Human Ingenuity

Last night, while much of the Empire spent its freedom on intoxicated social endeavours, I was thinking about human ingenuity and how it seems to be thinning out. Our education system serves not to nurture ingenuity by encouraging its patrons to think for themselves, but rather to follow orders. Our employers judge us not on our adeptness, but rather our ability to follow instruction. Our news reports tell us their side of every story it deems worthy of our attention. By and large, we are discouraged from thinking; those who become aware often end up discouraging themselves.

For the vast majority of us, most of life's decisions are made externally; all that is required is for us to carry out the actions. We depend on machinery to receive the information and groom and fuel ourselves accordingly so that we may carry out our given tasks. At the end of the day, we immerse ourselves in the material fruits of our servitude and wonder what we would ever do without them.

In the beginning, we had very little, so everything we could with what we had available: we sought shelter in caves and tents fashioned from animal hides, we used rocks, sticks and bones for tools, and lit fires to keep warm and cook the day's kill. We were primitive, but it was all simple. We did not depend on much, though we depended on each other.

These days, we have everything, so we do very little. We have washing machines and dryers to clean our clothes for us, microwave ovens and fast-food kiosks to cook for us, and television and newspapers to think for us. It seems human ingenuity is serving to negate itself over time. I think back to when the electricity grid collapsed in the summer of 2003: we were in a panic to acquire ice - for fuck's sake, we were reduced to buying frozen water from store owners - to prevent our food from spoiling. We were lost without our televisions, computers, stereos and traffic lights. We have become so attached to the machines we invented, we lose sight of their fallibility. What would have we done had this happened in the dead of winter? Wait... ask the citizens of Québec how they handled the ice storm of 1998.

Ironically enough, when the machines fail, human ingenuity is all we have to pick up the pieces.