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Artificial Selection is an elegant concept that trumps the murderous intents of a wild world and makes evolution work for human benefit. However, the first time I heard the term, it was not described to me as a mode of selective breeding of plants and animals. Instead, someone described it to me as the mode of logic that governed the Human species' evolution. They said that it was how humans were selectively breeding themselves.

That astonished me at the time. "Wow!" humans subjugate the planet's species and resources and then breed themselves to supremacy by selectively choosing the greatest of their society to prosper, live-long and reproduce. What an example of "the universe knowing itself" eh?

So, what are we breeding ourselves for?

Who is setting the conditions of the breeding environment?

What's our development so far?

...

Selective breeding requires conscious control. Artificial selection requires an artifice of breeding conditions, crafted by thought and imposed by will. When was the last time you thought about your genes and whether the world is favorable to them? Should the world be favorable to them? There is no single standard of perfect humans that we collectively agree to aspire to. There can be no artificial selection without a standard to select by. Humans are not breeding themselves selectively.

But they are breeding. And they don't breed randomly. They don't die randomly. That means....

We are evolving, and we currently exert no control whatsoever over what we are evolving into. Not conscious, decisive control, that is. Humans protect themselves from disease external to their bodies. Weak-systemed humans survive and spread their weakness through the gene-pool. Grand fears of overpopulation touch the hearts of millions of upper class citizens who restrict their breeding to about two kids per couple. No one's keeping the massive families of the impoverished to that rule. In fact, economic scarcity encourages large families, who can gather more income as a whole, to survive in impoverished castes. Were there systemic differences between the inherited ways the poor approached life and the way the more affluent did? If so, the more prolific humans shall see their methods of living become the standard of the species.

It's a selection based on the habits developed by our species, rather than the traits. A Habitual Selection. Our addictions to ways of life dictate directly and inversely how we will change.

When was the last time you asked yourself, "Will the future of humanity be more like me or less like me?"

Am I an adaptive trait in this world, or am I a maladaptive one? And most critically are these two questions:

1) What do I even want humanity to become in the first place?

But sure was her love and great was her joy as verily painted we journeys and ploys to every wild corner with ear to the warner that thudded so wildly within. Splattered to canvas we sinned. A gallery of depravity that refocused perfectly magically into a holy of hollies in bright swirling hues the perfection of all things going in twos. No ruse was used as we swam in the air, for 500 days we happily shared a joining, anointing subsequently coining the blessed verbal insanity composed mathematically to lift up our spirits yet undemandingly  perfectly honestly and always modestly making and taking the ways we'd be waking each other in bed to be happy instead. Lives bled together so unbelievably red. Heading straight up to heaven, when up to eleven we drove each our tenderest touch in so much, creating a band woven with hands of pure open sincerity lending a clarity that reduced to hilarity any conception of misdeed or woe. Ooooooooh.

It was fantastic. Near, I could say, bliss as I spoke and mingled that day.

In ourselves we stood so strong. Nary a miss when we snuggled and kissed with words inside actions of unmarked transactions we made each other so rich. She was a painter, and she painted a canvas. I stood aside to imbibe of this madness that flowed from her motions, illogical sweet. Where her self-satisfaction and laziness meet. It worked. No opposites met, each in our ways, mutually set to differ. Our mutual bond grew stiffer.

Then died. Choked when we tried to join together as one. In a house, where it was cold. She couldn't pay. I would stay. It was grey. She could tell. And she'd yell as it cracked, the paint dried and split. The habits slowly receded and lost. It couldn't flow. Breath fell dead as her heart was cold. I expressed my love and suddenly nothing was magic to her. She let the silence in. We let the silence win. Someone else offered her magic to make her dream again. I am happy she survived her first. I know that it hurts. To tell someone that you got to leave. I hope she believed when I said I received her apologies with no uncertainties of my peace. Though love cannot cease, it can change. And in every exchange I was honored to be, even but shortly, her lover.

It's okay.

Let Mass be Mood. That is, our net emotional state of well-being. It is our harmony. It is our mental focus. It is the wild drowning screams of a state of ecstasy, and it is the low murmuring temptations of depression and woe. What is Mood explicitly? What is Mass explicitly? They're stuff. Measurable stuff that is very valuable to us and is part of our lives in an inextricable way. Both of them define much of what we experience as "reality", which is all we have to treasure from what we experience as "life". It's this fundamental importance that makes it the variable to measure first and last. It's not the money we count to buy gifts. It's not the gifts we count to please friends. It's not the friends we count into our time. It is the delight and sadness that results from everything we take and receive into our lives. It's how we measure a life as a story: "How does it make you feeeeeeel?"

Let Force be Pain. Pain changes our moods, or at least tries to. It shifts the self-regulating mechanisms of our mind to accelerate our moods toward negative emotional experience. It is not like a velocity. Pain is not how quickly we become sad. It is how quickly the rate of change in our mood shifts toward the negative direction. If I am subjected to pain, like an object subjected to force, I am not suddenly very sad or angry. But I am beginning to move towards that negative end. And the longer I am subjected to a pain, the faster and faster my mood is pushed to become more and more negative. If I am subjected to small amounts of pain when I am very happy, it can take quite some time to reach a rate of change that can lead to significant change of mood. Of course, some pains are so immense that the change in distance can feel completely immediate. And of course, some moods are harder to get moving than others. Emotional Inertia is a property of Moods that determines how much pain it takes to get a mood moving in the negative direction.

TO BE SEEN IN PART 2

Let Work be Stress

When the circumstances surrounding human life change, the humans involved can find themselves changing too to fit into that new reality.

The extent of this change can be dictated by the laziest and most belittling of human desires for simplicity and efficiency, which identify only the points of greatest benefit and danger to survival that separate the new world from the old one (sometimes erroneously).

