Post by Mike on Oct 12, 2007 3:19:20 GMT -5
And it dawned on me early this morning (which, personally, I call late tonight as I have long since passed the hour of normal slumber) that human beings are fucked.
Forget global warming, don't fret over deforestation, fuck nuclear warfare. We, as homo sapiens, are our own weapons of mass destruction.
Intelligence - sentience - is what has done us in. Our greatest gift is also the largest threat we face and the biggest obstacle we must overcome, though we never will. We are a species divided - not only by religion, politics, values, race, nations, and the invisible and visible lines we've drawn all over maps and the face of the planet; but mainly by two, simple concepts.
Picture this, as if it will be hard: you and another are engaged in heated discussion over a topic you disagree on. You both have your points, but neither is correct. As basic instinct kicks in, you have the urge to dominate; to win at all costs. To survive - perhaps not physically, but intellectually. Socially. Slowly adding to your ego as you try to piece together what is left of your shattered pride as step by step you meticulously overlook your life and everything wrong you've ever done. You want to change; to improve. You don't. You never will.
As the disagreement goes on, one that could simply be solved by confiding in the other that they prove excellent facts that you had overlooked and now must consider while you grow and learn, politely asking them to do the same - it becomes more heated. You insult them to make yourself feel more powerful, bring up over-the-wall topics and hypotheses which are intended to stun or injure while all they do is prove you aren't as correct as you thought if you could pull something like 'anorexia is okay because it reminds women of their strength over their body' out your ass. For what? To win. You get sloppy. Instinct kicks in. Intelligence is overridden.
That's just it, isn't it? The root of all our problems. Intelligence versus instinct - the ultimate war that humans have waged since the invention of the wheel. Or language. Or fucking for pleasure, which for some reason hasn't been perfected for fifty percent of Earth's populace.
You have morals; you toss them aside when you meet opposition. You believe in family and monogamy; they're out the window when someone interesting comes along - perhaps she appeals to your mind, but your dick is thinking just the same. You think your relationship has gone sour; your cowardice gives in and you perform better fellatio on a stranger than you would your husband.
You love someone; you give yourself to another.
To simplify it further, the differences between wisdom and genetics' drive is exactly the same as those of making love and fucking.
Love is a human concept. If there are aliens floating through the cosmos, I hope they realized how screwed love is. Or maybe they wouldn't understand it and do their best to analyze it. Or maybe it will piss them the fuck off and they'll distintegrate us all, sterilize us, or find a way to please our women and lull them to their crib with the best view of Saturn's rings. Then again...if they were smarter than we are, they'd know better than to do that - women can take anything and turn it upside-down.
Perhaps when the Romans re-wrote the Bible to reflect how they wanted to change their society to make it more docile (while saving their skins by adopting the religion and calling it Roman, which they also did to the Greeks) they got something right by making Eve out of a man. Eve represents everything that Adam could not be; Adam is a senseless moron without Eve. I assume that is why we want to know each other (in the Biblical sense, while we're on Christianity); to become whole. We each realize what is best in us belongs in the other person. Half of us might believe that means our dicks. We understand that what is worst in us could be erased if only mingled; joined in passionate, fiery, primal union with the opposite sex. And when it fails, no one is really left satisfied. Even children aren't a perfect union of two - they still have a gender, our society still tells them what and who to be, and we insist separation if only to have classification. In romantic languages, there are even male and female words - the way we converse is gender biased.
Could there possibly be a more simplified version of what fucks us up? Surely you've heard, "behind every good man there's a better woman backing him up." I know some men who would beg to differ; claim behind them is a huge man backing up his intestinal tract, not to mention some women who have a liquor store behind them as they get back into their Mercedes-Benz to drive home and pass another night with Jack, Jim, or Jose'. What merit does this have to it? Is it true, that good things only come of a union between male and female? Is this not also the source of our greatest failures?
Joey-John beats Mary-Sue halfway to death because his milk-packing job just isn't cutting it to pay for the mobile home and the kid she so foolishly dragged into this mess that only the truly intoxicated could call a marriage (by the way, why do they say 'man and wife'? Is this some subjugation of women?) and he just can't bear to hear he's a fucking deadbeat who will never see a hundred dollar bill go into his pocket? Does the man with the money who neglects his family as he snorts coke off a hooker's asscrack do any better to provide? Is there truly a balance in this fucking world?
