Devo

In the beginning there were lots of little tribes scattered asunder across the world. Some prospered and grew. They eventually ran into one another. Sometimes, maybe at one time even most of the time, these meetings were peaceful. But there were some aggressive tribes who simply killed whom they met, later instead reducing some to slavery, much later still putting a rightwing president in charge of an unregulated third world economy.

The peaceful tribes were destroyed one by one. Slowly the agressive ones survived and reproduced and grew unto empires; blood thirsty abominations such as the Romans who spread across the globe.

Now the logical end has been reached, with each nation just varying degrees of the same idea, with entire nations being basically sophisticated slavery. (No longer any need to even take care of one's slave property.)

And within these groups, the benefit of being agressive to one another (although the idea of morality/community isn't completely gone) is quite real.

The backstabbers get ahead. The power hungry get ahead. The Good do quite often get stomped upon. And those that dare to question society instead of simply obeying the traditions that have us here today are viewed with hostility and worse.

And so we really have been and continue to evolve in a negative direction.

The mormon polygamists: How does a movement like that manage to grow? What kind of woman thinks that sounds like a good idea? Only someone who grew up in it. And they have a ton of children, thus their movement grows.

There was a music group named Devo. The name stood for devolution. (Which is an incorrect usage of the word suggesting not understanding how evolution actually works but I'm certain they did understand how evolution actually works.) The band members were students at Kent State when the protestors were shot. In fact one was a few feet away as a student was gunned down and they were put under martial law.

Their idea was that we are evolving in a negative direction. That being dumb, wanting to have lots of sex, and being aggressive was how one increased their chances of reproducing nowadays. They had to be sort of careful not to put that out there too clearly. And so no one even really understood. But they sang songs about getting laid, etc... exactly like all other bands were doing. And people loved it.

The founder recently said of devolution that "It's all over. It's happened. We're fishes in the sea."

People who openly talk of such things are viewed with quite a bit of hostility. It suggests elitism and eugenics and so on. It is more complicated of course. People aren't That bad. And there's no solution anyway. It just is. If anything it's wonderful the degree to which people are nice and peaceful to each other despite it.

Maybe because those are good qualities to have in slaves.

But intelligence is not really such a great quality in a slave. That would mean questioning society. So, nice, but... "unmotivated" to think....