In this mode of adaptation, the old principles of personal and social existence remain tenaciously entrenched, and only a few modes of behavior are modified to address the new circumstances, often simplified into antagonistic and superficial abstract entities.

An example of that mode of change are the "Black Codes" of the Reconstruction Era of the southern United States, wherein all of the changes that were suddenly thrust into confederate society by the end of slavery (a change of lifestyle, a loss of workforce, a loss of property, an influx of radically opposite culture, a change in governance, the decimation of southern wealth) were approached as if they were a simple problem: the "invasion" of the freed african american populations. By identifying an easy target for antagonism (rising from the tenacity of long entrenched racism) and takings actions aimed only at managing this scapegoat figure of the "black threat", states like South Carolina played themselves into a wild-goose chase of legislation that led them into economic decline. That decline occurred not because the black codes were soundly routed by the Civil Rights Act, but more importantly, by the inefficiency of the share-cropping system of indebted freeman labor that kept most farms producing an ever decaying yield of cotton in a market where its prices continued to fall internationally. The focus in reactions was so exclusive to controlling the newly freed african americans, that the region didn't realize that they were trapping everyone, black or white into an economic model doomed to failure. They took the easy, emotional mode to approaching a new situation (through the viewpoints of old principles).

But the changes to humankind made during an adaptation do not always come from such simple drives and tenacious stupidities (despite how frequently they do). I'll give no example here, because doing so would weaken the resolve imbued by this writing's thesis. It can be done, and little more need be said of the human ability to think before leaping.

Here is that thesis, put forward simply: Slavery does not exist in our western world order as we define it, and yet very few people "feel" that they are "free". In this state of dissatisfaction (a vague and apathetic one) the use of the word "freedom" has dulled and diluted the sources of sorrow. When humans clench their heads and chests at the sensation of being crushed beneath some external tyranny, they look about, as a slave looking for its belligerent master, and they find no-one barking orders. No one whips us or steals from us in the open. We cannot find the source of our sense of constriction, and so we strive to dismiss it. It is a horrible state of existence akin to being stabbed repeatedly by a ghost we cannot see or comprehend, leaving us with the options to falsely blame the living or silently suffer in surrender.

The feeling of freedom can be fleeting and nondescript, but must its definition then also lead us in a fruitless tail-chase of "I am not free, but I must be, yet I am not"? Consideration must be taken into how freedom has changed in our world of covert realities. How has the thing we call "freedom", which we chase after and desperately yearn for, morphed under our very noses that we can feel unfree and yet have no means of identifying why we feel so. Adaption is in order. Recasting definitions is demanded. Our feelings are not dismissible, reality deserves a double-check.

Examine the foundation of freedom's many present definitions. What is right, and what might be wrong? Is freedom a power? Perhaps, but of what? Choosing. Are we free when we make choices? If I choose to obey a master barking orders at me under threat, then surely even by this old definition, I am not free. If I choose to refuse orders, have I chosen to have freedom? As I am whipped, do I feel free because I did not do as I was told? Or is that arrogance? Is that pride? What if I refused to do something I was told to because I told myself that it was a morally wrong thing to do? Do I have freedom from myself? What if I obey the lessons of my parents in choosing to refuse drugs? What if I obey the desires of my friends and refuse my parents' warnings? What if I evaluate the pros and cons of a lifestyle involving drugs and discover that it inhibits the acquisition of some of my personal goals? Did I choose because I was controlled by the very reality of drugs themselves? In every choice I made, did I ever have freedom from influence?

This old definition depends in every single line on a human's ability to choose something, have something or be capable of something without an influence or constraint determining their choice or capacity for them. This paints a very old and very classical picture of humans, presented with a garden-universe and choosing which trees to eat from. If someone  puts up a flaming fence around a certain tree, and no human can climb it, then they are not purely free, as someone/something has restricted their capacity and choices (much like a cage that is keeping the entire world out of the space of that single tree).

Many choices yet remain, and the situation might be called "fairly free" on some kind of scale of freedom, but we can easily see the problem with this way of defining freedom lies in a cascading standard of that scale. If that tree is fenced off, then surely the human is not free, but if the tree is available then their choice remains constrained by other forces, such as their own appetite or the height at which fruits grow on that tree. The standard of freedom shifts and we find again and again that our choices are being "controlled" by outside and inside forces as deeply sourced as from the natures of the options themselves.

The reality in front of them in-fact presents no true ultimatums of choice (though we easily simplify it to that appearance); it is presenting them only with a sample space of conditions in which they are making choices. And those conditions are what make the choice possible in the first place; it cannot be made without them. If one is given a choice between two identical options, there is no choice to be made as the options cannot be individuated to be chosen from. In every conceivable scenario of choice, each option comes with a set of conditions governing the outcomes of its selection.

Then the old definition suggests we can never and will never be free, not as long as we have the will to choose, which always receives dictations from the universe to determine it's choices. What a dark and sinister conclusion, that we might be shackled by our wings in an ouroboros of control and weakness. Not acceptable. As we have changed as a species, we have seen deeper and deeper into our supposedly "free-will", and at only the stage we find ourselves at, our definition of freedom must already become a shackle of perpetual self-slavery. No, that will not do. We must adapt our ideals. We must think broader in our dreams while being yet more humble in our self-understanding of the limits and powers of our choices. Freedom, as an object we covet and pursue, must be re-defined to be obtainable again.

Let us climb. Climb the flaming fiery fence and rend our self-imposed exile from the tree of our ancestors, devouring its fruit and planting new seeds in the space of that grim old apple tree. We must burn our hands and furrow our brows in the sweat and heat of uncertainty, or we will never taste ecstasy of this form again.