Neurophobia

"We were neurophobic and perfect
The day that we lost our souls"

Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals
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"They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite objective they were just marching and showing themselves in the more prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were being ‘scrapped’—as horses had been ‘scrapped.’
Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this gathering surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless—and incapable—and pitiful.
What were they asking for?
They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen——
It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful, for something—for INTELLIGENCE. This mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these dislocations—that anyhow they ought to have foreseen—and arranged.
That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly to assert.
‘Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,’ he says. ‘These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything is that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too, that as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order has still to be gathered together, out of scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It’s something still to come....’"

[...]

"It is wonderful how our fathers bore themselves toward science. They hated it. They feared it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and work -- a pitiful handful... 'Don't find anything out about us,' they said to them; 'don't inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of life from the fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us, little limited tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our colds and relieve us after repletion...'"

HG Wells - The World Set Free, 1914
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"Me go too far!
Me am play gods!"

Dresden Codak, Caveman Science Fiction
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Here's an old riddle: you're given a choice of being executed by being thrown in a room with either:
A) a blazing inferno
B) inescapable quicksand
C) tigers that haven't eaten in a year
There are different versions, naturally. Sometimes the tigers are lions, sometimes the quicksand's poison gas. Have you solved it yet? The kitties have long starved to death, so they're the safe choice. I flunked that riddle when I first heard it. To me, the hazard which carried intentionality ranked automatically most hazardous. I never even considered its details.

Speaking of poison gas, have you heard of this crazy old thing called World War 2? It was pretty popular back in the day. Nuclear bombs and the Nazis' gas chambers remain the war's icons of destruction, but vastly more civilians were killed by plain old bullets and shrapnel, or by starvation, or by homelessness, or by being worked to death or by any number of other low-tech solutions to the problem of breathing. In fact part of the stated (albeit highly questionable) rationale for nukes was that they would result in fewer casualties than a protracted conflict, and for gas chambers it was to spare soldiers all the mental anguish from all those millions of civilians they'd been shooting the old-fashioned way. Yet somehow our minds fixate on the complicated, technological evil as the necessarily greater one. The same was true of World War 1, where the infamous gas attacks which so captivated both the media of the time and our historical perspective fell two orders of magnitude lower than the total deaths caused by fighting, which in turn were an order of magnitude lower than deaths caused by the breakdown in social services, plummeting health conditions and pandemic disease. Even back to the French Revolution and its subsequent years, the guillotine, that towering emblem of Terror, racked up under twenty thousand deaths during a period when ten times as many were being butchered in the Vendée alone, and maybe a million in the country as a whole, by methods a great deal more painful than instant decapitation.

Nor is our skewed perspective of such dangers limited to warfare. As I've pointed out before, the media loved to build up Theodore Kaczynski as their poster-child for terrorism and have ingrained his name in our memories even decades later, even as he was eclipsed by the world trade center bombers whose names no-one remembers. Yet in his seventeen year "unabomber" career, he inflicted only three fatalities and a score of injuries, easily outmatched by any of hundreds of terrorist Muslims in each single attack, not to mention all the other superstitious cretins of the world smiting various infidels. Kaczynski retains his notoriety partly for evading capture so long, but largely because he stands out, because instead of being a brainwashed simpleton like most murderers he was a mathematics professor. Instead of chanting and praying he formulated his own convoluted misinterpretation of the world and demanded it be published. He thought. Whatever his crimes in a practical sense, in the public unconsciousness he was convicted of the worst crime of all: thought.

All of us, if we're to die a violent death, would likely be shot by a soldier with no more understanding of the world than a rabid dog, or by a hobo with 70 IQ beating our brains out with a brick - yet we fear the complex means of death, nuclear bombs and noxious miasmas and guillotines. To escape the knowledge that we'll likely be pummeled  to death in a fit of rage or greed by our own moronic neighbours, we fabricate imaginary techno-wizards leveraging the mysteries of the universe against us. Or has anyone not watched a movie from the past hundred years?

