March 8, 2016

A Paradox: Struggling Against Our Own Humanity

//Remembering What is Worth Remembering//

None of us can get through life without making serious mistakes.  Most of the time we do our best to do what we think is right in an imperfect world, using the scattered pieces of information available to us, trying our hardest to make choices we think will lead to a better future--a future that is always totally unknown and unpredictable.  On top of this less than ideal environment for even knowing and understanding what the right decisions to make are, our countless imperfections, our engrained impulses, our baser instincts, our unintentional short-sightedness, and the constant struggle we have within ourselves, often lead us astray.  Inherently, "to error is human," and, in fact, all life in existence struggles to the make the best of things in a chaotic world and necessarily makes mistakes along the way.  What is more important than the mistakes themselves is that all that can be learned from them, is, and that newfound knowledge is proactively applied to do better in the future.

Nevertheless, we cannot ignore, nor excuse the impact of, those mistakes we make that are excruciatingly painful to others and ourselves, made in our darkest hours, when it seemed there was no light to guide us as our own light had faded in the darkness of the pain and the fear.  Though, were we, and those we've loved but deeply hurt, not victims of our own blind humanity in the times we were truly lost?  Must we judge the character and value of a person's entire life based solely on their worst errors?


Can we accept that we all share, among a great many other things, the common experience of inducing pain and sorrow we never wanted for ourselves or our loved ones?  Can we all agree 'we are not magnificent'--that with all our natural flaws, whether they include in any particular person a mental disorder, disability, or malady, or none at all, we do our best to find a sense of happiness and safety, even if we are looking in all the wrong places?  Is it not true that we all abhor living in fear, being controlled by sadness, bitterness, and regret, and that we quite often do things that seem to make us feel better in the moment but leave us just as empty as before?  Is it not clear the 'human condition' is an inherent paradox, and to be human is to be a walking, talking paradox of mixed emotions and mental conflict, having only a dim perception of the real world whilst possessing dangerously limitless but immature imagination?


We all want to be loved and remembered fondly, despite the very serious, yet very human blunders we've made.  I, for one, believe our best qualities and greatest achievements are the only things of value worth remembering once we are dead and gone...





//"
We're Living at the Mercy of the Pain and the Fear Until We Dead It, Forget It, Let It All Disappear"//

"Yeah, yo
This is not the end, this is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision
But you listen to the tone and the violent rhythm
And though the words sound steady, something empty's within 'em
We say 'Yeah', with fists flying up in the air
Like we're holding onto something that's invisible there
'Cause we're living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it, forget it, let it all disappear (yeah)

Waiting for the end to come, wishing I had strength to stand
This is not what I had planned, it's out of my control
Flying at the speed of light, thoughts were spinning in my head
So many things were left unsaid, it's hard to let you go

I know what it takes to move on, I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got

Sitting in an empty room, trying to forget the past
This was never meant to last, I wish it wasn't so

I know what it takes to move on, I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got

Yo, yeah
What was left when that fire was gone?
I thought it felt right but that right was wrong
All caught up in the eye of the storm
I'm trying to figure out what it's like moving on
And I don't even know what kind of things I said
My mouth kept moving and my mind went dead
So, picking up the pieces now, where to begin?
The hardest part of ending is starting again!

All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven't got

This is not the end, this is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot rocking every revision
(I'm holding on to what I haven't got)
But you listen to the tone and the violet rhythm
Though the words sound steady, something empty's within 'em

We say 'Yeah', with fists flying up in the air
Like we're holding onto something that's invisible there
(Holding on to what I haven't got)
'Cause we're living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it, forget it, let it all disappear"

5 comments:

  1. I wonder how much more advanced our society would be if we never had to fear our fellow man and everyone worked together for the greater good of society. We would most likely be hundreds if not thousands of years more advanced than we currently are. Technology isn't the only contributing factor. We could still be in the stone age and be entirely happy if we could all just get along. The earth is more than large enough to provide for us and will be for quite a long time if we (or an asteroid) don't destroy it first.

    Fear of other humans is much worse than fear of the environment (weather, predatory animals, hunger). Mastering the environment has left us with nothing more to fear but each other and we are much worse for it. I believe the root of this fear is the insatiable desire of some to control others. They are not satisfied unless they feel they have power and even when that is gained, they find they are still unsatisfied and continue to prey on humans to feed a desire that can never be fulfilled. Why this seems to be an inherent nature is a mystery and in my belief is the main cause for every grief in this world.

    The need to control others is unnecessary and detrimental to human kind. I wonder if there is a race out there on some distant planet that does not have this desire. I envy their society. Even with all the errors we make by being imperfect fallible beings, imagine what society would be like if everyone was simply on the same team, helping each other and not wanting to have more than anyone else just for the sake of having more when they already have more than enough. Sounds a little communist. Many have written about the faults of a theoretical Egalitarian society, but I believe the fault lies in the desire to have more than others for no reason other than they want to have more. (Continued)

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    1. There is no good purpose to be anything other than equal. Of course, there are those who would put forth more effort than some, and would be deserving of reaping what they sow, and on the other end of the spectrum there are those that would want to achieve the same status without working, by stealing or being given handouts. That is an issue that also needs to be addressed, but I believe it would pretty much fix itself if the desire for power for power's sake was erased. We're just too damn greedy. I can't say exactly what type of society/government would be the best, but I'm pretty sure they would all work just fine if greed was nonexistent. If there was no greed, every type of government and society would pretty much be the same, only appearing a little different from the outside.

