There is no contradiction. What the knowledge of good and evil signifies in the Bible (or rather, what it signifies according to Quinn’s interpretation of the Bible) is the knowledge required to rule the world, whereas what Jason is talking about when he says that hierarchy is bad is simply that it’s bad for us (it puts way too much pressure on our psyche, and it’s helped us get ourselves into the current mess). Quinn never said we didn’t know what was bad for us - every creature (more or less) knows what’s good and bad for it. (But do not confuse this last statement with the much stronger claim that every creature knows what’s good and bad for its whole species in the long run.) But Quinn’s point is, nothing is good and bad, period; instead, everything is good for some and bad for others (to take Jason’s example, the Holocaust was very bad for just about all humans involved, but it was very good for various parasites). The problem lay in the fact that we tried to make the whole world so that everything is always good for us, even at the expense of everyone else. And of course, in doing so, we got, not only everyone else, but also ourselves into trouble. Quinn, for instance, says that if a quail catches a grasshopper, that’s good for the quail, but bad for the grasshopper; and if the grasshopper gets away, then that’s good for the grasshopper but bad for the quail. Now imagine the following scenario: the quails decide that they’ve had enough of grasshoppers’ getting away, and so they devise some fancy technology so that grasshoppers virtually never get away. What happens then? The quail population sky-rockets, the grasshopper population plummets, and then the quail population winds up crashing because there’s nothing left to eat. Well, that’s pretty much the situation that we’re facing now.

So to sum up… When Jason says that hierarchy is bad, he’s saying that it isn’t serving *us* well. It’s not a matter of its being good, period, or bad, period. In fact, it is very good for some, for instance, for various parasites that thrive whenever they find a dense human population; and in retrospect, it will have been very good for any species that evolve only because the mass extinction that we caused will have opened up some new niches that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (much as we never would, presumably, never have evolved had there not been for the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs). But it is very bad for humans. In the long run, it is bad for us, no question about it. In the short run, it’s causing us individually a lot of pain, but it is the only thing that’s allowing us to survive in our billions (but this of course can’t last), which is, I suppose, what keeps us from getting rid of it.

So if we can never know good and evil as humans, then how can people like you argue that things like hierarchy are evil? This seems to be a contradiction.

Glad to be of service.

Did the American public even take 5 to discuss this? Nope. Ninety-nine percent of the population doesn’t even know about it.

Then there’s the upcoming mid-term in November. Despite Pedogate, I can’t see the Grand Old Pedos losing their grip over either senate or congress.

So on the 5th it will be business as usual with the Orwellian Nightmare continuing for another two years.

How the fuck did we end up with so many morons in this country? You would have thought that America would have tossed these assclowns out in 2004.

You’ll have to excuse me for not taking any consolation in this. It’s all that I have ever known and all that I see.