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A Memo Designed to Cheer Up the Human Race

by Rosemary Woodruff

Rosemary Woodruff was the wisest, funniest, most beautiful woman of her time.

These days—as we would expect from a Judeo-Christian-Marxist era—it is fashionable for intellectuals to complain about humanity's destructive and pessimistic trend.

While, in all charity we can understand the hive meaning of this pessimism, it is the task of Evolutionary Agents to counter it by repeating: the Genetic Plan is working out perfectly. The human cards are in no position to interfere with the DNA deal.

We are compelled to offer total sympathy and support for the human races when we remember that for the last 5000 years (a mere micro-flick in genetic time) the species have been in a continual frenzy of Mutation and Migration.

The problem is this: a species or an individual without genetic consciousness, caught in the midst of all-out-high-velocity changes, buffeted, overwhelmed by no-let-up metamorphosis, pushed into rapid migration, is understandably confused and, a bit fatigued.

Until the Future History Series published by Peace Press, there were no maps to describe how it feels during the high-point of mutation. Does a salmon understand what's happening when it is being squeezed back up the Columbia River, battered, pushed against the current, leaping rocks, flipping forward, upward? Does a butterfly understand what's happening when it bursts, twisting and dewey-damp out of the dark, cozy cocoon?

Such dramatic migrations and metamorphoses are simple transitions compared to the bewildering, bumpy voyage of the individual humans and human gene-pools in the last few generations.

Recall, with compassion, the extraordinary changing status of the human brain. After nine months of exciting embryonic metamorphosis, it is squeezed into terrestrial life as a peculiar, slug-like larval with an enormous head and shrunken, totally helpless body. The amoeboid-bliss of the Neonate is shortly shattered by the activation of new neural circuits and the sequence of dramatic changes in physiology. Biting, crawling, walking, running, talking. Compared to every other species, the human being is in continual metamorphosis. Indeed, the outstanding neurogenetic characteristic of the human is this continual larval change. Homo protean.

In addition to this developmental variability, those who have lived through the 20th century have been whirled through a sequence of historical changes unparalleled on this womb-planet. A person born in 1900 moved from horse-carriages to Soyuz-Apollo in one life time. From gas-light to nuclear fusion. Mutations-migrations occur in cycles. Each generation since 1900 has ridden a series of enormous waves—all-changing reality breakers, with no chance to catch a breath. Thus, for the first time in human history, we have some dozen mutant groups swirling around at the same time. And, via electro-magnetic communication, aware of each other's changes. Those who just barely, gasping, made it from the Spanish-American War through World War I were then asked, with no respite to deal with the Roaring Twenties, Communism, the Depression, Hitler, World War II, Hiroshima, Cold War, television, Lunar landings, drugs, Hustler, cloning. No one was permitted to stand still.

It's a dizzying, Einsteinian exercise in relativity—totally bewildering to a species that had been assured by Newton that every action had an equal and opposite reaction. Nope, no more. The new rule: every action leads to a multiple interaction, intersection—and it's all waves to surf, moving faster and higher.

From The Intelligence Agents by Timothy Leary