Batshittery - An Anthropological Commentary

The Cult That Made Your Grandmother’s Fine Silverware

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A friend asked what I as an ethnographer, a student of Humankind, make of the cult reported on in the above video. My answer: “Batshittery americana domesticus, anthropologically speaking.”

This genus, species and subspecies belongs to the taxonomic family of religious cults and other beliefs and practices that have failed to find a place in mainstream American life. Such cults and their beliefs are not in a dustbin with similar nonsense the likes of which are never to be seen again. This one and its sundry mutant variants await us in a holding pattern in the Ethnosphere. Awaiting what? Awaiting their chance to rejoin us and hopefully get into the mainstream of American thinking. That is, as a new and improved human-made supernatural myth to propel us further toward our place in Abrahamic heaven.

But, shockingly (well, not too shockingly), such bizarre approaches, in all spheres of human life, have become more highly feasible options for Americans in recent years. That is, as we careen toward full national batshittery under the pastoral presidential leadership of God’s current anointed one, Junior Jesus Golden Hair.

The full-open, genius and idiocy spewing font of human creativity is bountiful. With liberté, égalité and fraternité must inevitably come some, perhaps an equal measure of, utter cockamamie nonsense, individual and collective. That is a good thing. No font, no diversity of ideas and behaviors, no ever-fresh material for cultural evolution to chew on. No-one knows what oddball notions will be adaptive given the right context.

It’s not so much what kinds of ideas the creativity font provides as long as there’s a great variety in what it produces. What’s really important is the wellbeing of the selective mechanism working on that stuff. Mind you, the selection process has no direction or goal despite the protestations of Protestants, caterwauling of Catholics, or the murmuring of Muslims. Cultural evolution selects ideas that are provisionally adaptive in whatever context happens to exist at the time.

A variety of ideas put in the selection mechanism at a time populated by ignorant, gullible, uncritical, tribalistic people, you get crap out. A variety of ideas put into the mechanism at a better time of a more enlightened population, then you get less crap out. The crap will never be totally eliminated. We’re human. We don’t produce perfection. We muddle through on a few, occasional quirks of genius along the way.

Although it is showing serious signs of declining efficiency in terms of favoring Humankind, which it does not do so intentionally, the winnowing mechanism of our species’ cultural evolution selection process still works in our favor, for now.

That is, it continues to work despite the efforts of Ayn Rand, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Michelle Bachman, and Alan Greenspan, just to name a few of my favorites who happen to come to mind. And there are many other moderns, including that cast of evangelicals and charismatics that have found their way into the White House and are fawning over JJGH. That is, the cultural evolution selection mechanism is still working well enough for us to have so far avoided extinction and not completely destroyed the biosphere.

But hey, who knows, give us enough time, enough bad ideas in bad contexts and we just might succeed at exterminating ourselves and ending all other life on the planet!

Yes, Jim, thank you for those words of encouragement and hope.

But really, you ask, what about the possibility of a good future where our sub-species, Homo sapiens sapiens? Let's say, one that stays the meandering course we are on toward a greater realization of the truly best (that is, humane) Enlightenment political and economic ideals; and continues toward flourishing on a scientific and technological journey of progress that does not enslave us and/or kill everything? Well, I say the chance of that happening is a crap shoot. 

Personally, I took my chips off the primate evolution betting table the day after U.S. presidential election day, November 8, 2016. I no longer have them on us, the relatively weak-muscled, small canine-toothed, wordy, ever-tinkering, sometimes treacherous, sometimes wise primate. Oh, by the way, never turn your back on or otherwise trust a monkey or ape, especially not their evolutionary cousins wearing suits. They’re capable of anything. I know from my personal experience of indignities given and received. But that’s another story for another time.

I’m looking for a better earthly critter to place my money on. How about a total Life on Earth reset starting from one of the Xenophyophora, hydrothermal vent creatures at the bottom of the Mariana Trench?

But, then again, we can’t be certain that the eventual outcome of such a restart would be any better, can we? It might be a worse, shorter, scarier evolutionary run than we’re currently having. Then again, it might stumble toward universal and sustainable peace, love and brother/sisterhood in a paradise on earth. Surely something like that is somewhere in the current font of human creativity. Giddy-up, selection mechanism!