A Deep Narcism

Human beings are amazing in the ability to imagine, express, process, and emphasize with different realities, usually created by different human beings. Be the format in literature, in painting, in film, or merely an idea in your head. Regardless, we are able to use our brains to create beautiful and complex fictional worlds.

But we're not so good at some things. I mean, can you imagine a new color? In any case, one that particularly peeves me is the whole "aliens" genera of fiction. The most obvious pitfall is when you see aliens that are humanoid or resemble anything living on our own world. I mean, who says that bipedalism (or quadrupedalism) is the best or only way to transport oneself in traditional space over solid terrain? And the thought that all living organisms keep both their central nervous system and most of their major sensory organs on a venerable, extended appendage? Preposterous!

Not to mention that they're carbon based, water necessitating, solid-food consuming creatures. Or that they see in "visible" light. Or that they smell. They tolerate the same approximate temperature range. And goodness knows what else! Some people have gotten far even by my standards, yes, but the fact that most of our media seems dependent on the idea that life that evolved isolated from our biogenetic influence somehow ended up similar to ours shows a deep seated, and often unnoticed, narcism.

Now, in a way, our inability as a people to conceive of something truly and unspeakably new makes the moment when we view another complex organism all the more awe inspiring! The chemistry that it creates, the biology of it as a whole would be mind-blowinly fascinating merely due to the fact that we could not have conceived of it unless we where to actually be beholden to it. And it guarantees that when, if, we do meet life on an exoplanet, humanity as a whole will be amazed. As Shakespeare once said; "There is more on heaven and earth, than is dreamt of in your philosophy."

Mistakes Abound

I get very depressed and unresponsive every time I think about the fact that I seem to regret pretty much everything I've said and done. Why did I say that? Why didn't I do that? So on and so forth. And I doubt I'm alone in this. We grimace at the memory of what we used to be, how silly, how stupid we were. We see ourselves in hindsight and cringe at it. Remembering how you handled something with fondness is like finding money stuck in a library book. Unexpected and pleasantly surprising.

And this is paradoxical. The fact that we see our mistakes means that we can learn form them, which in turn means that we are evolving and refining ourselves. That thought alone should be enough to counteract the regret of your actions, or lack thereof. But instead we're cursed to linger on and exaggerate the gaffes of or past selves.

Evolutionarily speaking, it does makes sense. Those who remember their missteps more acutely than others are less inclined to make the same mistake twice, which, in the wild, can be lethal. Human nature has evolved in order to cause us to make as few mistakes as possible, particularly social. But sometimes it goes too far, and the bitterness over your past is enough to drive anyone mad.

And thinking along those lines, anyone who says your mistakes don't define you, well, think about it more carefully. Your choices define you, do they not? So, mistakes are a slice of that pie. You can't just ignore something that influences your thought processes so profoundly, both logically and emotionally, merely because you don't like your self-criticism.

But I suppose the best thing we can do is to just learn from our oversights and make the best of it. Just because you don't like it or agree with it doesn't mean that you can just ignore your past, lest your future pay.

Transcending Moral Polarity

I have a moral issue with the terms "good" and "bad", because not only are they so ambiguous as to be less than helpful, but also the idea that something is either good or bad is inherently flawed. To think that something is evil merely for the sake of being evil is narrow minded and just wrong. And there's the other side of the coin. No one, and nothing, is ever truly good.

So, rather than blunder our way through the day bluntly firing off crudely fashioned statements containing or implying inherent moral polarity, we must use more appropriate adjectives. Not only does this fix the fact of assuming that something is good or bad, but it makes it a more accurate statement, and, more importantly, it puts emotion into your sentence. For example, if you where to say; "You looked good today.", how is the person receiving the compliment sure that it is, in fact, a compliment? People through out the words "good" and "bad" all the time like there's no tomorrow. But if you where to say; "You looked fabulous today.", they automatically understand that you're being sincere (as long as you adopt the right tone of voice), because now you've taken the time to select a specific word from your vocabulary for the sole purpose of complimenting another person, and that makes them feel good.

Of course, there are drawbacks. If you're texting, and you use a positive adjective to compliment another person, you have no control over how it's read. That person can read it as sincere or sarcastic, or any shade in between, and there is very little you can do to change it. If you type; "You looked fabulous today.", fabulous can be inflected to either actually mean fabulous, or to be derogatory and detrimental. Only one of the reasons I dislike communicating through text (although, the advantages pretty much break even with the disadvantages).

So, you should use words other than "good" or "bad". But everything depends on context. One slip of the tone, and you can find yourself being extremely degrading rather than helpfully uplifting.

