Do we have the right attitude as we go about our day?  We are so wrapped up in our routines, are we missing important clues?  Do we really know our purpose here on earth? Do we really know what we can accomplish?  As we see all the amazing things that come from being human like music, art, love, happiness, fun, humor, beauty , can we even begin to imagine what a collective social idea could accomplish?  How can we miss all these clues right in front of us every day? 

 

I believe there are instinctive emotions we have pre-installed in our brains that are inherently dangerous and destructive.  We try to maintain a balance of sanity, purpose, and belief, but many of our beliefs are out-dated, and just plain wrong.  Something I believe is missing in humans is a sense of awareness and responsibility for ourselves as a species and especially shame about anger, violence, war and killing other humans.  This is odd, since we are so eager to see other groups of humans and animal species as a whole, and to predict their behavior as a group.  Farmers know coyotes and wolves will harm their flock, not just individually, but as a species.  Elephants are nice and helpful and can be trained.  Dolphins are intelligent and can do neat tricks.  Why can we not see ourselves as a species, homo sapiens, in need of help dealing with our own animal instincts?  For humans, I see righteous indignation, pride, directed hate, prejudice, racisim, competitiveness, and vengeance all as examples of our instinctive weakness.

 

If we were a viable worthwhile species, violence would be rare, maybe limited only to problems of mental illness.  It should be obvious that we have the intelligence to realize that we have the capability to live peacefully and lovingly.  And yet we continue to accept anger and violence as a necessary part of live, rather than the threat that it actually is.

 

I find myself wondering about how can we go about our days knowing horrible violence is happening and even participate in the violence and hate, but NEVER see the violence itself for the shameful horror that it is? Even those directly involved in the violence cannot see that the way out is to simply STOP.  Sanctioned murder? Rape? Shooting a missile? STOP. Wrong choice. on both sides.  

 

I think that even the humdrum media reporting the news adds to acceptance of the status quo.  Constant, monotonous accounts of conflicts, acts of terror and wars minimize the truth and actually dull the pain.   We don't react, we just take it in and move on.  The further away we are from the horror, the less it affects us.

 

What we do is create laws and institutions to police ourselves.  Each institution is a result of a base instinct in our DNA. What is the percentage of people who commit crimes to get ahead and why?   We can't share the world or help each other because some among us will take advantage or steal.  Con men and women pretend to be helpful, but only manipulate our emotions for their own personal gain.   It is not enough to put band aids over these shortcomings of our species.  They must be shown for what they are and targeted as serious flaws in humans as a species.  

 

I don't have an answer as to how or what to do about, but I know the first step is to see the problem for what it is: it is a flaw; an inability to deal with instinctive aggression built into our DNA.   A vestige of our evolutionary struggle to survive.  Our perception of strangers and other races and religions as threats to hate and fear;  our extreme over-protection of our own families and friends at the expense of others;  our need to preemptively imagine terrorism and not to accept responsibility for our role as a species with serious defects.

 

What are we waiting for? Evolution?  Will this make us peaceful in a million years?  Can we legislate ourselves into peace? Can our politicians placate us with empty promises? How long will it take for us to even see this problem as an agenda item? Every now and then, we poke our heads above the shark infested waters and see endless possibilities.  Clear sailing all the way to the horizon.  If only we could live up here! there would be no dangers at all from ourselves.  It is called Peace.  Peace is not just a word meaning lack of aggression. Peace is serenity, peace is art, peace is music, peace is love, peace is sharing, peace is quiet, peace is soft, peace is gentle, peace is kind.  

 

So in the past, we needed all this aggression to protect ourselves from all the dangers, and we know it worked because here we are.  But when our intelligence enabled us to build destructive weapons  - yes,even knives, our DNA was not ready.  Our DNA had endowed us with scrappy hunting abilities.  We evolved the ability to kill prey and protect ourselves from the world, and yes we were in the same world, so we began to view other humans as potential threats.  Every animal society has simple rules regarding who gets what.  But the animals are self limiting in their ability to punish other animals.  Throw a hunk of fresh meat into a pack of lions.  What happens? Chaos?  I don't know for sure, but I think not.  I think there is an understood heirarchy.  A young male feeling particularly frisky might go for it, but i suspect he is quickly put into his place.   Well the fact is that in animal species it is common for animals to kill each other even within a species, father mice eat baby mice, big cats will fight to the death.   But as you can imagine, this happens occasionally, and animals are limited in their ability to do extreme damage. But now, before you can re-adjust, transport yourself to Aushwitz, Hiroshima or Normandy and see what humans are capable of - genocide on a massive, unimaginable scale!  Are you proud now?  We can legislate ourselves into protected little cocoons, try to be politically correct, and not express the instinctive hatred we were born with, but that is not working. 

 

I take on one concept, winning.  I only do this to hopefully to help you realize that a concept could be built into our DNA, and the instinct did not have to be perfect, it merely had to work! We are left to clean up and deal with the "moral" consequences of arriving here after millions of years of evolving. 

