Page 58 - Effable Encounters

Kids’ Krusade for Krissendom

explanation, something that might help determine which of those
options you mentioned moves from the table to the president’s
teleprompter.”
“Your assistance is appreciated, Doctor. Your credentials indicate
you are a respected member of the APA, and your publications in
this field put you at the top of the list. Your politics are also known
to us, and will be taken into account. Please speak frankly.”
Rod Easton signaled his harmlessness by slumping as much as he
could in his less-than-easy chair, and his confidence by steepling his
fingers.
“Sarah, to understand this phenomenon we must consider both
human nature and human history. A little-appreciated characteristic
of our species is neoteny, the retention of infantile behavioral and
physiological traits into adulthood. It is the sine qua non of
domesticated animals, distinguishing them from their untamable
cousins. The large head and small features of a baby are the exterior
manifestation, in our case, of a brain requiring years of learning in
order to enable its bearer to function in the real world. That capacity
for absorbing culture—an all-encompassing term for the tools with
which we find our way in both terrestrial and social environments--is
a double-edged sword. It gives us the ability through memory, reason
and fantasy to imagine the future, weigh alternatives, make plans and
find creative solutions to new problems.”
“But it also forms the basis of deception—of others and of self.
The terrors of the night—both real and dreamed, the unpredictability
and ultimate intractability of nature as well as the familiar childhood
traumas and struggles of the infant to establish itself against parental
authority: all these factors conspire to make human beings rather easy
to manipulate by suggested fear and stimulated desire. Thus the
irrational in our lives, as seen in pre-modern tribal groups as
superstition, animism, ancestor worship and—crucially—the
sacralization of the cosmos.”
Colonel Sennick concentrated on his words as if parsing them for
key formulae easily strung into a necklace of sound bites, an
apotropaic amulet.
“And so our predecessors lived for millennia before a combination
of climatological and technological factors created settled agricultural
communities, then cities and warfare as we know them today.

57