We Are Living On Forbidden Planet

The civilised Krell destroyed themselves by creating a network where they could express their deepest thoughts and desires.  The machine behind the network could turn these thoughts and desires in to physical manifestations.

The Krell wiped themselves out overnight due to the ‘monsters from the Id’ being made manifest.

Does this sound familiar ?

Human civilisation is the thinnest of veneers.  We are the result of 500 million years of evolution where the most ruthlessly adaptable organisms survived.  If you think that’s all too long ago to be relevant, consider homo sapiens over the last 100,000 years or so.  We are the descendants of people who committed barbarities beyond belief in order to survive.

These ancient memories are deep within us, all the way back to the ancient slime.  They drive our instinct for survival and haven’t diminished in any way.

In our modern world we convince ourselves how civilised we have become, that we would never resort to barbarities.  Ask yourself, what would you do if you and your family hadn’t eaten for a week ?  Will you stick to your artificial morals ?  As a vegan, will you eat the remains of that dead badger ?  Will you kill it ?  How about invading a house where sensible people have hoarded food ?  Will you kill them for that food ?

Don’t throw your hands up in horror at these questions and proclaim that you’d never eat meat or kill when that’s the only option to survive, because you’d already be dead.

The idea of a civilised society is wafer thin.  It’s about co-operation at personal and tribal levels to make survival more likely by pooling resources.  Humans learned to have some control over their emotions to be polite to their peers as a way of avoiding damaging conflict.

In our modern world we opine about how nice we should be to everyone, we mustn’t hurt them with words or deeds in anyway.  This is not natural.  How often might you be nice to your colleagues at work by watching what you say and do, whilst later going home or to the pub and trashing those same work colleagues to your small familial or social group ?

The pub was a great institution, it allowed people to let off steam in a place where they didn’t need to be so guarded.  Views, thoughts and emotions could be expressed that would never be made in a wider context.  The proximity of other people made tolerance quite broad for the sake of avoiding conflict.

The Internet has become our version of the Krell’s machine.  The monsters run rampant, the primitive hindbrain let loose with controls turned off by the lack of consequences of virtual activity.

The Internet is not going to be uninvented and neither will human nature evolve in any discernible timeframe to overcome the instincts of the lizard brain.  It’s taken us tens of millions of years to acquire the level of overrides and control that we currently have.

We’re creating a delusional illusion that the Krell machine designers would recognise.