      So, which comes first, greed or the desire for power? Are they they same? Are they the root of humanity's problems? If greed and the desire for power were erased from human consciousness, would some other fault be magnified? I think all human faults (besides basic errors during trials that harm no one, at least not intentionally) would pretty much be gone. So the real question is, “how do we address greed and the desire for power?” Is it even possible or will we have to cope with it being the main dividing force between members of the human race until we become something different than we are now, something transcending homo sapiens. Maybe we'll have to wait for the next step in evolution to ever truly find peace among our fellow beings.

      I hope you had your waders on because that was deep and maybe foolish, but maybe it gets you (anyone reading this) thinking a little about how you live your own life. Our time here is short and everything we own will eventually turn to dust anyway. Why not share it with others rather than steal, horde and deny others access.

      To a much more advanced and peaceful race watching us from across the cosmos, we are nothing more than children fighting over toys. Instead of banging a rattle on a kid's head who has something we want, we blow the shit out of them with bombs. Not much difference. We're all just kids that have a lot of growing up to do. Maybe nothing to do but wait a few million years.

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    2. Thank you for adding your thoughts and extending the scope of the post. I concur that the main destabilizing force in humanity is our individual penchant for self-centered thinking and behavior. I think it helpful to put this innate property of the human psyche into an evolutionary perspective. All social species on the Earth inherently have within their social groups an individual-driven struggle for establishing a social hierarchy. To look at this near-universal behavior in a morally non-judgmental way for the moment, its not difficult to understand why social species gain evolutionary advantage by having a social structure wherein the strongest/smartest members are the leaders, making those specific social groups more competitive and cohesive, and those leaders also have greater opportunity to procreate, passing their "better" genes on to the next generation.

      Clearly there are down-sides to this from a moral point of view. The more intelligent the species, the more violent and "inhumane" individuals' attempts at achieving greater social status become. For example, countless incidents have been documented of: rape in dolphins, infanticide in some primate species, and murder in other mammalian species (most notably between and amongst primate groups of the same species). Taking notice of this scientifically validated pattern of ever more destructive methods of achieving social status the more generally intelligent the species, it is not at all surprising that homo sapiens, having rapidly evolved over the last 3 million years a significantly heightened intelligence over all other species, is by far the most violent, manic, and self-absorbed.

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    3. One of the biggest drivers of human self-destruction is the system of "money." Money is seen by individuals in "civilized" societies as THEE symbol of and means to achieving greater social status. For the vast majority, any use of money beyond using it to obtain the basic necessities for survival causes psychosocial corruption of the highest order. Capitalism has taken this corruption to an entirely astronomical level: if you have money, you can make additional money simply off of the money you already have (because the system inherently siphons wealth from those who do the actual work of creating it, channeling it higher and higher up the social hierarchy ladder). When you consider how rapidly economic inequality in the U.S. has increased in the last six decades, and that at this point the top 5% of the population own 60% of the nation's wealth, it is clearly aggravating humanity's trajectory towards self-destruction through socioeconomic collapse. "The love of money is the root of all evil" is not entirely accurate, but it certainly is not far off the mark given I would argue it is one of the top three corrupting motivations of human individuals.

      Given our degree of intelligence is more than sufficient to objectively analyze and condemn the self-destructive behaviors of individuals (and especially the individuals in leadership positions throughout human history that have promoted their subordinates to kill others and die on their behalf) to increase social status through negative sources of reputation and wealth, and to restrain ourselves as individuals from such behaviors, humans, specifically, have no excuse for not intellectually evolving a sensible social system based solely on communal cooperation to achieve the betterment of our social groups and the advancement of our species, rather than letting ultimately less efficient selfish instincts continue to drive the direction of human evolution (which is currently nose-diving into self-destruction).

      As I've mentioned in an earlier post most people don't fully grasp, perhaps because of its apparent paradoxical nature, the truth of the idea that a person gets the most benefit for themselves in the medium- to long-term when their actions are primarily selfless, because they gain access to a significant amount of socio-communal resources, as opposed to being primarily self-centered in thought and action, which reduces the quality and access they have to fulfilling and materially-supportive social relationships they would otherwise have.

      If our societies shifted our psychosocial reward system from money and power, and shifted our culture away from the idea that each of us is a distinctly separate entity from the rest of the world (creating a psychological breakdown in realizing the link between our actions and their consequences, among other things), towards a psychosocial reward system based on positive social recognition for selfless acts and achievements, and instilling an ever-stronger internalized notion in individuals of the interconnectedness of all things and that it actually benefits us most to be selfless, rather than selfish, in our behaviors, humanity would effectively pull itself out of its current death-spiral.

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    4. P.S. Clearly, to get rid of a money-based economy without reverting backwards to a disorganized bartering system would impose a societal requirement that everyone receives a distribution of goods and services minimally necessary for survival. There should still be social and material rewards for making significant contributions to society, but they should be bestowed on those individuals by a deliberate assignment by a morally-upstanding decision-making body appointed by the people, and those rewards should be based on the idea that academic honors and certifications, "rank" and other decision-making authority labels in any particular organization, and the receipt of additional goods and services are not "permanent assignments" to be attached/possessed/owned but must continue to be earned by continuing to retain the trust and respect of 'the people' through selfless deeds and being morally upstanding.

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