You could say that socialism is the evolution of human society. Ever since the Neolithic larger and larger groups of humans have been adapting their lives to the advantages and disadvantages of “civilization.” Other than some tribes living in the Amazon jungle or the New Guinean highlands humanity has abandoned the hunter gatherer and nomad lifestyles for civilization that allows for agriculture, permanent settlements, scientific innovation and the joys of income tax.
Ever since the first “city” in Sumer began dictating how the fertile crescent would be fertile and how the Sumerian farmers would pay their tithe to the great god Enki we have lived in a continuously more regimented society that slowly but surely has begun to resemble an ant hive.
Now, from time to time there have been revolts. Chiefly these have consisted of nomads swooping down and ransacking the ant-hive. The last big example was the Germanic sack of the Roman Empire. The various Goths, Vandals, Franks and Lombards turned the checker board of civilized life over for good and proper sometime in the mid-400s AD. These pastoral barbarians not only burned and pillaged the various cities of Western Europe but they set the cause of insectoid existence back a thousand years. But here we are fifteen hundred years later and evolution has made incredible strides. The hive has been modernized, mechanized and now automated beyond the wildest dreams of priests, bureaucrats, or even Aldous Huxley. Even in his science fictional brave new world Huxley at least maintained the conventional male/female dichotomy and sex roles. In our factual brave new world, the “scientists” aren’t as technically proficient as the ones in Huxley’s tale but they can still do a lot of damage with some hormones and a scalpel. And since the objective isn’t to build a functional genetically engineered human ant hive but rather to cull the herd down to a controllable size, the results of their modifications don’t have to be eugenic, just not immediately lethal. And add in all the other programming that has been used to discourage the young from family formation and you have a considerable effort being expended to make this a truly brave new world.
But is this really our future? Are we going to be whittled down to small “sustainable” population of “alphas” to be the royal caste and the rest of the population will be a manageable number of workers who will toil their lives away without leaving a trace after them?
Despite the resources and organizational control that our betters possess I find it improbable. I think it’s more likely that some less advanced but more motivated people will manage to upend this system just as the tribesmen did to the Romans all those years ago. Maybe it’ll be the Mexican cartels or maybe it’ll be some nation state that doesn’t want to be globalized out of existence. But whoever it is, the imperative to be human will outcompete the logic of the hive. Turning humans into cyphers may work for Amazon.com and Google but only because we haven’t been driven to the wall yet. There will come a time when it becomes apparent to the more intelligent that we are being driven to extinction for the sake of the convenience of the few. At that point, resistance will occur and hopefully the insects will lose. If not, “Long live the Queen!”