Small, Seemingly Insignificant Things Can Have Catastrophic Consequences

      It doesn't take much to achieve catastrophic results. There is an old quote that I had thought originated with Pascal, but is apparently anonymous, which says:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

      Often, we tend to only consider the “big” things. The things which are obvious to us, or are so large we can’t ignore. But the catastrophic chain reaction, so to speak, always begins with something small, something we wouldn’t consider or even notice. Deadly diseases begin with tiny viruses or bacteria. Cancer begins with a single random mutation of a gene. For want of a nail a rider is lost. For want of a bolt, a door is ripped from an aircraft at altitude. On an assembly line where a robot must line something up with precision to within a thousandth of an inch, a .001 deviation can go unnoticed as the robot continues its work, but the entire line is ruined. A single unkind word can cause a chain reaction from person to person over time until nations are devastated.

      Any deviation in the human brain from its normative neural “configuration” can have serious consequences, most often behavioral. Can it adapt? Yes, but it is never the same and neither is the personality of the affected person. Therapy and the road back are difficult to walk, and many don’t reach the goal. And there are many things which can cause such deviations, even self-inflicted.

      When I talk about a toxic piece of fruit ingested by our ancestors being the cause of our common human neurological/behavioral disorder known as “hamartia,” I am not talking about a major brain deviation from the original state. I am talking about a small, probably epigenetic change, a “switch” that was flipped from the introduction of the toxin into the human system which caused a slight enlargement of the amygdala, affecting how and when the hypothalamus’s survival responses are triggered. It doesn’t sound like much, and realistically, it isn’t. But that very slight change to our genetics fundamentally altered our behavior to be ruled by fear, aggression, and bodily cravings over and beyond what other animals are. That change to our behavior caused a catastrophic chain reaction which, over the course of a hundred thousand years, give or take, led to mass extinctions, ecological destruction, and massive amounts of suffering.

      Human beings were naked hunter gatherers once that had no moral thinking, no perception that something might be “good” as distinguished from “evil.” Like animals today, they had no sense that something was "right" or "good," or something was "wrong" or "bad." There were also a lot fewer of us, and more species of us, not just races, living at the same time. When our human malfunction happened, it threw everything about us out of balance with the rest of our environment. A hundred thousand years later, there is no return to Eden. Not just because of our inherited neurological disorder, but because there are eight billion of us, all of whom depend on the technologies we developed to avoid death and working hard. A return to the state of Eden would cause mass chaos, starvation, and death on a grand scale because of the changes which have happened to us over the millennia, and the changes we in turn have inflicted upon other animals through millennia of breeding livestock and pets making those animals dependent on us. We, the last species of Homo on the planet, are fundamentally out of balance and continue to push this world out of balance to somehow compensate, trying to force it to accommodate our lack of balance. There is, unfortunately, only one eventual trajectory for this. We might be able to stave it off, but not forever. And all because our ancestors didn't listen to a warning about a toxic fruit tree that wasn't meant as food for us.