I did not get the shots and do not regret it

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

Venerable tradition.


Human being have marked themselves in various ways for millennia. Tribal stuff mostly. Language and dialect are "sound markers" in this sense. Originally, the capacity for language was probably a big dividing line as the various -thals and -mags worked out the bidness.


I mean who the fuck wants to marry someone with the end of their dick chopped off? Etc.This is big stuff, this marking stuff. And since it is all about triggering tribal reactions, you have the wrong teensy mark on your head, bam, they eat your liver and hold a ceremony.


These are olden ways of the most olden sort. We used to be our avatars, or, our avatars used to have to be us.


There is no human nature except what we make it. That's pretty much what anthropology teaches you.


However, for the picky, there are constants.

1. Certain "kinship" rules always exist to the effect that reproductive sex is never a free for all in any known community of human beings. Non-reproductive sex has variability on this issue.
2. Every known human culture makes the distinction between raw and cooked foodstuffs. Taboos often associated, but are not constant. Some cultures have lots of taboos. Others very few.
3. Turning your body into a social sign. No known human culture does not create symbols, hygiene rules, scarification rituals, and so forth, that turn your body into a "member of the group."
4. Given time and the predominance of technological development in our species, there is no upper bound on what people do with these first three rules. Just that they will form them, in some shape.

I'm tempted to add a fifth observation. Tribal cultures are designed on animus, or at least non-admittance, toward outsiders. You want to be Orthodox Jewish? I'm gonna have to see that dick, buddy, no exceptions.


Yeah. You see the problem. Toffler called it "Future Shock," and it actually is just a modern twist on what Emile Durkheim called "anomie."


tl;dr the people who are freaking out now better buckle up.