastic Man triumphed as fathers proudly sent their daughters who relished the chance to die to the bloody knives and watched their child ripped apart in front of their eyes. But what did Plastic Man win? Only its own destruction. Only Nature's vengeance on their anti-survival, unnatural codes.

Therefore rather than asking ourselves: 'what is the ideal society?' as though not humans, but 'beings of pure thought energy' were going to inhabit it, we should all be asking ourselves "what, given our knowledge of history and biology, is most suited for human society?" We can even admit that it's unpleasent, mean-spirited, even nauseating. We ourselves may not even be suited for it, and would have to purge ourselves from it before it could even work. Nevertheless, for serious people, none of these objections matter and Nature must be the touchstone from which philosophy arises.

We must never make the mistake of reasoning out an ideal society from the standpoint of an individual. We must never craft the ideal world for ourselves to live in. This is meaningless because 'we' aren't going to be living in this society. A community will be living in it, the only living thing at all. Generations upon generations of people are going to be born into this community and keeping this community alive and breathing, long after you are dead. The transient, uncompleted parts of men and women, elderly and children, workers and indigents, warriors and poets, thinkers and doers are none of them alive, none of them the goal, none of them the barometer of our health or weakness. Only the community that includes all of them is the value-giver to any of them. If society is well, then all is well. If society is sick, then everyone in it is a failure. No self-serving shortcuts. No self-justifying excuses. We owe our ancestors and our children better.

Who are the healthy societies on Earth? Certainly no one with a below replacement birth rate, certainly no one living beyond their means, certainly no one who endangers themselves by picking fights with much stonger foes, certainly no one willingly embracing its own coming extinction. This isn't surprising, when a drastic shift to the environment occurs, Darwinian logic shows that the vast majority of all species will die out to their inability to adapt to it. Only a few fringe mutants that were uniquely ready for such an environment by sheer chance will emerge as the healthy and thriving new norm. There has been no more dramatic shift to the environment as industrialization since farming. And some parts of the world, by the time they interacted with the outside world, had to undergo farming and industrialization simultaneously. Pity the poor Aborigenes of Australia! And it may be proper to speak of a third revolution transcending even the Industrial, what could be called the Scientific revolution that not only is rapidly changing the patterns of production and consumption, but also our very way of seeing the world in upsetting but uncontradictable new lights. Those not rendered irrelevant by machine labor may be driven mad by the impersonal and uncaring nature of the Universe. Those not disconnected by the vast machine-like life of living to the clock, vast distances between themselves and everyone else they know, without ever knowing their neighbor's names, could be instead lured by the easy availability of escapism affluence, drugs, tv, video games, internet etc provide them. In an environment like this, it is unlikely many people will survive unscarred, or that many communities will not totter and collapse under the collective weight of their individual miseries. The answer comes down to a few scattered micro-communities, I am not certain that even a single state on earth qualifies as healthy. Mormons are healthy. Mormons are healthy. Mormons are healthy. And yeah, that's about it.

Look to the mormons.