 

 What does "winning" mean?  We have instinctive concepts bred into us over millions of years. One such concept is winning a game or a fight.  We won, we're done.  Maybe it is an instinctive reaction to see winning or losing as an end.  "Winning" is a concept in our brain that has evolved from our instincts to "fight".  So deep is this, we can witness it easily in animals.  We have 2 hungry animals, and put down one plate of food. the animals will fight over the food, and one will win and get the reward. But I say that competition can be viewed differently.  This simplistic, tit for tat mentality of fighting may be a flaw that actually causes conflict on a much larger scale.   Within a lower species, these instincts are self limiting because the beaten party does not really intellectualize and internalize this pain, it is what it is.  In our "superior" species, these conflicts  can be remembered and communicated across family, and city and nation.   Territorial disputes may last for generations.   How can we step outside and judge ourselves objectively?  What if something this simple is a cause of all the violence in the world? This simple urge to compete is what enabled us to survive, but that exact same urge, now that is a part of our DNA, doesn't scale well up to a civilization, because a man on man dispute can be dealt with more easily than a country on country dispute.  War is an expression of a simple instinct in humans that has been distorted and complicated by our other strides in evolution.  We can predict, worry, plan, and remember.  So the next time we need to compete for food, we have all those abilities at our disposal.  This is also a simple explanation for other types of violence and behaviors like theft and crimes of passion.  Studies with primates and chimpanzees have shown a level of violence that supports this view.  Plus our concept of winning itself may be distorted.   Maybe winning should be viewed something like this: Winning usually requires the defeat and therefore unhappiness of the other party.  So the success of a win should always take into account the suffering of the losing party.  Winning may be built into our DNA,  but maybe "bittersweetness" is not.

 

So if our ideal is peace and non-violence, sharing , love, music, art, and comfort, why do we fall short of attaining all those wonderful things as a society?  We have not learned to deal with our high-tech present.  We invented guns then began using them against our own kind.  This will only get worse! As we invent more and more deadly things!  We have proved that scenario with nukes pointed at our own heads!  So we need to cure our own sickness,  If we have a violent person in our family, we urge him to go to a shrink.  What about the weakness in our own species?

 

So isn't it obvious that our emotions have not caught up to our intelligence?  Studies have shown that we base most of our decisions on emotion, and then use our intelligence to "justify" the decision.  

 

We need to declare war on war.  The true crime is violence.  The only time violence should be used is to stop other violence, and then it should be seen as the first step. not as a cure. Not as a win.

 

Ok, I don't have a clear idea of this, only wisps of an idea.   Imagine a world army consisting of people from every nation whose sole purpose is to control and solve violence of any type.  They are pre-sanctioned to respond to outbreaks of violence  of any type.  It may be a border dispute, a cou, a mass kidnapping of high school girls in Nigeria.   I don't know ....  but just ruminate on that for a while and try to find a bad side of that idea.

 

What gives rise to violence on the street level?  Police try to keep it in check, guns, drugs, road rage, jealousy, alcohol, greed, poverty, hunger, brain-chemical imbalances.  And a good portion of our society has these problems. We have all been touched by these problems.  These events are all caused by FLAWS in us as species. It is not the devil.  Evil is caused by human shortcomings.  This problem should be addressed on a human species-wide level.

 

What if humans were targeted for extermination by a higher intelligence and it was your job to argue in our defense? Would you not be ashamed at how messed up we are?   It would be a tough sell.  How can you justify the horrors of recent history? Hitler, the Civil War, all the barbaric acts of genocide and murder? How can you justify Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the fact that now we have enough missles to destroy the entire planet 10 times over pointed at each other just  to keep the peace?  What if we were slightly more evolved than we are, but a different species, homo superious?  Would we allow the sapiens to kill themselves and possibly destroy the world with their weapons of destruction? How would we, the superior peace-loving Homo Superious deal with them?

 

Causes are everywhere. Charities, Civil Rights. Gay Rights.  Where is the Humans for Humans cause? 

 

To simply sum it up:  Accepting and embracing violence as part of our culture is not working.  It can and maybe will lead to our total annihilation, either from a more intelligent alien species from outer space, or more likely, from ourselves. 

 

This is not to say that we don't have any sense of being human, we do.  We are in awe of our abilities, and suffer from delusional narcissism.  Some believe we were created in God's image.  How can we not?  We are so much more aware. it seems, than any other creature on earth.  We are in total domination except for the most powerful predators, and tower above those in cunning and intelligence, but only together, not individually.  And yet we can exhibit an ignorance so much lower and so much worse than any other creature.  We are the best and the worst.  I am simply saying, step back and view us as a whole.  Accept the violence as a flaw in yourself and your brothers and sisters.  And take that leap and make a promise to begin to fix it.  

 

I often ponder the plight, if it is a plight, of the dolphin.  They may be even more intelligent than us, and yet they  took a completely different evolutionary path.  Their path was not one of modifying the environment to suit themselves, it was one of fitting in, belonging to the earth.  Imagine being as aware or more aware as we are with no hands, only flippers and powerful muscles to propel you through the environment at great speed. But, food is easy to come by.  Warmth is not a problem.  Industry is not necessary for the dolphin.  They cannot paint, make musical instruments, sculptures, but they are self aware.  They cannot create the level of violence as humans, because they have no hands!  They can't build a bomb, or guns.  We need to control our new found abilities. Now! Not in the million years that it would take for our human nature to evolve and  change and shake off the violence that is our heritage, but now!   We need to make the slight adjustment in our thinking that will make change possible.  Please pass this message along.