How deep does the rabbit hole go? How many times has Zion been destroyed? How many red pills can you swallow before you lose all humanity?

Delusion Damage poses the question, without knowing it. Texas Arcane has the answer.

You are not a pessimist until you’ve read Texas Arcane.

The following quotes are juxtaposed without comment. If you are an idiot, stop “reading” now.

Delusion’s question:

For every calorie of energy spent doing it, hunting and gathering produces 5 calories of food. Farming only produces 2 calories for every calorie you expend on it. That is to say, farming is 4 times as hard as hunting and gathering.

(For those of you who think 4 times 2 isn’t 5: you have to remember that we’re counting the surplus. To produce a surplus of 4 calories, you need to hunt and gather with 1 calorie – you get 5 calories of food, and you spent 1 hunting and gathering, so you have a surplus of 4. To farm a surplus of 4 calories, you need to spend 4 calories farming, which gives you 8 calories in total, and subtracting the 4 you spent, that’s a surplus of 4. Q.E.D., farming is 4 times as hard as hunting and gathering.)

So… what kind of assface decided that we should produce all our food by farming? It doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.

Why would you want to plow and plant and harvest when you could just go out and spear a buffalo instead? You wouldn’t.

It wasn’t that ancient man created farming, and saw that it was good, and decided to prefer it over hunting and gathering. It was the other way around… that people multiplied too fast, crowded the land and killed all the buffalo until there was nothing left, created farming out of dire necessity, saw that it sucked but was the only way to extract enough sustenance from too small an area of land, and cursed the gods for their misery but did it anyway. And continued to multiply…
…
Civilized people like to think life is better now than ever before, but maybe they’ve got it the wrong way around. Maybe life is worse now than it’s ever been. It’s hard to compare when you haven’t lived through 10,000 years of change…

Tex’s answer:

Why Humans Are Engineered For Self-Destruction and Regression To The Mean

They were biologically customized to exterminate Neanderthals. That’s the purpose of their existence. After they served their purpose, genetic failsafes were added to see to it that any complexity they manage to organize, would naturally decline and become disorganized over time because of their basic biology. This would see to it that they would never get far beyond mud huts before collapsing back on themselves according to their nature. Sapiens would serve his task like a disposable tampon, holding together well enough to get the job done.

Interbreeding with Neanderthal females as war captives was not foreseen in the plan. It chucked a wobbly into their gene pool which allowed them to get a little more advanced than had originally been intended but not in such a fashion that it would stick. They benefited from a temporary increase in brain size and deductive reasoning that lasted just long enough to breed it out of them with trial and error.

Homo Sapiens civilizations last around 200 years on average before they do a face plant because of their essential inherent qualities. There is no simple answer to this problem. It’s like asking “What is the best approach to wean fish off of water?” That’s a tough one. There is no easy comeback waiting there. The problem is Homo Sapiens himself, who is fundamentally damaged goods. He’s botched product by design.

The Neanderthal was an integrated whole. He had a consistency to every single thing he did that made so much sense it established him in a relatively stable arrangement lasting a half a million years. Sapiens is like one of those creatures created in a lab in a science fiction movie that runs around knocking stuff over and screeching and spitting up mucus before it’s inherent instability causes it to explode. The Neanderthals are frequently being described as somehow neurotic in the literature nowadays by academics who understand a little of what they are talking about. They’ve got it backwards, though. Neanderthal was self-effacing, often deferential in a way Sapiens could never be and could think ahead further than ten minutes because of his huge frontal lobes. Sapiens is the neurotic spin-dizzy toy that always ends up rattling around into a chaotic heap. The Neos could spin a half a million years without falling over and making continual progress that entire time. We could say the only creature on Earth that ever posed a threat to him had to be so prodigious and so violent it was broken coming out of the gates. This is what was required to unseat the Amud as the undisputed peak of creation at the time.

…

Jacob in Hebrew means someone who comes along and takes credit for things he never did. It means “Swindler,” or “a person who takes that which he did not earn.” Esau means “man of action,” “doer of deeds,” and “the elder one who was meant for the blessing.”

Abel was a herder (meat-eater pastoralist) who was favored by God. (Best kept secret in anthtopology is that Neanderthal skulls are almost always found with mouth flutes used in pastoral herding) His brother Cain an agriculturalist (carb-eater) was despised of God. Cain killed Abel out of envy and was marked for it permanently by God so no one would ever mistake him for Abel.

In China there is an ancient story of two brothers, one of whom was hairy, noble and strong, the other weak and criminal who kills his brother, takes all his possessions and begins to pass himself off as his brother, living in his house and harvesting his fields.

In all these ancient traditions there is the same thread running through them telling the same story, over and over again.

For those of you not familiar with European thought, nearly every great thinker from Voltaire to Schopenhauer has described man as being eerily similar to a domesticated creature rather than a natural product. All through Homo Sapiens DNA, we see evidence of splicing of strange components again and again at random, a patchwork quilt, a witches cauldron that was apparently boiled as a poison for the Neanderthal. Analysis of DNA shows consistently that Neanderthal is the “normal” one, with the most coherent genetic framework. Sapiens by contrast looks like a horse put together by a committee. Do tell once again how he got those rhesus monkey genes spliced into his body. I’d be curious to know how such a thing is even possible.

…

What have you mistakenly given credit for to Homo Sapiens?

Surely not the domestication of all plant and animal species, all of it nearly a quarter of a million years ago, when Sapiens can barely be established as a distinct type as little as 80,000 years hence?

Not all abstract art, musical instruments and cave paintings, accidentally assumed to be the work of Sapiens for the past 400 years until recent revisions by anthropologists who are begrudgingly conceding there is not a single cave painting in existence that can reliably be attributed to Sapiens before 38,000 years, including La Croix? Flutes and wind instruments have been found that may be more than 300,000 years old at Neanderthal sites.

Surely not metaphysical notions, when Neanderthals were burying their dead prepared for an afterlife over 200,000 years ago, whereas the paucity of Sapiens grave is slowly being absorbed as the result of cannibalism of all their dead as a rule?

I’m not sure what you have come to assume is the work of Sapiens, when the evidence clearly shows Sapiens has never done anything but kill people and then eat them or rape them.

What, you ask, is the point?

This.

The elves are dead. Orcs remain.