the fifth dude is Thoreau, in some excerpt or another from Walden. i sheepishly admit i did not glean everything i should have from this text. basically he just complains about the idea of shelter for a few pages.
the mass of men live in quiet desperation, he says. "resignation" is but confirmed desperation. the grand necessity of life is to keep warm, physically and socially. a poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world, and to cold we direct a great part of our woes and ails. (that is all pretty much direct quotation with only some deviation, i think)
we used to be free and live in caves or.. tepees.. or something. and now it is rare for someone to actually own their abode! we pay for our houses in rent and mortgage! he thinks this is a pretty effed up fact of contemporary life, i think. erm, the basic idea is that clothing and shelter have rendered us domestic, and mankind has become the tools of their tools. self-sufficiency is where it's at, guys. let's all move to the woods and build our own houses and quit paying taxes. the government sucks! or.. something.
I've just started reading the back logs of your posts. I like this post. It corresponds with the idea that human being's domesticated themselves by removing the violent, "animalistic" members of society from the gene pool. As a reward for this genetic trimming, we gained higher intelligence and variation in our phenotypes, much like domesticated cats and dogs. By removing the wolf from the canine, we lost pointy ears and got cute little floppy ones. :)
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