In prehistoric times, you could walk all your life and never see another human being ever again. And while that is still (mostly, occasionally) true of the most desolate environments, it is by no stretch of the imagination any longer true of prime habitation ground.

If we have not yet earned the term "vermin," the time's not far off.

Consider these startling points:

1: Human nests (a.k.a. cities) are insanely congested. Holiday Sundays and Mondays are the easiest to deal with, while parade days are by far the worst.

2: Human nests are filthy. Actually, this varies from city to city, with my own occupying a good middle ground. On the whole, though, humans have very little respect for their surroundings.

(And just to undercut the charge that this is a strictly Western prejudice, I'd like to point out that Western cities are far cleaner than Eastern cities; I'm not qualified to talk about the precolumbian Central American cities, but I'm sure they weren't the HoJo either).

3: Humans have a very high natural increase rate. Unlike other vermin species, like rats for example, this is not due to our natural constitution, though the amount of damage a human can go through is nothing to sneeze at, and would fell many a beast of comparable size. Rather, our natural increase has to do with our intelligence, specifically our medical knowledge.

4: Humans can eat garbage to survive. Skeptical? Eat at McDonald's. A "hamburger" is mostly pressed oily bean curds (soy) and ground-up worms (so they say), with trace amounts of actual beef, not to mention the whack of preservatives that render what little nutrition to be found in the burger next to useless for the human body. Nonetheless, we can digest the profane stuff and actually derive energy from it, rather than puking it up like any sane digestive system would.

5: Despite what those horror stories of the Cold War era might have you believe, actually, a nuclear holocaust would leave some survivors. They can live off rats and cockroaches.

Historically, the verminhood of humanity has only really become evident since the dawn of the Industrial Age. Before that, most of the world was covered by vast stretches of wilderness, with small pockets of civilisation. Nowadays, living on Prince Edward Island, I barely have any conception of "wilderness" at all. Our population as a species effectively doubled over the course of the 20th Century. Now, we've soiled the whole planet to such an extent that we could actually alter the climate and geography of the world if we don't start cleaning up after ourselves. The key to our status is technology, which gives us an edge over other creatures who are vermin by their very constitutions.

Anthropologically, explanations for our extreme adaptability generally run like this: Millions of years ago, we were smaller, hairier little ape-like creatures, basically the same as chimpanzees. At that time we lived in jungles, like those that used to be found on the east coast of Africa. But as the mountains rose, and the hot continental winds changed, those forests shrank, until all that was left was open savannah. These primitive ape-creatures had to find food and survive. One of the ways in which we are said to have evolved during this time is a stronger constitution, a taste for meat, and the intelligence and cunning required for a little ape-man to get that meat. This learning curve, anthropologists say, was best acquired via a process called neotony, whereby an animal retains certain foetus-like features throughout its adult life.

Now, don't get me wrong. Being vermin is a high honour. Being vermin is practically a prerequisite to being one of the most successful species. Vermin are adaptable, they're cunning, they're nasty little buggers that, try as you might, you just can't get rid of. If we're going to populate the stars, or if disaster strikes our homeworld, we damn well better have these traits if we want to make it.

But being vermin also bears with it certain challenges. Psychologically, we are not made to be vermin, we are made to be human, and that invovles a certain degree of individuality, of humanity. To the extent we are common, to the extent we are base, to the extent that we are inevitible (objective, objects, not subjects), to the extent we are vermin -- exactly to that extent are we really blocked from having individuality, honour, dignity, responsibility, Existenz. There's no way to say which is most important, survival or dignity, but if we're to truly win the World's Most Successful Species Contest, we need to resolve this seeming paradox.

In a way, Christianity and the religion of meekness (where it is believed that the "meek," or cowardly, are to inherit the earth) is a natural expression of this vermin aspect. So too is the conformity-machine, the State, and the "virtues" the state promotes (loyalty, obedience, fraternity, etc.). They sum up the basic conundrum of society: Sometimes you must inure yourself to someone else's service temporarily, do something you don't want to do, so that later you can do what you want to do. Of course, this is only rational; it is a simple matter of delayed gratification.

But both Christianity and the state-society represent the worst lies, the worst perversions of this principle. In the case of the state, we must not live for ourselves; we must live for the state itself, or the society itself (which amounts to the same thing). The "delayed gratification" response is mobilized with the promise that our hard work will pay off for our children, when of course if we slavishly obey the directions of established government our children will most likely be quite a shock worse off than we are.

In the case of Christianity (as well as its progenitor, Judaism), it is the lie that all this subordination, this enslavement, is in the name of a greater reward after death. This myth of an afterlife, once hammered into children as soon as they could walk, makes true opposition to tyranny impossible. It is impossible in practice, because it is pointless (the tyrant will get his just deserts in the end, and so will you); it is impossible in principle, because God is just as much a tyrant as anyone, asking of you exactly the same thing that any tyrant does. The metaphysics of Christianity is the constitution of a universal dictatorship.

Both Christianity and the State have helped the human race survive. Christianity is the religion of the underclass and of people enduring hardship; Judaism, its parent, is the religion of slaves and wanderers. The State is a natural development in organizing agriculture and specialized crafts in a world where we've hunted the big game to scarcity or extinction; it is not the evolution of society, but a hack, a compromise made necessary by the impossibility of living in hunter-gatherer nomadic bands anymore. But in "helping" us thusly, they have reduced us to units, to things, objects, tools or manipulanda.

True progress occurs at the fringes. The mad scientist, the witch or warlock or sorcerer, the radical (or rhizomal) artist: these are our true heroes. These are the true non-vermin, the true human beings, even when they live like animals, because they are not of the pack. Democracy and capitalism only represent freedom insofar as it permits a proliferation of these archetypes. Otherwise they are ochlocracy and plutocracy. And freedom is good because the extreme experience, the encounter with truth that doesn't happen in a book but is a true event -- the domain of the artist or sorceror or prophet or mad scientist -- are humanity's particular method of adaptation.

verminity = stasis

humanity = dynamics