You could consider human self-awareness a kind of parasite that feeds on convenience.

These "chipization" conspiracies suddenly start looking more creepy. Imagine some controlled (or uncontrolled) infection indeed can cause humans to take some specific risky behaviors. For example, gambling or taking more credits.

or some parasite that makes us believe everything is a system, spot patterns everywhere, and approach all "problems" with systems thinking, when reality is just chaos.

Reality being chaos would be systematic, too.

Wheat has been pretty successful in domesticating humans, so far.

It's called capitalism :)

Are you suggesting that carbon emissions do not exist outside of countries that have private ownership of production?

When communism fell in East Germany, pollution actually dropped for a while as living standards rose, because a lot of inefficient coal plants were replaced.