Wednesday, June 20, 2018

The Reign of the Lizard People

There's been this idea among the psychotic tin-foil-hat conspiracy crowd for years.  There's a secret cabal of powerful people controlling the world, one that goes to incredible lengths to assert power over the helpless sheeple.  It's not the Rothschilds.  It's not the Bilderbergers.

It's the lizard people.

There's some debate among lizard-people-conspiracy-theorists as to where these reptile-beings come from.  Mars seems a likely candidate.  Or maybe the giant cave cities in our hollow earth.  Or perhaps they scrabble around on the flip-side of the Flat Earth's disk.  Or maybe they materialized from an alternate dimension right before the filming of the "V" miniseries.  Those shows, were, as we all know, just a carefully crafted propaganda narrative by the Lizard People running the media industrial complex, designed to cover up their arrival.

It's not clear.  I'm not up on the latest iterations of the theory, as my subscription to The Fortean Times expired last year.  But what is clear...to the Lizard People theorists...is that the lizards are in charge.

It occurred to me the other day that they may be right.  In fact, I'm almost certain they are.

Why do I think this?  Well, golly, let me elucidate.

Human beings and lizards are quite different, but we do share some common chordate traits.  We are bilaterally symmetric.  We are omnivorous.  And while homo sapiens sapiens may have a massively developed cortex, all our more sophisticated processing rests on a shared and ancient neural architecture.

We call those structures the "brain stem," or, because we share it with our Sleestak friends, the "lizard brain."

Our "lizard brains" manage our most primal responses.  They drive us to conflict or to alarmed retreat.  They govern our appetites, and they channel our reproductive energies.  To put that more alliteratively, our lizard brain rules the four "F"s:  fighting and fleeing, feeding and...um..fornicating.

Our lizard brains are not rational.  They do not think about the long term, or care about complexity.  They are not social, in that they do not permit awareness of the other as anything besides a threat, a snack, or something with which to copulate.  They are incapable of metacognition, that self-awareness that constitutes the essence of sentience.

In the Lizard Person, all other functions of the cerebral cortex are subordinated to the four "F" drives.  Where rationality is nominally present, it serves as a gloss over those primal urges, used exclusively to seek datapoints to justify the lizard person's rage or fear or appetite.  That gloss does not, rather obviously, help the lizard person with spelling and grammar.  They don't really care.

And right now?  They're running things.  They're in charge, right out in the open, of the United States of America.  Because we are governed by an administration that seems to primarily make decisions based on that part of the brain, and that knows how to incite an otherwise practical people to use that part of their brains for most of their political understanding.

Long and short of it, at this strange junction in history, it is not entirely inaccurate to say that the lizard people are in charge.