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We have a new species of human being. The latest evolution of Homo sapiens. There are many of them and they’re well spread around social media. Their new name is ‘Homo influentia’. To many younger people they’ll simply be known as “Influencers.”

What is this new subspecies that has used the internet as its breeding ground? What are its aims and aspirations?

Put simply, they want to take over the world. In that sense they’re not too different from Homo sapiens. Bad traits persist within species. They capture as many converts as they can. “Followers,” as they’re known hang on their every word and do exactly what their “Influencer,” tells them to do.

Most of these pseudo-messiahs are just hellbent on making money. Those who can rack up sufficient followers are well paid. Chinese manufacturers of cheap, “wear once, throw away” clothing,  or other items,  are happy to pay large sums to ‘Influencers’ displaying these things and selling them through their Facebook, Tiktok, or Instagram pages.

Although exact figures are hard to come by it’s suggested that a top “Influencer,” can coin in over a million dollars for just one post. Those at the top have in excess of half a billion followers.

Most “Influencers,” are not in that league. Anyone who can establish a large number of followers can use the power of social media to influence those who, like sheep,  rush to their every word, however valuable or worthless those words tend to be.

Linkedin is pushing more and more companies to use ‘Influencers’ to sell their products. Is this advertising gone mad?

Can it be a good thing for an estimated 64 million plus ‘Homo influentia’ worldwide to control the thoughts and ideas of billions of us Homo sapiens? While a very few of them are actually of use in the world by giving out sane and sensible thoughts to their followers, the vast majority of the 64 million plus are only interested in personal enrichment, and/or pushing extreme political ideals.

The Covid denial scandal is one example. Research has revealed that a mere twelve “Homo influentia,” were responsible for spreading the myths about Covid and the dangers of vaccination. Yet they caused numerous unnecessary deaths. Many parents refused to have themselves or their children vaccinated after reading false accounts of the dangers on social media.

The internet was supposed to bring people together. Now, this new breed of human being, known as Homo influentia, is doing it’s utmost to separate Homo sapiens into many different tribes.  Each is ready to take up arms against the others, if necessary.  Followers are certain in their own minds that their ‘Great Influentia’ is the fount of all wisdom in the world today. They rush to spread ‘His Gospel’ to all who will listen.

Where have we heard all this before? Two thousand plus years ago? So long as Homo sapiens refuse to use their huge brains to think for themselves, we will continue to rush to wherever any pseudo-messiah stands up and tells us what to believe.

Baaaaa!

 

I’m not one given to reminiscing. Life goes forward, not backward. I suppose it was reading of the sad death of Roselynn Carter, US President Jimmy Carter’s wife. He’s been in hospice care for some time and his wife only joined him there two days before she passed away at the age of 96.  It was a long life, yet however old one is it’s never quite long enough, if one isn’t in serious pain or distress.

It wasn’t her long life that set me reminiscing, or the ex-president’s at 99 years of age. No, it was reading that they were married in 1946. That’s a date burned into my memory. It would be, it’s the year I was born. I had a sister five years older than me and when we were old enough to have an inkling of such things, we would giggle together that she was the last thing our Dad did before he went off to World War II, and I was the first thing he did when he returned. Then she’d nudge me and giggle, “I wonder if he took his boots off first!” Still embraced in at least the partial innocence of childhood we thought it the funniest thing.

Looking back now over seventy-seven years, it’s just amazing how the world has changed. There’s no sense of time or distance. Events of  a long time ago can be brought into focus as though they only occurred yesterday.

There were very few cars back then. My parents were the first in our road to own one. I have a vivid recollection of the day it happened. The sales area wasn’t the plush sort of polished floor palace where one buys a car these days. It was a piece of wasteland on a slight hill and the sales office was a corrugated iron shack, not very pretty but surprisingly strong as we were to discover.

After the initial test drive my parents decided this was the vehicle for them. It was an Austin 10, meaning 10 horse power, quite small but with huge running boards on each side.

^{1936 Austin 10.}

It wasn’t new, probably well pre-war. My parents could not have afforded a new car.

Once the decision was taken to purchase the salesman invited my parents to sign all the documents in the sales office. My father parked the car on the slight slope and my sister and I, who had occupied the back seat during all the goings on, were told to stay put and behave ourselves while the paperwork was completed.

