We are interesting creatures. We live in a complex natural world, beset on all sides by problems and catastrophes. Most of the locales on planet Earth are inhospitable to human life. Food is not readily available or abundant. The climate is harsh and even deadly. The natural flora and fauna of many of the places on the planet are passively harmful to humans, if not outwardly predatory. We lack any natural defense to the sun, the wind, the cold, the rain, snow, or even darkness. It’s almost as if we didn’t evolve to be here at all.
Then there are other people. At our most basic units – a family consisting of a breeding pair and offspring, we might get on okay, but even that’s a bit of work. For a male and female to meet and find each other worthy sexual partners is a bit of a tough game to play for both. Rearing children, clothing, housing, feeding them and keeping them alive is a huge undertaking, even today, nevermind 10,000 years ago. Heck, even for the woman to survive childbirth in the recent past was a tall order. Just getting to our most basic social unit was, and continues to be, a struggle.
Bigger social groups birth bigger problems. Competition for mates, food, water, resources. Struggles between leadership candidates, egos vying for power and influence. War. Murder. Religion. Technology. There is no end to how infinitely complicated we make our lives and our existence. We’re like little problem machines that can’t leave well enough alone without finding some way to make the world “better”.
That said, we have made the world “better”. Less human beings live in poverty today than at any other point in history. We live longer. We’re generally more prosperous. For most human beings, our needs are not met by the force of will, or breaking the earth, but by working within the systems we have made. We see problems and we fix them. Sure, we make many of the problems that need fixing, but it’s not as if every problem gets ignored. We are far from perfect, but we seem to show some ability to improve.
This seems to be our legacy, or our imperative. It’s as if we are built to innovate, programmed to build, and change the world around us. The human brain is a complex quantum computer, whose purpose is mysterious as its function. We’re not like the other creatures on planet Earth. We seem to have some connection to some other place beyond this one. Be that some other world, or some other time, who knows, but it seems we’re driven to uncover our genesis, and thereby, our destiny.
It seems to me that many of our more immediate problems would be solved if we were just open and honest with each other about our intentions and our expectations. The principalities and powers of this world have long designated themselves as the natural rulers and dictators of our collective fate, and this type of chronic megalomania has tainted us for millennia. We are separated from each other as individuals, as families, as communities, and as nations, even though most of our struggles are basic, common afflictions of humanity. If we were able to understand ourselves at the individual level, then perhaps we could do a better job of communicating as a group. Perhaps having less conflict within us would lead to less conflict at large? Who knows?
I tend to subscribe to the idea that we don’t have to look down very far to see the depths of human cruelty, malevolence, indifference, and evil. However, when we look up at what our potential is, there’s no ceiling. Just a vast, blue forever that eventually breaks into billions of points of possibility. We have so far to go. If we keep our eyes downcast, we might see a reflection of that potential, but we’re never seeing the big picture, the endless and beckoning horizons of who we could be and what we could do. The only thing holding us back – is us. We can’t do it alone. We need everyone.
-DJR
