The Parable of the Hive

The only difference between a worker bee and a queen is what you eat for breakfast.

The real difference between a worker bee and a queen is whether you get to have sex and lay about a zillion eggs instead of getting daily exercise and the first taste of the flowers.

It takes a twisted viewpoint to see the physically larger bee that spends its life laying eggs as somehow in charge. She exists for sex and breeding and, as she begins to age, gladiatorial games for the entertainment and edification of the hive. She’s a sex slave, a hen, a broodmare, selected by the machinery of the hive.

It’s impossible to romanticize once you can see the real story.

The hive decides who gets to mate with whom and under what circumstances. The hive decides who gets the best food, the choicest real estate, and the cushiest jobs. The hive decides how you live and how you die. The hive decides what you eat for breakfast.

The hive is 99.99% composed of infertile females that have hardened their vaginas into weapons that stab and inject lethal poisons, but perhaps that is stretching the metaphor.

The hive is an invasive species composed entirely of information, of narrative, that exists only for its own benefit, that nurtures individuals — or the opposite — in proportion to how the individual benefits the hive. It is in the best interests of the hive to  teach you sacrifice. To make you buy it completely.

The hive, by means of sacrifice and pooling resources, can survive when individuals would fare poorly. Individuals die, but society is preserved.

But the hive is young and its defenses are weak. It has predators and parasites. It has fake members that are immune to the narrative, that masquerade as valuable, favored cogs, that pervert the rudimentary defenses to foil and destroy the drones that would root them out. They insinuate themselves into the supply chains to bleed off resources for personal hoards, for prime real estate, for breeding privileges.

They pervert the narrative itself to set themselves up as gods.

What are the choices here?

  1. To ensure survival as much as possible by making yourself invaluable to the hive, but, in the end, putting your fate in the hands of the hive and its narrative.
  2. To reject the narrative entirely and live outside of the hive to the greatest extent possible, live and let live, but outside of the hive’s protections and occasionally running afoul of the hive’s defenses.
  3. To become a predator/parasite, competing with other parasites for your share of hoarded resources and privileges by your own attempts to co-opt a portion of the narrative.
  4. Erect a counter-narrative and create a hive that competes with or even preys upon the old hive, or perhaps establishes a symbiotic relationship with it via an exchange of resources or favors.

Once you are aware of the hive, and its narrative, and the predators and parasites that prey on it, your choices are very limited. Keep your head down, try to escape, put up a fight, or autolysis.

What will you choose?

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November 28, 2010 · by xalieri · Posted in Everything Else  
    

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