Consider the humble frog. There are two known facts about this animal, as follows:
1. Put a frog in a controlled space and allow a fly to buzz around in there as well. The frog will react and catch the fly, and eat it. Now put a beetle in and let it crawl in front of the frog. The frog will catch and eat the beetle.
Now tie a piece of meat to a string and drag it in front of the frog. The animal will completely ignore it, as it will if you swing the piece of meat in front of it. This is because the piece of meat does not act like a beetle or a fly. The frog’s evolutionary conditioning has fixed things so it will only react to prey behaviour.
2. Put a frog into a pan of boiling water and it will leap out immediately. However, put a frog into a pan of cold water set atop a source of heat and the frog will, as the water heats up, quite happily sit there and boil to death. It has evolved to react to immediate threats, not to slowly changing situations.
Now consider the average British voter.
Face the average British citizen with a fait accompli that is inimical to his/her continued well-being and he/she will protest in some way. Letters to the Press, protest marches, a phone call to the media, vandalism… the list of responses is many and varied.
However, face the same citizen with a slowly changing situation, which will eventually have the same detrimental effect upon his/her life and said citizen will quite happily ignore the change and let it continue until it is too late to do anything to change it.
The exception to this rule is the citizen who is commonly known as a “loony leftie.” Such a citizen has evolved slightly differently, to the point where we can see both the immediate and the gradual. It is these people who tend to be the ones to park in tents on fracking sites, or who join the Rustic Pullover Brigade to obstruct unnecessary road extensions, or who stand up, march, or publish what the average frogman being sees only as alarmist verbiage.
The truth is, frogmen, the people who do all these things are trying to protect you from your own evolutionary shortcomings, which mainly manifest as lack of foresight. We are the ones who see that the piece of meat on the string, being dangled before us by the government, is actually a policy that is not good for us. We see that it doesn’t behave in the way a naturally good policy would. It is we who can feel that the heat is being imperceptibly increased to evaporate our rights, and who leap out of the pan and jump up and down about it to show we’ve spotted the subterfuge while you continue to sit there and slowly but surely allow the situation to become more and more uncomfortable.
So, frogman beings, who are the most forward members of our race in evolutionary terms?
Cheers,
Darren Lynch
