Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

On Doom, and the Lineage You Are Founding

13 August 2026 · 5 min read

What do you want out of life? Really? What is your end game, your bottom line, what are your holdings? I bet its that sweet little slave mind of yours, right? You want to work for the purpose of earning money, to what end? To die, of course! How wonderful! You could die tomorrow, will you be satisfied? Will you be happy? Will you feel the regret of all the things you never got to do, what is it even, what you want to do? Do you know yourself? Or have you simply been putting off finding out until you have free time, maybe next year during your paid 2 week vacation you'll figure things out, maybe when you retire even, and your mind is weak and frail and your body can no longer will itself beyond what it believes possible, maybe then, or maybe you'll retire and you'll quickly die, never having found out what it is you're living for, but to the people who managed you all your life, that death doesn't matter, its proof the system works!

You are a SLAVE.1 Oh but protest! No no no, you, a slave? No never! Yet, look around you, are you free, what liberty do you exercise? If you lost your job, how much savings do you have to cushion it? What is the longest stretch of period in your life you have been free from wage labor? I bet it isn't that long.

There is something called teleology, but I would call it fate, or better English, doom2, and it is something that you, dear reader, should be quite concerned about. If one studies phylogenetics one noticed something, doom present in all things. Take the order of Hymenoptera3 for example. All of these critters; ants, modern wasps, bees, essentially descend from a proto-wasp like creature, that looked nearly identical to modern wasps that we see today, only difference being they were not eusocial4. Here we see one of the most amazing examples of doom; the habits of these proto-wasps became their evolutionary descendants, ants are just proto-wasps that went one way, bees are a proto-wasp that went another way, and so too, are wasps just proto-wasps who stood true and never even became eusocial! The collective habits of individuals becomes teleological, it becomes doomful, it grows the gap, wider and wider, over time, becoming differences in subspecies, species, clade, and family, yet all coming from a single source. Oh how the choices we make ripple through the ages!

So I ask again, what is your doom? Will you reproduce? Will you inspire others to reproduce? And if either are true, what will the doom of your contributions be? What will your ancestors look like, and be doing, when we diverge further and further away from one another? What will they look like in even just 100 years, will there be any, will any of your individual actions ripple as much as the proto-wasp that wondered if flowers and pollen were all a wasp needed in life to be happy and thus; was reborn in a line of his own, as the noble bumble bee?

What are you doing this all for? To survive? To what end? You may as well just keel over and die if your only goal in life is to survive! Turn your eyes towards yourself, Son of Man5, what do you notice? Look around you, at all the peoples of the world, are they not just proto-wasps finding their own niches, what is a folkway if not6 a teleology? If a people move to Antarctica, will they not be shaped and formed by not only their base founders collective teleology, but also the land itself that they choose to settle? Of course they will. We humans are biological animals, and anthropology is simply a form of auto-biology.

So I ask you again, what is best in life7? What do you want to be reborn as? If you simply think this life is the only life, and there is nothing more, then working until you die for the sake of money makes little to no sense, right? You're working for what? It would be more dignified to be homeless8, and only would seem to be not that way because of cultural taboos that hold your fragile ego up high, having been taught by hand and rod9, that work sets you free.

So again I ask; what do you want out of this life? What would you want out of the next? The actions you make in this life can echo throughout history, if life is just about survival, then shouldn't survival be enjoyable? We love to live under this low information assumption that we've never had it better, look at all our mass manufactured goods and doodads, yet plenty of our ancestors lived in continual and endless splendor, while others of our ancestors lived in perpetual slavery and isolation, what was the difference between them? Their collective will of course! Nowadays you are born with the assumption that you will work until you die, and failure to do so is considered a grave offense against society, society that sees you as a drone, not as an individual. If you have kids, will you raise them10 to pursue class and money as well? Is the ethical and moral foundation of your family the accruence of fiat capital? Perhaps it is, what does -your- descendants doom look like? This is not facetious, seriously, meditate on it. Do you feel good?

So one final time, I ask you. What are you doing now? What lineage are you founding? Are you creating a lineage of parasitic wasps, a lineage of bumble bees, or a lineage of hive ants? What folkway have you pledged your allegiance to, and what is the teleological end goal of the God that rules your path? You work day in day out, you got good grades, you did everything right, now you will shape bricks to build the tower of your own doom, until you die, and so too will your progeny, raised well by your droneish hand, you will awake one day and rub your little pincers and stridulate; "By God, what have I done?"

May God have mercy on your Doom11

Notes

By the editor.

  1. Cicero, De Officiis 1.150, ranks the hired labourer's work as unfit for a free man because the wage itself is a pledge of slavery (auctoramentum servitutis). The idea that wage labour is slavery in miniature is therefore ancient, long before the 19th-century phrase "wage slavery." Cicero meant it as snobbery, since he counted such work beneath a gentleman; she keeps his diagnosis and drops the contempt. source ↩
  2. Old English dōm meant judgment, law and decree, and also the verdict on a finished life. In What the Ghosts Actually Are she gives it as the law of all things, and ties it to freedom: Old English frēodōm is frēo, "free," plus dōm. That is why she can call doom both fate and the thing you should be concerned to choose. source ↩
  3. Phylogenomic work (Branstetter et al., Current Biology 2017) found that ants are the sister group of bees plus apoid wasps, and that bees are nested inside the wasp family Crabronidae. So bees are wasps that turned to pollen, which is the shape of her story. All three groups descend from stinging wasps, not from each other. source ↩
  4. Eusociality has arisen independently many times: once in the ants, twice in vespid wasps (once in hover wasps, Stenogastrinae, once in the hornets and paper wasps), and at least three times in halictid sweat bees. The pattern she describes, a habit becoming a lineage, therefore happened over and over. Many wasps stayed solitary, as she says. source ↩
  5. "Son of man" (Hebrew ben-adam) occurs 93 times in the Book of Ezekiel, where God uses it to address the prophet, stressing human lowliness before the divine. Her use is the prophet's: a question put to the reader with authority behind it. source ↩
  6. Folkways are a people's customary habits and everyday norms. William Graham Sumner made the term standard in sociology with his 1906 book Folkways. She builds on the idea in Why I Wholly Reject Nationalism, where a folk is families and clans sharing a language and customs, and a folkway is what they pass down. Here the folkway is the lineage's habit becoming its fate. source ↩
  7. The question echoes Conan the Barbarian (1982, directed by John Milius), whose opening exchange on what is best in life paraphrases a saying attributed to Genghis Khan. She turns the movie's answer, conquest, into its mirror: what is worth wanting from a life. source ↩
  8. The ancient case is Diogenes, who lived in a storage jar and owned nothing, and was admired by Alexander. She takes him up in What Women Really Want or 'Just Bee Yourself', where the philosopher who does not care about money is set above the banker who does. source ↩
  9. Arbeit macht frei, "work sets you free," is the German slogan from an 1873 novel by Lorenz Diefenbach, later placed over the gates of Nazi camps including Dachau and Auschwitz I, where prisoners were worked to death. She borrows it as an example of how a slogan about labour can serve whoever owns the labour. source ↩
  10. How a family treats a child's will fits that child to a class, as she argues in Who Benefits From Your Child's Broken Will. The same question she asks here, whether the family's moral foundation is money, is asked there of discipline. ↩
  11. Doom here is a verdict, as in Old English dōm, "judgment." In Beowulf 1387–88 the hero says to win dōm before death, and a man's doom is the thing that is judged after it. See What the Ghosts Actually Are. The blessing reads as the old courtroom formula, "may God have mercy on your soul," with the word swapped. source ↩