Farming is Why Humanity is Fucked · brennan.day

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'The Harvesters' by Léon Augustin Lhermitte, ca. 1888–89. | The Art Institute of Chicago (edited by the Author)

Lightning can strike the same spot many times. Goldfish can remember things for months. Bulls are colourblind. Vikings didn't wear horned helmets. Napoleon wasn't short.

This month's IndieWeb Carnival run by Alex Hsu, has a theme titled "No Way!" where bloggers are asked to write about something that was a plot-twist level revelation.

The first few ideas that popped into my head were the most obvious. The well-known facts that weren't facts at all, but really, the truth about these facts is usually already well-known. Anti-facts, if you will.

It's a fantastic topic, because it makes you pause and recollect on when you've had a real epiphany. An actual paradigm shift.

And I suppose I could write about something like how the scrip system was designed to fail and speculators bought scrip from Métis families for pennies on the dollar before they'd even received their land, which is why so many ended up landless and pushed west. Or that the "barter came before money" story taught in every intro economics class has no anthropological evidence behind it and there's no documented case of a society running primarily on direct bilateral barter; proto-money and credit brokers show up first, with barter as the rare exception, not the rule. (The textbook origin story of money is basically fan fiction economists tell each other.)

But instead, I have something a lot... weirder. I want to share the most mind-shattering concept I've ever learned. A concept that was nonchalantly taught in a first-year general education class I took in the spring of 2022 which completely upended how I thought about humanity as a whole.

Setting the Stage

To begin, the university I attended, Mount Royal University, has far more general education class requirements for its undergraduate degree than most schools do. Three classes need to be taken in four clusters, in other words, twelve entire courses dedicated to the liberal arts outside your degree, and this isn't counting electives. And there are four foundational courses every student needs to take, with ambiguous, vague titles like "GNED 1103 - Innovation" and "GNED 1404 - Writing about Images" and "GNED 1202 - Texts and Ideas."

Professors often take advantage of how loosely defined these foundation classes are, and teach whatever the hell they want to. It is a total gamble of what you're going to be learning and if the class is going to be a bird course. Your best bet is to look up the professor's RateMyProf more than looking at the syllabus.

This class I took seemed popular at first, with class at full-capacity of 30 students (yes, MRU has grade-school class sizes, which is amazing). The professor was charming and funny, but it quickly became apparent that the topics he was going to teach made many of the Oil-and-Gas Business-major archetypes who enrolled uncomfortable.

Our professor did several lectures on the perils and inevitable exploitation of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism, and an assigned reading was Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto. Truly, this class was what the anti-woke conservatives are warning the populace about in regards of the brainwashing happening on campuses across the nation. That's sarcasm, mostly because another GNED I took had a professor deny human-made global warming and glaze the economics of Adam Smith for the entire semester.

But no, learning about the horrors of the zero-sum slave labour occurring around the world was not the most eye-opening experience of this course, not even close. And I apologize for burying the lede here and reminiscing about my undergrad days, but I really need to ease you into this and soften the blow here, you'll see.

Enter Daniel Quinn and Totalitarian Agriculture

Daniel Quinn was an American author, cultural critic, and publisher of several educational texts. He's best known for his novel trilogy Ishmael, which is what I'm going to be discussing now. What do these three novels explain?

Farming and agriculture are why all civilization is in peril.

This seems absurd at first glance, and why it takes multiple books for Quinn to lay out and explain the idea in a way that makes it comprehensible. But I'll try my best to explain it in a single blog post.

The idea is rather simple: Farming allows a surplus of food not otherwise found in nature, which means there is an increase of population likewise not found in nature. This unnatural, rapid population increase results in unnatural increased density, resulting in disease, vulnerability to natural disasters, and more.

Quinn's argument runs on what he calls the Law of Life: for any species, population size is a function of...