On a completely unrelated topic, I was listening to some TV show or another on nutrition. Mostly good, sensible, simple, redundant warnings of our immoderate intake of sugar and fat...until the presenter got to the topic of additives and spouted one of the stupidest lines imaginable: "don't eat anything with ingredients you don't understand." Like what? Prolyl endopeptidase? Or guanidinoacetate, oh, that's great stuff, delicious on toast. Or maybe you're afraid of dying of simple histone poisoning? I hear the Nazis invented it. Hey, here's a question: if you chop a leg off a wild boar and toss it onto your grill, how many of the chemicals sizzling so enticingly do you think you can actually identify? You yourself are a pile of ingredients you don't understand!

Here's the thing. We fear thought. Our later stages of evolution selected us for it. A human tribe as a whole is a highly efficient unit of resource-gathering and shelter, especially once supplied with a Neolithic arsenal and domesticated snacks. Survival and reproductive success, for our ancestors, primarily meant competing not against leopards or antelope, but against each other. Reading others' intent has been so crucial to our propagation that when posed the question of intent, our brains fail safe and just assume it. We read faces in anything from knots in tree trunks to car headlights; we hear voices on the wind. From even deeper in our evolutionary past we also inherit a fear of the unknown - which is why so many dogs will be spending this fireworks-rich night hiding under their masters' beds. Combine the two and you have the greatest evil the human mind can imagine: thought it can't understand.

So even though the food additive currently causing us most harm is simple sugar, we fear the chemicals produced by chemists much, much more. The warlocks must be up to something! We fear the convoluted machinations of engineers designing RubeGoldbergian devices for killing us, when the greatest threat to our safety comes from our uneducated neighbours who decided to have seven children and now could use a bit of long pig to feed them all. The more thought goes into something the more we fear it, shun it, assemble angry mobs to combat it, and the reactionary Luddism thus engendered continually hampers scientific endeavors. The outcry against cloning for instance has not even the barest seed of reason to it. Identical twins are perfectly natural, but when it's done with intent and intelligence instead of leaving it up to the stumbling of chance, out come the pitchforks and torches. Genetic engineering holds the greatest promise to improve quality of life since fire and the wheel, yet the wailing against "frankencrops" drowns out all sensible arguments. I am sick to death of hearing phrases like "we don't know what the long-term effects will be" from cretins who don't know what the long-term effects will be without it either, who in fact don't know much of anything about anything. Do you know what the long-term effects of hereditary disease are? Disease! What about endemic diseases? What about mass starvation? Does that have any long-term effects? What about the potential for longevity and immortality? Am I supposed to meekly accept my death sentence because you imbecilic filth fear transgressing some imagined supernatural plan to our natural lifespans?

Anti-intellectualism is intrinsic to human instinct, but society is increasingly outpacing instinct. Ultimately, the discernment necessary to view the world clearly is not primarily a matter of education or availability of information, but of the capacity for independent reasoning. We can't dodge it. Even placing trust in some institution and the information it provides means somehow evaluating its trustworthiness. By accepting the conclusions of some university researcher's study on horizontal gene transfer, I, as an individual, am accepting the validity of that university's accreditation, the reliability of whatever machinery was used in the study, the size of the giants on whose shoulders the researcher stood. The same is true of the primitives placing their trust in superstition. By taking the word of some astrologer or voodoo priest or economist, one implies some sort of evaluation of that person's qualifications -- to which I would retort: based on what evidence?

We're long past due to admit that in order to continue to improve the world we must improve its inhabitants. We must select for those capable of rational thought, those who not only fear tigers on a mindless instinctual ape level but can evaluate when the tigers do or do not pose a threat. There can be no better world while the vast majority of the population is actively, reflexively fighting against the intelligence which might bring about improvement.

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P.S.:
I'd put money on "the fearful shaft of understanding" being Wells' pet name for his penis.