The Question of Civilization

We tend to take civilization for granted. I don't mean that we don't appreciate all the benefits (while we certainly do plenty of that), I mean we automatically think that civilization is the only option. It certainly doesn't help that the lines of what is civilization and what isn't are blurred to such a degree that it's almost controversial. In any case, we automatically assume that civilization is advanced, it's progress. To revert to any former human organization is to regress to banging rocks together. Right?

Well, civilization certainly seem to have it's benefits. The surplus of food it generates through agriculture allows specialists dedicated to certain tasks like producing objects designed to make our lives easier. It's because of this that I can choose not to devote my life to foraging for food or hunting animals. I can become a musician or a politician or an architect. All thanks to civilization.

But would living a nomadic lifestyle be so horrible? You live in tight nit community where everybody pulls their own weight. You participate in group activities live picking fruit or hunting game. You spend your days outside, free of the pressures of a large, dense, interconnected society that usually demands that you behave a certain way in order to succeed. You know everybody, everybody knows you, and you share a special familial bond with everyone in your group. Of course, there are societies that sort of meander between these two opposites, like herders or traders along the silk road. But that's beside the point. The question is, which is superior?

Well, you might think civilization, because it's the predominant order of people today. It allows us to create technologies that further or advancement as sentiment beings and as a species as a whole. After all, every time an advanced, organized civilization has collided with any hunter-gatherer peoples, the technologically superior specialists, created by surplus of food from farms, almost always come out vitreous in war or conflict.

But prowess on the battlefield isn't the only measure of the success of humanity's attempt to better
itself. There's categories like overall health, including the prevalence of disease and malnutrition, as well as overall things like suicide and homicide rates. In both of these, hunter-gatherer clearly comes out on top.

So, the debate goes on. whether a complex, advanced, rigidly structural society is superior to a free, nomadic lifestyle or not is a matter of opinion. Most likely, the answer for humanity (like many other solutions involving the masses) lies somewhere in the middle.

The Abnormality of Normality

Statistics lie. Though, not in a traditional sense. The data they present is correct (most of the time), but the world view it gives us is fundamentally skewed. I mean, say that there was a rare genetic mutation that caused people to become temporarily paralyzed after they are startled, and it only affected 0.01% of the population. You could say; "Well then, that does seem very unlikely. I don't think I'll worry about it too much. After all, I doesn't affect alot of people." But remember this: 0.01% of Earth's population is still seven-hundred thousand people worldwide. Now, all of the sudden, it seems like a much bigger number. But it's still the same data, merely presented in a different format.

Another gross misrepresentation of humanity's obsession with percentages is what is "normal". What is a normal person? Well let's see. If we assume they live in the US (just to make things easier), then they would have to be: white, male, straight,  ~35 and a half years old, have brown hair, brown eyes, be ~5' 9", weigh 170 lbs., have had an average college GPA of 2.93, have an income of ~$81,400, be married, have 2-3 kids, and odds are they're also a salesperson for a living. But just how many people you know fit this neat little box? And that's not even factoring in things like religion, pets, household space, diet, hobbies and interests... et cetera, et cetera. So, why do some people have such a compulsion to be "normal", when there really is no such thing? Of course, even there, the normal they're shooting for isn't even statistically correct, but that's a discussion for another time. People have this animal urge to squeeze themselves into a mold that others have sculpted for them, in order to be accepted into a group. Their dedication to this idea is quite impressive, if pitiful to watch.

However, there are exceptions that make the rule. People out there that don't give a fig about what society thinks, or what standards it sets. I applaud them. But interestingly, their numbers seem to be growing. Where people used to squeeze and stretch themselves onto a template in order to present themselves to a social group, they now revel in their uniqueness and dance in the glory of their own imperfections and humanity. People accentuate their differences from each other and from there create and find groups that match their interests, not societies. This can be attributed to the large human population and the scramble for jobs in the recession. People go out of their way to separate themselves from the masses, to distinguish themselves amongst their peers. And you need to do this, it's a necessity, a requirement in order to catch and hold someones attention long enough that they hire or promote you. But it's a delicate balance. Too uniform, you'll never succeed. Too different, and you'll end up alienating yourself from society completely. While that may sound okay, enjoyable even, it's not desirable if you seek advancement. After all, we still cling to our primeval need for order and uniformity. Who would hire a freak?

So I suppose, in a sense, that the fact that we still need to alter ourselves to our social environment still lingers, like a disease, like the parasite it is. Society's interaction with individuals is a parasitic relationship. Unfortunately for us right now, it's also a necessary relationship.