Anarchy, Wolves and Resource Acquisition – Are We Next?

What Is Resource Acquisition?

New Delhi, India – “Starving flood victims fought each other for scarce food supplies Monday…” Associated Press, Aug 6, 2009.

Five years ago Fortune magazine reported military planners warning of “the mother of all national security issues…the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies.”

Every living species, including Homo sapiens, is involved in an endless battle for life’s resources. That battle I call “Resource Acquisition” and is well described by the AP quote above.

If you are a predator, acquiring a resource such as food is a daily task. Acquiring a female to mate with is an annual or estrus cycle task because females provide offspring, which continues the species, which maintains Resource Acquisition. Finding a safe home/mating location whether a cave, a hole in the ground, or a nest in a tree is acquiring a resource. Killing or driving away competitors is acquiring a resource because lesser competition means more available resources within a given area. Making more resources available in your neighborhood makes it more likely you will succeed in your Resource Acquisition goal, which is survival. Head-butting rams, wolves killing coyotes and pine trees killing all plants beneath their branches are examples.

Conservation of resources is another form of acquisition because conservation minimizes the risk of Resource Acquisition failure. And failure to acquire resources means death. Conservation, including procreation, applies because maintaining life provides more opportunity for the species to expand and expansion means higher probability of survival. Procreation is projecting Resource Acquisition for your species into the future.

Predators such as wolves fight to acquire territory, which will provide their two most important resources: food and females. Wolves that acquire territory survive, those that don’t die, either directly in battle or indirectly by the ending of their genetic line. Keep in mind that unlike the current batch of Western humans, wolves do not die of old age – they die from failing at Resource Acquisition. There are no nursing homes for wolves. And if the anarchists win this war there will be no nursing homes for humans either.

Examples of Resource Acquisition in the human species are legion.

In his book “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage,” anthropologist Lawrence Keeley exhaustively documents the Resource Acquisition nature of humans. Human tribes burning villages of other tribes and taking their women and food is just one of his many examples of humans acquiring resources by any means possible. Another example is humans killing off wolves and other predators to expand their Resource Acquisition area for food. Wolves basically eat the same protein sources humans do (and humans themselves if given the chance) therefore we had to kill them in order to survive and expand. This is obvious from the numbers: in 10,000 BC there were 20 million wolves and 3 million humans. Now there are 200,000 wolves and 6 billion humans. We killed the wolves before they could kill us and by doing so acquired their resources. Humans are the ultimate Resource Acquirers. We don’t need to apologize for that, it is what we are supposed to do.

Wars are fought over resources although the history books will often couch them in different terms. Caesar in Gaul? Resources for feeding and arming Rome. Thirty Years War? Land, gold and taxable populations, all resources to be acquired and subsequently used. US Revolutionary War? Retaining monetary resources, i.e. taxes, being paid to England and access to all geographical resources in N. America. That was indeed a large Resource Acquisition.

Think of a human process and you can come up with a Resource Acquisition explanation.

Traditional Marriage? Children are resources provided by women; food, shelter and security are resources provided by males.

Divorce? Economic wealth allows enough resources to be provided to both parties thus eliminating the Resource Acquisition needs of Traditional Marriage. Wealth provides Resource Acquisition reserves i.e. future resource needs can be guaranteed by current wealth unlike resource needs being a daily or constant need.

Capitalism? Using agreed upon rules to acquire as many resources as possible to ensure the survival of your own family, clan and tribe.

Socialism? Theory that Resource Acquisition by a group is more productive than by individuals within the group. It has been proven false and has, in every case, lead to less Resource Acquisition not more. See Soviet Union, China, India, Cuba and North Korea as examples.

Liberalism? Economic wealth dulls Resource Acquisition recognition/anxiety thus encouraging anti-survival behavior such as pacifism, species diversity (including competitive predators), and multi-tribalism (multi-culturalism) even if it threatens your survival. However the Resource Acquisition gene is never permanently muted and when faced with the immediate certainty of resource threats virtually every member of a species, including the human species, will revert to personal Resource Acquisition. It is in our DNA.

The Return of the Wolves – Could It Happen Here?

What are the possibilities of a modern breakdown of social order by terrorist or anarchists acts. Has it happened before and what should we do to prevent it from happening again?

Russian author Vasily Grossman, writing during the German invasion of Russia in WW II, wrote:

“Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves he must keep a rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, then everything’s lost. The wolves come out of the forest, and everything is buried under dust and snow.”

What happens if Resource Acquisition needs come to the forefront because of a terrorist act in the West?

The prime example is the 9/11 terrorists attacks. On that day our resources were not only threatened but many were actually destroyed, reminding us deep in our DNA that threats to our survival and threats to our Resources were real and immediate. We began to realize that pacifism and multi-tribalism are anti-resource acquisition and therefore dangerous to our survival. What should our response be? Destroy competitive predators (especially terrorists) and aggressively pursue Resource Acquisition at every level. Those who control resources control human destiny. To think otherwise is cultural suicide.

Western cultures have a problem though, and that problem is wealth and its tendency to distance us from reality, its separation from the real source of our physical well-being, Resource Acquisition skills. Extensive, American-type wealth is a recent phenomena in the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens and has a tendency to make us think resources have always been here and always will be in the future. Memories of the constant struggle to acquire and maintain those resources have been temporarily forgotten a sort of cultural amnesia. But our DNA contains the history of our species and DNA does not forget.

