Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

We’re engaged in very weird bio-engineering experiments and we don’t know what we’re doing, or how it works, or what the results will be.

It’s become an open secret that many of the “mass shooters” are either people who are on anti-depressants or who just quit them.

My kids probably needed medicine for ADHD. Look, my husband and I have all the stigmata. There’s a very good chance. But I fought against giving the kids ritalin when they were really young, because I had seen a ton of kids where they got ritalin and their personality changed completely. Worse, they never learned to deal with themselves, to manage themselves and who they are, for lack of a better term.

We are now for the first time in history, as far as I can tell, having entire generations come of age who never knew who they are chemically unaltered.

And it’s not “just” ritalin and anti-depressants, either. It’s a ton of other things, some of which are not supposed to have psych or emotional side effects. But do. Perhaps in a minority of people, perhaps in a majority, but it does have effects.

I know that illnesses can, too, like the flu. The flu can cause an “after effect” of extreme depression. Doctors tend not to tell you that. But I’ve had it a few times. Now I know what it is and I discount it.

But there are other things. I got very, very ill with singulair. People keep telling me that singulair doesn’t even have side effects of that sort. But get any doctor alone, a good doctor, and they’ll squirm and say “Yeah, we keep hearing that. We just don’t know how or WHY.”

The effects on me were terrifying. I’m just now starting to write again. It shouldn’t have anything to do with that. Maybe. But I know that from about the first week, my ability to remember things started to come back. At the end there, I couldn’t hold a thought in my head for more than five minutes. So… It was affecting me, but I didn’t know.

Which is the most terrible part of this. We trust the thinking meat, but but what we’re thinking with is affected, and you don’t know it…

This came to mind because the boss over at instapundit had an article at USA today about selling contraceptives over the counter. And I was talking with a friend about the weird psychological effects of the pill on some of us. They put me on it twice, once while they were doing a bunch of tests for the infertility treatment and, in terms of liability, they couldn’t risk my being pregnant. Once a few years ago, trying to figure out what would fix it.

Both times, I had a major side effect of depression and the hormones didn’t work as they should. I got pregnant while on the “menopausal pill” which is weirdly weighted and very small. Apparently it made me more “normal”. Eh.

But there are psychological effects, and those are the worrisome ones. Women on the pill prefer more “feminine” men, men who are less aggressive and have softer features.

Since most women these days pick their husbands or boyfriends while on the pill, they’re changing what the next generation is selected for. And btw might have a lot to do with “toxic masculinity” because that type of men tend to have a more underhanded “dominance” than larger, more masculine men. There’s a name and a pattern for it, and Dave Freer has told me it’s the same in ape bands, so it’s something very deep.

But heaven help us, that’s what the west is selecting for, without even knowing it.

In the same way, we’re feralizing our pets, animals who are practically our symbionts.

This occurred to me a while ago, and then I realized that other people have been thinking the same.

Think about it. We know from the Siberian fox experiment you can tame an animal in ten generations of selective breathing.

Now think about the best cats and dogs. None of them are reproducing. In the US compliance with spaying and neutering is so complete that shelters are importing strays from other countries to be adopted. (Dogs. Cats are more likely to escape young and reproduce in vast feral colonies.) Even twenty years ago there were guys with boxes of puppies outside walmart. Now we have to get puppies (or dogs) from elsewhere. And then we spay them.

Now, I understand this is really bad in places like Australia, where felines can take down vast swathes of marsupial wild life.

In the US, the impact of feral cats is not the same as that of one “eco-power” windmill. Not saying they don’t have an impact, mind. It’s just not the same.

We’re not going to eliminate feral cat colonies. And maybe that’s a good thing, because escaped or discarded cats that are still predisposed to like humans are still reproducing. Dogs… Dogs who’ve been our best friends and without whom we’d not be where we are? The ones we allow to reproduce are either bizarre or come from countries where they’re practically feral.

What does all this mean? I don’t know.

It looks like we’re conducting these bizarre experiments, which I’m not 100% sure where they lead.

Yesterday on Facebook someone said something about “we’ll go to the stars. And when we go, we’ll leave the Earth so clean no one will know.”

And I wonder. I wonder if it’s happened before.

What if there was a great civilization before us, and they did the type of bizarre biological things we’re doing, to themselves. And what if they feralized their pets with their “responsible breeding.” Perhaps some of the animals who now hang around humans and are domesticated but not tame are what remains of those pets. Perhaps the great symbiont of humanity’s last civilizational interaction was the Raccoon.

And what will our descendants look like, as we’re allowing all these chemicals to change who we are, how we think, with whom we mate?

I don’t know. And neither do you. And neither does anyone else.

And maybe it’s for the best….

Humans are, after all, the self-domesticating animal. We change the world, but most of all we change ourselves.

Perhaps we’ll get to the stars and we’ll meet aliens who are us.

And perhaps–

Perhaps it will turn out for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

But I’d feel better if anyone at all were thinking about it, instead of careening merrily down the same path, all together, without a thought.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for June 15, 2019