Risks – and why we must take them

For the next 99.66% of our entire racial existence, we were all hunter gatherers. On occasion, hunted gatherers. Each day a small group of males would forage, working in concert to kill and collect enough food to sustain the tribe. Sometimes there was injury and death. Sometimes, in winter times, food became scarce. But man endured, tools improved, and through many generations of nomadic existence the accessible world was populated despite the vagaries of climactic change which so terrify today’s misguided zealots.

Ten thousand years ago, agriculture arose. Tribes increased in size and complexity. Some men were able to become specialists. Not everyone was needed to feed all. Early civilization began. Writing and recorded history ensued; the Egyptians, the Greeks, Caesar and Charlemange, Copernicus and Jonas Salk. It has been but an instant, a mere 500 generations, since we invented agriculture.

Farming, too, is risky business as any farmer can tell you. About 1400 the appearance of double-entry book-keeping joined the stirrup (armored knights) and the crossbow (end of armored knights) in advancing civilization. Trade flourished, capitalism evolved and mankind looked up from the ground and considered the stars.

The notion of a benevolent, all-embracing government only appeared in the time of our great-grandfathers. Nineteenth century intellectuals advanced the creed of the overweening state, and the subservient citizen. A chicken in every pot, a pot for every man. No steak though – so sorry.

The twentieth century began with the adoption of collectivist concepts by Trotsky , Lenin and Woodrow Wilson. By the millennium it had become obvious that replacing the daily tonic of an uncertain and risky existence with the tepid pabulum of statism killed people. Lots of people.

100 million or more died in the purges of Stalin, the mass extinctions of Mao and Pol Pot. Today we see, wherever the government has exploded, rising levels of suicide, drug addiction, alcoholism, the emergence of cults, tattoos and thuggery and disinterest in having children. England, Russia, Iceland.

Why bring children into a world with no hope for self-betterment? Why strive when success is punished and obedience acknowledged by the ruling class of elite politicians and flawed academics who are so deeply imbued with the false tenets of Marx and Engels that they pursue their ends even as society disembowels itself around them.

Dear Reader I submit to you that man is hardwired for Risk. Without chance and adventure in our lives, without the possibility of failure and the heady brew of achievement we will die off as surely as unwatered daisies. Risk. We need Risk. We thrive on Risk. If we are to endure we must stop regulating every aspect of human existence and legislating each perceived imperfection in civil society before we are so tightly bound we can no longer move.