There are many things worse than death; slavery, anguish, grief, pain, all sorts of human conditions when in sufficient intensity, are better left for the grave. However, choice is slippery, and not always an easy to push red button. Anguish and grief for example, can build up, or crush slowly, hiding the button behind blurry tears and anxious nightmares.
As with any Death Trap, the trap is sprung at the last moment. A Death Trap could be a mine with terrible support beams, ready to fall and bury you in the dark. Or perhaps surrounded by flammable materials with no fire escape. Perhaps your work demands you risk your life to venture into the trap, and perhaps the thrill of exploring a cave beckons you into the cracks of adventure.
However, there is a single trap which has quite a strange shape. Resembling a gigantic rat trap; there is a piece of cheese at its center. This cheese can be opioids, money, control, or even simply the fulfillment of hunger. This cheese can take many other shapes, and vaguely resembles pleasure itself. There is a nearly universal draw towards the bait. This is because the smell of cheese is programmed into human beings in the form of instinct. The instinct is wholesome, its pleasure, it’s safety and security, its comfort, it’s all the happy chemicals in the brain which tell you everything is going to be ok. It’s a soothing cheese; bringing stillness to the crisis and emergency of life.
The cheese is constantly being prepared and packaged for consumption. There are new flavors invented every year in countless varieties and colors. There are fluffy green cheeses and cheap knock-off cheeses, fancy pants cheeses and cheeses made of lethal ammunition. There are cheeses made from oil, alcohol, hope, all sorts of mundane madness paraded around and consumed for whoever would try them.
Regardless of the cheese’s nebulas construction, the most important feature of any trap is the creature it seeks to contain. The human creature is not made of flesh and bone and does not share a single head. The blood of the human being is made of money; a super-conductive material used for commerce. Their heads are constantly sprouting from their body, like little flowers from the concrete garden of super-malls. Their mouths are even more numerous, consuming any cheese they can find. Occasionally they pause to recite a poem, story, or song, expressing the horror of some experience. Their hands and feet are blistered and burned from the great hunger of existence. Their back is bent and curved over the mountains of their waste, made of plastic towers, and radioactive pits seeping into their water sources. Their body survives on poison and pollution, like the necrotic breath of a sweet dream. The bones and skin of the human creature are a twitching pile of terror, full of fertile secrets, guilt, and cancerous self-reflection. This is why the cheese must be so glamourous and wholesome, to distract the creature, to relieve the human being from their misery and strife.
Getting human creatures to eat the cheese is relatively easy. They are constantly looking for a new cheese, a balm against the reality of their hunger and their position in the trash-filled universe. However, tolerance increases quickly so then a new cheese must be found.
Springing the trap is the hardest part. This is because the physical dimensions of the trap are difficult to see at first. The trap might cause genetic damage, like from lead poisoning or pollution, but as soon as the descent into extinction begins, the human creature wiggles out and seeks a new cheese. Drugs are great traps, but too obvious for every head of the human creature to fall into.
In the past the most potent trap to close the circle of life has been success. Nature spreads her arms and legs, elongating to form a net, seeking the sweetest variety of cheese, some exotic creature never before imagined. Once the chosen creature emerges, all other traps are sprung. For example, during the early Triassic period (about 200 million years ago) a small creature measuring 1 meter in length called the Lystrosaurus represented 95% of land vertebrates on Pangea. With their success and procreation, bacteria within their stomachs also grew. This bacterium emitted methane and was so abundant a global extinction occurred. Methane drove up the global temperature and 35% of all life on the planet died.
This is a single example of how the trap of success closes in around a creature.
Humans are likewise successful, and intelligent in their own way. They found ways to harness energy from petroleum and could increase their food production to match their population rate. This success was built on technology, logistics, and the virtue of efficiency, a virtue forever driving the progress of evolution.
This is how money became their blood, their hands became cars burning on the highways, and metal wings grew from their back in the shape of jet engines. Their eyes became cameras, their brains were augmented with libraries, computers, and machines of immense computational power. No longer limited by the crude biology of flesh and bone, they were free to populate their heads and bodies as much as the machines could progress. This journey of transformation is well documented as the industrial revolution. Humans grew in population from 0.6 billion in 1700 to 8 billion by 2023.
Success has built a gigantic trap all around the human creature, and there is no certainty the cheese will retain its sweet delight. Once the hunger for cheese stops, once the capitalistic death boner becomes flaccid, the trap will spring, and the teeth of success will pierce the bubble of glory. Perhaps the desire for cheese of any kind will become mundane, and courting extinction will be the only thrill, driven by the moral relief of suicide.
For now, the cheese continues to sparkle in wholesome glory, and the trap grows larger each day.
