Social scientists and writers of every ilk, from the lofty ivy-covered institutions to lowly anarchic word masters, have been looking for the “missing link” between what makes us humans so fucking good and bad at the same time. And of course, depending on which ever side the discoverer of that link is, will determine the course of history from here on out. There seems to be no consensus among them whether humans represent the epitome of collaborative evolution like most other life forms or a disingenuous mutated development that ultimately will be suicidal or a dead end because there too wide a gap of dissonance between “the individual is an island” and the social collective, as the ultimate survival evolutionary mechanics. Are we mankind(sic) or beast? The age old question.
I’m beginning to think again about whether or not the “self” (or who are we?) is discoverable. There being subjective or objective evil built into the world, depending on whether or not one expects perfection in this real world or after it. In the former, it’s a matter of regulation, law, belief, and “moral conscience” to cull and calm the herd into compliance, whereas the latter requires extreme patience and self flagellation in our world of self-conscious driven fears and imaginary drives. To be or not to be is the oldest question in history for sure. Ever since the first hieroglyphic, pyrrhic symbols describing our fears, aspirations, and beliefs, we’ve been able to reenact, relive and reimagine everything in and outside our sphere of experience. We carry our history around in our heads whereas the rest of the living world carries itself around in its genetic code, whether it is a bacteria or a whale, or even a tree. I believe that our real evolution began just a few thousand years ago with the invention of writing, invention of organized society, the passing of information not just between individuals but between generations, and the division of the body politic into economic contradictions based on value. Albeit, the problem arises that not everyone gets the same message at the same time, at the same place, nor the same generation. It is like interpreting cave drawings or transcribing from one language to another. It’s the same problem we have today, which in some ways is understandable because our confusion started recently within the relative timetable of human history vs Darwins almost infinite concept of slow and fickle change. Since the natural world got such a long head start, we are trying to build a technological, literal wall between us and nature, which we don’t understand at all. Sure, many of us are in awe of nature while still wanting to believe the natural world is beautiful and worth preserving, (whereas ghod created the universe before he (it) created imperfect Man (them), hiking and traveling on, but, deep down, we don’t want to believe it cares absolutely nothing for us or about us and is no way dependent on anything we do. It’s anarchic. What scares us most about it, is we know we are made of the same stuff. We are as much more about the natural world as we are about the technological world. We’re in a monstrous identity crisis and sadly, the development of solutions to live in peace and harmony with both ourselves and nature doesn’t seem to be in our future. But that’s only natural too. Sent from my iPad