Human Domesticants
Domesticated to serve technology and ideology our persistence is dependent on
That modern humans (aka humans of NIMH) were domesticated to serve technology and belief-based ideology is not a new claim. For the compelling details, see John Livingston’s Rogue Primate, 1994. We are domesticants, zero-order humanists, true believers in ideology (abstracted belief systems), the zero level being the ideology of the necessary primacy of the human enterprise.
Domesticated by technology, the need to serve the world socioeconomic-political system, and the needed ideological belief-based consensus thinking, we are more dependent on fossil-fueled energy slave technology than dogs are on us.
Within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, largely abandoned by humans (a rapid contraction of the human footprint), some pet dogs auto-organized into packs able to feed and successfully breed because some were fed by humans, but most died. Within a few generations, with high mortality rates, some were functional enough to persist, and a form of feral dog reverted back to one able to persist mostly without humans.
Modern human domesticants may not have that potential. A marauding horde dynamic will arise. Those who join it will have no long-term viable future, and those who do not, who may have a potential to renormalize and persist, are likely to become a resource for the taking by those who peruse their short-term self interests like modern humans do now.
A ‘marauding horde’ culture arose with the Late Bronze Age collapse, and Indus Valley Civilization collapse whose downslope dynamic played out over a six hundred year period of dissolution to regional cultural extinction. Within two hundred years of the beginning of decline, almost all cities/towns had been abandoned, and likely no literate Harrapan was part of the next four hundred years on the downslope.
If only a marauding horde culture is selected for, then when there are no resources for the taking, factions would exploit, turn on one another in a ‘race to the bottom’ dynamic to regional extinction, after which outliers could move in within a few hundred years of environmental restoration to occupy the region whose prior inhabitants would be known only by the ruins they left.
If this happens globally, there will be no outliers (Klingons), and human extinction on a marginally habitable planet is a bit more than possible if not inevitable. Underestimating the challenge of sidestepping human extinction may prove fatal.
