There are broadly two views of the situation we humans are in.
The first is that what is happening is just a result of human nature. It is who we are. We are stupid, short-sighted, and profoundly cruel to each other and to other living beings. Our history is one of war, rape, and torture. In Tudor times, we would cut open a person’s belly and burn their intestines while they were still alive. Crowds would gather, and turn the occasion into a celebration.
Environmental destruction is old, too. Mesopotamia was not a desert once, but we made it into one.
There are those who look to the time before agriculture made possible the rise of kings and nobles and see it as better (and there is some truth to that), but there was violence then, too. The kings domesticated us, turned us into sheep, and except when they turn us on each other, there is less violence now. But, then a shepherd doesn’t want his animals to fight each other; they exist to be shorn, and die to feed the shepherd.
Humans are, in this view, too stupid, mean, and short-sighted to be considered more than animals. No smarter than bacteria in a petri dish, who expand until we choke to death on our own waste.
It may be that this view is correct.
There is a second view, however, which says that humans might be able to learn wisdom, foresight, and kindness — that we might be able to make that scale in both space and time. That we might be able to avoid the generational cycles of rise and fall; that we might learn to shape ourselves into a race which isn’t stunningly cruel, stupid, and foolish.
This isn’t a utopian view. It doesn’t pretend that the demons of human nature don’t exist. It says that we may be able to control them; that we may learn not to let predators and parasites run our societies, and that we might understand that what happens to the least of us, and to the least of the animals and plants, matters most, because whatever we do those without power is what we will do, in the end, to ourselves.
In prisons, rapists get raped, and those who do so become rapists. Those who laugh and consider it part of the punishment are rapists by proxy; their approval makes them monsters. When we say “this person deserves it,” we indict ourselves.
The penalty for abuse of power, in this view, is only to be permitted no power. To abuse the abusers is to become abusers, and those who are abused, themselves abuse later.
We live in cycles of abuse and powerlessness, and have given away our responsibilities to the worst among us. No serial killer is as evil as a President, or the CEO of a major bank or oil company. They have not killed nearly as many people, after all, nor hurt as many. But a serial killer’s killing, their cruelty, is that of a sheep against other sheep, and the sheep cry out that only the shepherd is allowed to kill and indulge in cruelty.
We are faced, today, with our the power we have created through technology, science, and our own domestication. We have become instruments of a few people — the cruelest and worst of us. But they rule because we have been made tame, and we have learned to see the world they way they do: that their power is legitimate and that we must acquiesce. They could enforce none of it if we did not acquiesce, and if they did not have their sheepdogs.
In this second view, we took the wrong path a long time ago, and followed it to self-destruction, misery, and powerlessness. We let the first kings and the first warrior castes rise, and we let the scribes become their servants, who turned into our modern scientists and engineers, forever crying out that what is done with their creations is not their fault.
When we take the wrong path, we must first recognize that we have done so, and that where we are is not where we want to be. We must understand how we came to walk that path, why it seemed reasonable.
Then we must change and find new ways of navigating.
In human society, this means a new culture. A new way of interacting with each other and with the animals and plants with whom we share the world.
Because we have gone so far down the path of (forgive the word) “evil,” almost everything will have to change.
Is that possible?
The second view claims that it is — that human nature possesses a range of possibilities, and that range emphasizes choice, and as we have choices, we can choose.
Is the second view true? Is the first? Are we evil because of an invariant human nature we will never be able to shape into something wiser, kinder, and longer-sighted?
The answer is, for now, unknown.
I choose to work for the second view, that what we have now is not the only possible expression of human nature at a global level, and that we can change, that we can be better.
It’s not the easy path because if it’s true, we’re going to have to have to give up almost everything we believe and are; everything we have shaped ourselves into over the millennia. Simply shrugging, living one’s life, and dying is easier.
And, perhaps, it is better. False hope is a sickness, not a blessing.
So I’ll not condemn those who shrug and say, “This is just who we are. Cruel, stupid, and short-sighted. The masses are nothing but sheep, the sheepdogs are the masters’ self-congratulatory tools who make serial killers look like children.”
We’re here now, just past the peak of our civilization (a cursed word, for almost all have been worse than the savages they scorn). This is the time we, you, must decide which of the two views you hold, and if you will work for the second path.
Is there a way to the good, or are we doomed to evil, for evil it is?
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