Once the adults were gone we both chatted and giggled at the thought of actually owning one these cherished horseless carriages. My sister started to show off her rather scant knowledge of the vehicle’s various equipment, pointing to the steering wheel, and then the gear lever.

At the age of five years I was not going to be outdone by a mere female when it came to mechanical matters, so leaping up from my seat I reached forward between the front seats for the handbrake. It was a very long, upright device with a silver lever attachment at the top that needed to be pushed forward before the brake could be released. In my enthusiasm not to be outdone by a girl, even if she was five years older, I was halfway through announcing, “And that’s the hand….brake,” while realising my forward momentum had caused me to hit the silver lever rather harder than I had anticipated.

There was a loud, “Click,” followed by a low rumble as tyres gathered momentum. With horror we realised the vehicle was moving down the slope and gathering speed, and heading directly towards the sales office.

Corrugated iron is noisy stuff when disturbed, and it took a violent dislike to being assaulted by a motor car. With hindsight, the old Austin was probably moving at no more than walking pace when it made contact with the front of the sales office. The resulting cacophony of those metal sheets was still sufficient to send mother, father, and salesman rushing outside, ears no doubt still ringing. They soon learned it was not an earthquake that had caused the pandemonium of rattling and noise.

As no actual damage was done to either office or vehicle, recriminations were remarkably few, though on the journey home in the Austin 10 there were lectures from father on the dangers of touching anything within the driving compartment of an automobile.

Frankly, I just couldn’t wait to get behind the steering wheel.

Once in a while there appears a word or phrase so overused it becomes virtually obnoxious. At present, for this writer at least, the latest word is “antisemitism.”

After the appalling October 7th attack by Hamas on innocent Israelis, world sympathy for Israel reached a peak. It took a nose-dive in the hearts of many at the cold-blooded revenge meted out by the Israeli government on innocent Palestinians.

Social media took sides and yelled at each other, as always.

Western governments, who should know better, debated new rules to strengthen laws already in place to curb the so-called “antisemitism,” of people peacefully marching in support of innocent Palestinians in Gaza.

“Anti-Semitic?” What exactly does this word mean? Most definitions state simply: “a prejudice against or hatred of Jews.”

So what are Jews? Again,  definitions clarify: ” a member of the Semitic people who claim descent from the ancient Hebrew people of Israel, are spread throughout the world, and are linked by cultural or religious ties. 2. a person whose religion is Judaism.”

The Semitic people claim to be descended from Shem, the son of Noah. Genesis 11.10 states that Shem lived to be 600 years old. Either years were much shorter back then, or Shem was a Superman!

The second definition is perhaps a little less complex: the religion of Judaism. Religions can be fascinating, if only for the huge numbers of human creatures who believe in one of them. Some estimates suggest there are around 4,000 differing religions around the world. Most of them fall into one of five categories: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or Judaism.

Each is totally dependent on one common factor: the existence of a God, Gods, or some form of omnipotent power “out there” somewhere in the ether. A power responsible for the creation of the human creatures, whose main attribute is a need to kill, maim and torture it’s fellows.

It’s also weirdly strange that most of that killing, maiming and torturing occurs between members of different religious groups. They fight over whose religion is the right one. Either that, or a common scenario reveals members of the same religious group fighting one another, each staunchly believing the God of their religion is on their side and not that of the other.

It does seem that the human creature this God, Gods, or omnipotent power created is a very flawed being indeed. It could also indicate that the creator is as flawed as its creation.

Or maybe there’s another explanation? Perhaps the God, Gods, or omnipotent power supposedly responsible for creating the human creatures is flawed because it doesn’t exist. It  is merely a figment of the human creature’s egotistical imagination. Could it be that the actual creator of the human creature was really this thing called “evolution” and the human creature is just a product of four and a half billion years of evolution from primitive, single-celled, life-forms that lived in the ancient seas?

Which, in a rather convoluted way, brings everything back to that one recently overused word, “Antisemitism.”

If there is no God, Gods, or omnipotent power, and the human creatures are all one family evolved from the planet’s early life forms, then religion is a lie, a make-believe. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism can all be consigned to the dustbin of history. Words like “antisemitism” would cease to exist, along with one of the major reasons the human creatures kill, maim, and torture each other.

Of course, being the weirdly illogical creatures they are, there’s no guarantee they’d not find other excuses to do so.