Wheat, the system and control

November 03, 2023

Edit Nov 15, 23

Agricultural revolution

The New York Times bestseller “Sapiens”, written by Yuval Noah Harari, shares with its readers, a pivotal time in human history, the Agricultural Revolution. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it began roughly 12,000 years ago and changed the path of our ancestors, across the world. Nomadic foragers settled down to become farmers.

There was a tremendous increase to the food supply, so our ancestors began to do more… of what we love doing today… making more babies! Populations proliferated. Villages grew, and with those larger consolidated numbers of people, came a greater sense of security against threats. It becomes a self feeding loop of growth and settlement.

However, the diversity in human nutrition diminished greatly, as diets no longer consisted of varied food sources across distant lands. Instead, diets focused on a select few species and crops, to farm and domesticate. Through this a symbiotic relationship was formed between human beings and select other species.

In particular consideration, wheat was a popular crop of choice, benefitting greatly from this revolution, without doing any additional work. It gained security for generations, through farmers. As human populations grew, wheat, like other crops, became a dependency, in order to feed all those additional mouths. Thus, one can argue, that during the Agricultural Revolution, it wasn’t human beings that domesticated wheat, but really, wheat that domesticated human beings. Because, we’re doing all the new work, cultivating its life.

Now, all of the above, is from the fifth chapter in the aforementioned book, none of it’s new. Absolute fantastic read. I recommend it.

But, I’d like to take a moment, and reflect on a parallel between the described relationship of humans and wheat, post Agricultural Revolution, and the relationship between humans and our created system, as it exists today.

The “system”

The “system” is a theoritical concept of all that human beings have created to maintain order. From religion, markets (economics), politics, law, war, all these mediums, if you will, enable each and everyone of us to interface in some shared understanding, a metaphysical reality.

These days, there are conspiracy theoriests, who go on and on about who controls (or attempts to control) the system, such as Bill Gates, China/Russia, puppet master families, terrorists, one world government or what have you, but there’s a growing possibility that it’s no longer really possible to control the system and human beings anymore. In other words, no human, humans or systems can change our path, by choosing something else through their own power, nor may ever be able to again…

That these days, in our vastly complicated, massive system, moving forward at a (still) increasingly difficult to keep-up pace that it has simply outgrown our ability to control, to truly change course, in ways we once had.

We have an implicit & dependent relationship with our system, because not only did we create it for order, we need it to maintain order, like parents and homes, for growing children. But, the relationship we have between the system itself and us, has grown rigid through centuries of proven precedent. That holds us to what we have standardized, as a necessity in order to provide stability, security and hopefully prosperity, across all domains of the system. But, it is vastly complicated, made up of a multitude of sub-systems, diverse of domain richness in culture, politics and history, a powerful momentous force. Some of it can change fast like culture and technology, while some of it usually changes slow like law and economics. Yet, it with us, in this metaphysical reality, guides the whole shebang on this path.

For centuries now, things have been in motion, building up momentum, history, collecting innovations, emotional debts, defining more rigid structures, becoming in a way real, that through through us, the system has grown bigger than our own species. It is an entity that does not exist physically, but exists metaphysically, through us, kept alive, even though it has no breath to breath. However, in recent times, perhaps before 2008, human beings hands drifted away from the wheel.

Unfortunately, the system is not alive. It’s not divine. It does not have any capacities to feel, grow, like you or me. It cannot evolve on its own. It does not understand. In its own way, it stands vulnerable, like a child. It’s foundational layers like law and economics are slow to change. Thus, when crisis emerges from unknown or misunderstood causes, the solution tends to be the same, a reactive, precedent proven strengthening of the system in ways such as, consolidating banks that are too big to fail, forming political tribes, and building denser housing. This consolidates and dedicates more of existing resources to surfaces of the system that either appear to or expose real significant risk.

To stabilize economics, to protect peace, for future prosperity or whatever causes claimed, more and more, the system gets bigger, denser, rigid, in its set ways, to the point that perhaps no human or humans can truly, even with advanced tools, conceive it in its entirety, in order to affect true change, that changes our path, destiny, if you will, in a major way that fate itself has now become set - through this marriage of human beings, history and this, so well defined yet so complicated of a system.

Thus, it’s possible that in recent times, given our relationship with the system, and how things are moving forward, that we no longer have control, that when it counts, our hands will be forced, as the system itself, in our entangled state with it, keeps its and inevitably our paths set. From rich to poor. From powerful to weak. All those who attempt to live, to exist with, essentially interface the system, cannot avoid its structures, rules, and firmly held viewpoints, as laid out on its path of proven history.

Things may remain rigidly stuck as they are, with slow changes on the rise, but it may take a crisis to create a window of change.

Wheat

So perhaps, things are in control by an unalive, metaphysically rooted entity. That really the very system itself, that we once created and now maintain, implicitly controls us, in a state of dependent, reduced optionality, rigidly protected by collective precedent.

Through each other, we do the work of the system, in reminding each other, reminding ourselves, to be held to the standards of the system, as we serve its various services and sectors. Some defend the system, while feeling hopeless about it, because deep down, they feel fragile without it.

That like wheat, after the Agricultural Revolution, the system holds human beings to a path that is both ordered (good for security) and exposed to new risks like sickness.

The system and our relationship with it has grown so large, too big to fail, like the populations of humans and wheat growing so big, that we have no other choice but to stick with it, even if it prevents us from invoking the necessary changes, because it’s the safer, more sensible choice. It could take a major crisis to open the door for significant change.

That the system, like wheat, is boxing us in to what has become, a domestication of maintaince, keeping us in check like fences for cattle, having us work jobs to keep it all going, yet as we intended, slow changing, and now more vulnerable to what we don’t know or misunderstand.

That what controls us now is like wheat - it has no feelings, no intelligence, it just is how it is, thanks to us.

Fucking wheat.