The origins of humanity’s downfall – Part 1 – Farming

If you could pinpoint the problems in society and fix them, do you know which problems you would solve and in what time frame? If you were to focus on one problem, do you know what the origins of that problem would be in order to end the problem before it started? What if the origins of that problem actually stemmed from another? Could you solve both?

In my blog, I’m going to write down my thoughts on where we’ve gone wrong, not as a race, or society, or even as a group of separate nations, but as a species. I hold a firm belief that throughout history, our brains have given us both great advantage, and great hindrance in evolving with our environment the way other species do. Examples can be seen even in the modern age. Our science has advanced to a point that we can treat countless diseases and afflictions, yet it has also allowed us to create forms of food that are counter to what our bodies naturally need, and hence we are riddled with obesity, diabetes, and autoimmune deficiencies. And there are other ramifications of our food derivation, in particular moving to an agrarian society, that we haven’t even acknowledged, that have had a direct and negative impact on the world we live in today. That is the first fork from our natural state that I’ll discuss in the blog. Certainly there are others that could be argued impacted us first. Religion, for example, could be argued to have influenced the earliest homosapiens prior to agriculture, for the simple fact that they had belief systems about how the world worked long before they realized how to cultivate crops.

But belief without action, is merely a thought process. So I posit that the first major action that was taken, was that of moving from a hunter/gatherer society to an agrarian one, in which our food was derived from crops that could be continually grown in one location, grain in particular. Although many outcomes from this can be seen as positive, I’m only going to highlight the negative, as I see that as more relevant to the reasons we have diverged from the path we were naturally meant to take.

The first and obvious negative is the health effects grains have on the human body. Science is only now acknowledging that grain as a source of nutrients is lacking at best, and harmful at worst. This is a major premise behind new diets like the Paleo movement. You can find scientists like Robb Wolfe (https://robbwolf.com) and Colin Champ (http://colinchamp.com) that explain in greater detail the negative effects of grains, but the overarching concept is that grains contain properties that aren’t conducive to the hunter/gatherer species we originally began as, and weren’t available to be gathered in quantities large enough for humans to consider worth their energy before the advent of agriculture.

The second, and arguably worse negative, is the requirement to own property in order to farm crops. Prior to the becoming an agrarian society, humans were a nomadic species that followed our food as it migrated from one place to another, similar to any other migrant animal. Nobody owned any one plot of land. If someone picked an apple from a tree, they only owned that Apple and not the whole tree. But agriculture changed all that. We soon began to take ownership of the land that we farmed, and settled down in areas around it, creating the first cities. If you’re belief system matched that of the people around you, and you were contributing to that city, you were welcome. If it did not, you were shown the door and not welcome in that particular area. With humans capable of gathering in one area for long periods of time, belief systems were able to now be more solidified, and areas (cities) in close proximity that had conflicting belief systems, could now fight over whose belief system was correct. The winner would take the losers land and expand both the land they could farm, and the amount of people their belief system could influence.

This certainly isn’t the end of the cons that came with owning property. I’ll talk more about those in future blogs. But for now, it’s important to understand the underpinnings of property ownership an the negative effects it has had on our species if we are ever to overcome them. These negative influences have been instilled over thousands of years. Maybe someday we can begin the process of reversing the negative while maintaining the positive aspects of our biggest asset and our worst hinderance, human intelligence.