Let’s discuss the unnatural nature of monogamy. This goes back to ancient times. When our ancestors were still living in caves and clothing themselves in animal skins crudely hacked from the kills they had freshly made and dried in the sun, it was a natural genetic prerogative for a man to impregnate as many women as possible, to have as many willing sexual partners as possible. This was a way of ensuring the survival of the species, because people died very young and children often didn’t last into adulthood. When there was no medical care and humanity operated more or less on instinct, this was just a terrible fact of life. Life was cheap. That meant that a man had to spread his seed around as much a possible to ensure his genetic heritage. It was also a genetic reality of evolution that this system, brutal though it may sound now in our more civilized and developed era, also helped ensure that only the better genetic material, the strongest and most persistent genes, were transmitted down through the generations. This is because the strongest caveman, the one who commanded the most power and respect, was able to have the most sex with the most women. Weaker men weren’t able to mate as much, and so their seed died off and their genetic heritage was erased.
We know that humanity became very adept at killing each other because we’ve found evidence of this. There was a frozen ancient man found not very long ago who was so well preserved that we were able to analyze what killed him. He had the kinds of wounds we associate with having been involved in a very serious armed conflict with other human beings. What’s more, this wasn’t just cavemen bashing each other with their fists. Our dead caveman had taken some arrow wounds and was himself found with some fairly sophisticated weaponry made for cutting and stabbing. Ancient humans were warriors because they had to be. They had to protect themselves from dangerous predators and, like as not, these predators were not wild animals. They were other human beings. Human beings could be very cruel to each other.
So what does all this mean? It means that monogamy, even serial monogamy (where a man has multiple partners over a lifetime but is never with more than one at a time) is an unnatural state of affairs for a modern man. It is as unnatural for him as it was for his ancient ancestors, but we have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to how men and women should interact with each other, how they should pair off to form relationships. In many ways, we are a collection of our genetic heritages. The things that drive us, the instincts that inform our actions, the urges we get that drive us on, are still identical to what they were when we were only just beginning to emerge from the caves, only just beginning to discover and use and apply modern technology. We like to think of ourselves as civilized, but we aren’t. We like to think of ourselves as better than our ancient ancestors, but we are really no different. No, we still behave today as we did then, but we have the veneer of civilization to try and fool ourselves, try and convince ourselves that what was natural then is no longer natural now.
There is so much cynicism in the world and in this business because, yes, there are a lot of people involved who only want your money. These are people who don’t care about the customer service experience. They are people who only seek to gain from the transaction, and the least amount of effort they put into it, the better, as far as they are concerned. They don’t care about the outcome of the service they offer. They’re not concerned with whether your are happy, only if you come back and use your service again. And they won’t address the things that make you satisfied or unsatisfied because, honestly, the customer service paradigm is not one in which they are interested.
Business in the United States has gone through a lot of transition in the last decades. The model of business and employment that we used to follow is no longer the ones that Americans are used to. And you will indulge us, we would like to talk to you about that for a little bit, because it is important to how we ultimately do things. It really does make a difference to how we provide our service. But we’d like to share with you some of the background of business and of service businesses in the United States, or at least what we think about those things. This may seem kind of round-about, but we are making a very real point, so if you’ll play along and read along with us, we will be sure to make our point eventually.
You see, there was a time when the United States was a vast and uncharted place with almost nothing in it but natural resources. You remember the land rush? That seems impossible to us today, and there are even people alive today who wouldn’t believe it if you told them about it, but at one time, there was so much unowned land in the United States, so much territory containing untapped resources, that all you had to do in order to have some of it, to claim ownership of it, was to do just that, claim it. The government opened up large regions of territory and told the citizens that whatever they could stake out and work would be land that belonged to them. Do you remember that movie with Tom Cruise, where he comes over to the United States from Ireland, and eventually has to race (and fight for his life) to claim a piece of land to call his own? That’s what this country was like when it was a frontier, just a vast, promising area full of potential, with more than enough room and not enough people.