A Most Wicked Species
The human race is deserving of extermination. Complete and utter destruction. The world cannot heal as long as there are people in it.
Who decides this? The evil nature of humanity itself. Humanity has judged itself: it is selfish, violent, bankrupt. Two thousand years of Christianity have not fundamentally altered the corrupt nature of the human animal. Nothing has changed. We are as evil and base as we ever have been.
The call from the cross at Golgotha might as well have been “My God, the children of man will abandon Thee.” What brings peace to the world is the absence of man.
Nature is not cruel, in that it cannot feel, it cannot be malicious or delight in pain. It does not grieve. It is amoral, no matter what tired anthropomorphism we foist upon it. Army ants destroying anything in their path do not do so for want of power, for coveting land. Species go extinct not because of the machinations of leaders. Living things fight to survive without the added layer of base corruption that exists in the human animal. This has been the hallmark of human existence, and has defined our character since the beginning of civilization.
Yes, civilization. That thin veneer that humans have created to adorn themselves with the fantasy of being created in some divine image. From this antecedent comes the curses of monarchy and priesthood. Merely the exercise of power under other names, to act as "representatives" for the divine.
The greatest technological advances have come from the need to kill others. Animals have evolved their defenses to survive, but Caesar built his pontoon bridge to cross the Rhine to subdue the enemies of Rome. We do not kill to survive, but for mastery. Alexander threw a spear into the ground after crossing the Hellespont to show his mastery over Asia. No animal in the history of the world has done such a thing. What better image is there for the story of man on Earth, but a spear driven into the body of what sustains him? We laud him as “the Great,” but he was nothing more than a great killer of men, and he used every technological means at his disposal to accomplish this feat. Man is his most creative when the need arises to exterminate other men. He adorns himself with prayer, gold and perfumes that cannot cover the stench of his crimes.
We did not split the atom to harness the power of the sun to create an inexhaustible energy supply, we did it to kill other people. We have created machines to speed up the process of killing people more efficiently and effectively. The 20th century is the greatest example of the marriage between man’s technology and his baser nature. The result? More mass killing than perhaps the Black Death itself, whose advent was not the will to conquer and enslave, but merely to keep existing. A virus in nature cannot delight in killing, but a man at the head of an invasion force can.
The corrupt nature of man has not been tamed by revealed religion. It has become, as all things do, a tool for the continued mastery of one person over another. And not for survival, but for profit and power. Everything is but a tool for man, from the first weapon that made killing easier to the first priest encountering the first fool: we must kill these others because our god has demanded it. Who can go against the word of a god as voiced through its representative? No priest ever turned down the riches of a looted people.
The human species is wicked, cruel and base. There will be no peace in the world as long as we are in it.