Opinion/Editorial
HOW DID WE COME TO BE THIS WAY
Humanity itself, throughout all cultures, all social groupings, and living individual circumstances has been enslaved by genetically driven motivations, desires, and actions. Much has been written in the annals of psychology, sociobiology, and the other social sciences about this difficult-to-understand phenomenon. Our actions. following decisive thought, each and every member of the species Homo sapiens is riven by basal motivations and physically generated causality. Yet, through the pursuit of everyday life humans live in almost total denial of such unseen powerful forces.
Cultures are built upon rules and mores. Conduct is measured in almost every area of our lives, with rewards and punishments continuously doled out based upon the decisions we make with respect to our obedience to those rules or our failure in keeping them. All cultures hold individuals and groups responsible for obedience, and all of them (either directly or indirectly) make an extremely powerful argument for self-determination. Our social sciences have been screaming silently from the top of their academic voices about how genetically driven we are and how we completely fail to take note of that vital fact or respond to it in any way. This failure has allowed for the similar shape of all human cultures and civilizations.
There has been no real change in human social structure since records have been kept. The result has been a repetition of never-ending waves of carnage, conflict, and war and an ever-growing body of angst burning inside the raging fires of our unhappy psychology. We attribute this vast lack of human bliss to outside circumstances, varying from things as diverse as insects, weather, geology, astronomy, physics, and even religion. Inside the heart of man lurks man’s true Rasputin-like evil actor. That actor is called deception although more commonly known, since Joseph Campbell’s teachings, as mythology. The application of mythological constructs has allowed humanity to vault from the rainforests of Africa out onto the Savannah, and then to every location on the planet, as well as a few off of it.
The myth that when our eyes open in the morning everything is going to somehow be all right or work out for the best starts every human’s day. We make things up about ourselves in the hopes that those things will come true, or we lie about things that have come true in order to lessen their negative or positive impact. We create devices in our minds that are not real, and then use our manipulative skills to build them. Our entire complex of rolling civilizations through history has followed (and does follow) this construct of the mind. This genetically provided ‘gift’ to make things up and to deceive others in order to maximize our own success for individual and group behavior while denying that same success to others around us is not truly apparent. Our open ability to compete against such outside forces as the environment, illness, harm in all forms, and the very element of the universe is great. Our secret ability to compete against ourselves is much more prodigious. But the price of our genetically driven behavior buried invisibly deep (or simply not believed) psychology lies in a baffling phenomenon that may eventually lead to our very undoing as a species. We can never climb to the point wherein we live in a world of reality. We are given a craving for reality by these genetic forces that is as powerful as our competitive lying spirit and drive. We are on the verge of understanding this source of misery and quite possibly the undoing of our lives and future yet powerless to take action against it.
We live to be always and forever disappointed by our leadership, our families, our parents, our schools, and our organized workforces. They lie to us, and we suffer angst when we are ‘surprised’ to discover it. We lie to them in order to maximize our own success while the controlling groups of humans mete out rewards and punishment for our efforts. We are condemned to suffer an infinite variety of changing breaches of trust. We know it. We cannot accept it. We cannot change it. We come to be forced to accommodate these breaches of trust so extensively and so painfully that the majority of people living in the human condition everywhere on the planet spend a good deal of their time waiting to die and finding relief from the thought of doing so.
Only angst, suffering, and misery can be gained by our being exposed to, and then forced to drink, from this bitter cup of gruel our genetically derived motivations delivered through natural selection.
Truths are myths. Our dreams are myths. Our hopes are myths. Our lives are myths. Only the breach of trust is real. How do we survive this depressive conclusion? By first understanding, it, then accepting it and then working to build a core of trust deep within our own identity. We can also use the teachings of the New Testament, as the writers of that text seemed to understand that acceptance, shying away from violence, and giving our smaller selves over to a greater power was not only an answer to our discomfort but the only answer.
