Against Feffers

In a short story a few years ago, my husband coined the term Feffers as a short hand for all the sad mouths who yell “Fix Earth First” every time anyone tries to escape the crab bucket this our native rock.

It is the perfect term, since without the first F it’s a pejorative anyway. And heaven knows, I start using it, in a tone like a spitting cat, when I’m following some cool event or development on X and find myself mired in comment after comment of “We could eliminate poverty” (Spoiler: Poverty always wins wars on poverty.) Or “We have so many problems here on Earth” or similar stupidity.

They are wrong. No, I can’t absolutely prove it for the reason that sociological experiments are really hard to run on an entire society. This could be solved by having a portal that allows us to observe parallel worlds that took alternate paths, but younger son refuses to invent the technology. Out of contrarianess I’m sure.

However we have a similar thing, called history.

The truth is that human societies that don’t move out of their space and colonize and change become stagnant and become stagnant in peculiar ways.

Take Africa — oh, please, for the love of Bob, take Africa. No one sane wants it, as China is finding out. — it’s a collection of the most successful, stable, environment adapted cultures. Not saying they didn’t have inside-continent colonization: Zulus. But by and large, the people who remain in Africa, as natives, (to the extent that they’re not mixed by virtue of colonization from elsewhere) are the descendants of those strong enough and fitting in enough not to be chased, pushed or coventry-ed out.

Those who got pushed out, starting in pre-neolithic days, populated the Earth and came up with endless variations on culture, some of which were so successful they returned to colonize Africa.

The ones who stayed? They were perfectly suited to the environment and strong tribal culture. You could say they were optimized evolutionarily, by pushing out all who don’t fit. And the result is…

Well, you can survive in Africa at a relatively low level of productivity and organization. Which is good, because it is what Africa always devolves to. In the words of my friend Lawdog “Africa always wins.”

How do I know this is cultural and not racial? Well, pre- weaponization of race by shitty Marxists, the Africans who got away voluntarily tended to do very well. Even some of the involuntary ones, once pulled away from the general tribal culture, adapted and were high achieving. But in locus, the culture that never left? “Africa wins” is the saddest term I can think of.

Or if you want to pick on another extreme of culture, by a people that even racists can’t claim suffer from some deficiency in that imperfect (and weird) measurement of “IQ” , let’s take the Chinese. One on one, test on test, the Chinese are the highest scoring humans when it comes to IQ tests.

On the more important side, because IQ is a fickle measurement, Chinese who leave China tend to do very well indeed, particularly if they are ISOLATED and on their own. I.e. away from the culture.

But you can’t read a Chinese history book without getting the impression of a movie stuck on repeat. Great flourishing and advances, then erase it all from history and start again, forever. And the culture has certain limiting blind spots of legalism and worship of the written word that make the whole thing unable to get very far. The result? China has been marinading in tears and wasted potential for thousands of years and imports all important advances from abroad.

I firmly believe this is the result of failing to colonize: Failing to go elsewhere and be challenged by different environments, different interactions, different challenges. Humans, like all animals tend to get too well adapted to their environment, too comfortable in their sameness and routine. And then it becomes codified and an iron crab bucket you cannot break.

Our culture (Western culture in this case, not specifically American) is showing some signs of trying to enter into exactly those cycles of destruction and restarting.

We need to break the bonds. We need to go elsewhere, reach further, challenge ourselves, and let those ideas come back to challenge those who stay at home.

Because comfort and safety are not survival-enhancing characteristics for cultures (or humans) in the long run.

As for fixing all the problems on Earth first, most of those problems are only problems as defined by crazy people.

Stuff like inequality is just a sign of freedom. Free humans are inherently unequal because they value and work towards different things. It’s only slaves who are held to complete equality.

Even poverty is not exactly a problem to be solved. First it depends on what you define as poverty. And second, poverty has been the condition of humanity for most of its existence. Trying to overcome it has propelled some of our greatest triumphs. And trying to fix it for other people has never worked. Never.

Whatever problems we have are more likely to be fixed by going out of the Earth: higher, further, more risky. As far as we can go. To the distant stars.

Because it is there that we’ll find the solution to problems we don’t even know we have. And also from there that will come the leavening and innovation that will renew all of humanity and cause us to survive longer and reach further than we think possible.

Shut up Feffers. The rest of us are going to the stars.