In reality, resources are the sin qua non of survival not manna from heaven. The ability to acquire resources, not just having accumulated resource wealth available, is quintessential to survival. Wealth, that is having resources already available for use without effort, is the false prophet of liberal thinking.  If wealth disappears, the elemental, instinctive sense of Resource Acquisition will return to humans with a vengeance.

You need look no further than Africa to see how lack of wealth results in the Resource Acquisition instinct coming to the fore. Decades long resource wars in the Congo, Liberia, Somalia and the Sudan are evidence that in the end, Resource Acquisition is the driving force of life. You will notice there are few, if any, liberal sentiments in these countries and gun control, such as for Darfurans, is a certain death sentence.

What would Darwin do?

Darwin’s theory allows for no conscious sharing of resources between species. Wolves and vultures don’t share the carcass, wolves abandon it for better opportunities and vultures get the leavings. Resource Acquisition by one species means fewer resources available for the other. Fewer wolves today are a direct result of humans killing them and taking their resources. Given the chance wolves will return the favor. They are only biding their time until we make a big enough mistake that will allow them to come back.

What could that mistake be? Don’t think for a moment any of us are all that far from the citizens of Somalia. They have no clean water or sewage treatment nor much food. If a terrorist explodes a nuclear bomb or even a dirty bomb in Lake Michigan near Chicago millions would have no clean water, or sewage or much food. A single terrorist event and we are right back fighting the wolves, human and otherwise. Unlikely? Perhaps, but much more likely now than it was 10 years ago.

If that happens you won’t be concerned about learning the Koran or multi-culturalism or reintroducing coyotes to your backyard. Geese and deer will be harvested for food, as they should be now, and predators competing for that food, such as wolves and coyotes, will be killed on sight, again, as they should be. Political correctness will have gone up in smoke along with thousands of people’s lives, jobs, homes and future. If Chicago’s resources are suddenly as limited as Somalia’s, your DNA’s Resource Acquisition instinct will then awaken from its slumber and, no different than Somalis, you will be looking to kill all predators and acquire all the resources you can to protect your family, clan and tribe. Humans whose DNA response is dulled by years if not decades of politically correct indoctrination will be prey themselves.

Instead of waiting for that terrible event to happen, Darwin says we should kill all the predators now before they kill us. Humans in wolves clothing first.

And there will be more than just terrorist wolves prowling the streets.

London, Athens, Milwaukee and Philadelphia show us the 21st century version of human anarchy. To these anarchists Resource Acquisition is not women and food but flat-screen TV’s and $100 gym shoes.

And the Chicago Crime Commission reports that Chicago and its suburbs have over 125,000 gang members. FBI audio and video recordings show that the accused Miami terrorists called the “Liberty City Seven” hoped to use Chicago street gangs as soldiers who would stage attacks, ranging from large-scale bombings of major buildings, including the Sears Tower, to poisoning salt shakers in restaurants. One of the defendants, Narseal Batiste, is heard on tape saying “he would make sure no one survived destruction of the 110-story Sears Tower because his soldiers would be ready to shoot down anyone who escaped.”

Where do you think the gangs will be headed if there is a breakdown in civil order in Chicago? My guess is the rich enclaves along the North Shore and other wealthy suburbs because that is where Resource Acquisition will be the easiest and of highest value. Lots of flat-screen TV’s there too. And of course the city of Chicago, like New York, has strict gun control laws so the innocent civilians will be unarmed but the gang-jihadist-anarchists won’t be.

If civil disorder becomes widespread in the West where is the best place to live?

Easy, Switzerland where every adult male between the ages of 18 and 50 must by law keep an assault rifle in his home ready for instant use as part of the citizen militia. Instead of tennis clubs and golf courses the Swiss have Shooting Clubs where sharp-shooting contests are regularly held. Understandably, the Swiss are considered to be the best marksmen in the world. The Swiss not only have a right to bear arms they have a civic duty to bear arms which probably explains why they have never been invaded. Compare that with the American left’s contention that Americans have a civic duty to reject the right to bear arms.

So if Switzerland is the best place where is the worst? I hate to say it but our friends in Great Britain, where political correctness has become a way of life for the political elite. The last few weeks have demonstrated their complete lack of understanding of the magnitude of the risk their people and country are facing. Nowhere is this made more obvious than the government’s complete ban on gun ownership. Not only can you not own a gun you can be prosecuted for defending yourself with anything that can be considered a weapon such as a walking stick. This results in burglary and assault crimes in London six times that of New York City. Not allowing citizens to defend themselves is leftist corruption of the worst kind. Great Britain joins North Korea and Cuba in this hall of shame.

Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of Great Britain, once said “civilization is a thin veneer over anarchy.” The last year has shown she was correct in her assessment. Ironically, the veneer has not been this thin since Genghis Kahn’s Golden Horde spread anarchy and death throughout the Muslim world 800 years ago, leveling everything in their path including Damascus and Baghdad. And the wolves feasted.

Remember, Rome did fall and the wolves did return. And the innocent and weak were the first to die. Wolves always take gentler blood first.

Bill Zettler is a free-lance writer and consultant specializing in public sector compensation.