To portray this in the technologically-astute world we now live in fluently and correctly so that all might have a shot at understanding; Instinct is a Mac, Intelligence is a PC, and politics, economics, and values are the blinking "12:00 AM" on your VCR that they never did include a fucking direction on how to program to the right time, as if you'd so much as fucking glance at them were they put in the box. Non-compatibility is amazing. We're paradoxical beings, the lot of us. I don't think it's just because I'm an American, either - the Arab world has got the same issues. Their instincts tell them to have multiple wives and fuck them all, their mind tells them to hide them behind concrete robes so no one else can have what is theirs, and their society that they've created from these two things not only tells women that what crime is being forced upon them is right and correct, but tells the men that the only way to truly love and care for their family is to strap a bomb to their kids and send them towards the nearest human being that's actually trying to help their opressed, impoverished, gender-biased culture as if either one were any were more right or wrong than the other.
We never want what we have until it's too late and we lose it, or until we think we're going to lose it; but if we can continue to get away with more and more and still get what we like then we'll push the boundaries until we're so fucked we can taste what we had for dinner in the fucking uterus. And then what do we do? We blame our neglect and failings on the world around us - whether the dog we beat, the job we hate working for little pay, the parents who raised us, the generation we grew up in, the society that forged the mindless drones that shaped our lives or the mythical man in the sky (never woman, unless you ask the pagans in which case it's the woman under your feet) who made us this way with their supreme sentience.
I say our problems lie in God, too - in all our human creations. That's all God is - a scapegoat for dealing with what hardships we create for ourselves and each other. To fuck our lives, as that is how life is created. If there is a God, I'd love to hear his voicemails and missed calls. I don't blame him for not answering - a billion people calling me, asking me for shit they don't need or could have if they got control of themselves - all while I'm watching Idol - would make me put my latest 'Fitty' ringtone on silent and empty my mailbox, too.
I don't know what to think, or how to fix myself. It is the futility that causes me to put this into these male and female words for others to read so I can prove my stance until the point of offensive, ridiculous statements only meant to anger so that I can piece together my pride and ego and put the blame for my basic instincts fucking over what I intellectually should know and what society tells us is should be valued on some outlandish, prophetic, symbolic, philosophical, "Point W" idea that only a truly fucked up person could pull out of their ass.
If you would excuse me, I gotta pop "The Notebook" into my blinking VCR as I download songs to my PC and transfer them to my fucking iPod.
Forget global warming, don't fret over deforestation, fuck nuclear warfare. We, as homo sapiens, are our own weapons of mass destruction.
Intelligence - sentience - is what has done us in. Our greatest gift is also the largest threat we face and the biggest obstacle we must overcome, though we never will. We are a species divided - not only by religion, politics, values, race, nations, and the invisible and visible lines we've drawn all over maps and the face of the planet; but mainly by two, simple concepts.
Picture this, as if it will be hard: you and another are engaged in heated discussion over a topic you disagree on. You both have your points, but neither is correct. As basic instinct kicks in, you have the urge to dominate; to win at all costs. To survive - perhaps not physically, but intellectually. Socially. Slowly adding to your ego as you try to piece together what is left of your shattered pride as step by step you meticulously overlook your life and everything wrong you've ever done. You want to change; to improve. You don't. You never will.
As the disagreement goes on, one that could simply be solved by confiding in the other that they prove excellent facts that you had overlooked and now must consider while you grow and learn, politely asking them to do the same - it becomes more heated. You insult them to make yourself feel more powerful, bring up over-the-wall topics and hypotheses which are intended to stun or injure while all they do is prove you aren't as correct as you thought if you could pull something like 'anorexia is okay because it reminds women of their strength over their body' out your ass. For what? To win. You get sloppy. Instinct kicks in. Intelligence is overridden.
That's just it, isn't it? The root of all our problems. Intelligence versus instinct - the ultimate war that humans have waged since the invention of the wheel. Or language. Or fucking for pleasure, which for some reason hasn't been perfected for fifty percent of Earth's populace.
You have morals; you toss them aside when you meet opposition. You believe in family and monogamy; they're out the window when someone interesting comes along - perhaps she appeals to your mind, but your dick is thinking just the same. You think your relationship has gone sour; your cowardice gives in and you perform better fellatio on a stranger than you would your husband.
You love someone; you give yourself to another.
To simplify it further, the differences between wisdom and genetics' drive is exactly the same as those of making love and fucking.
Love is a human concept. If there are aliens floating through the cosmos, I hope they realized how screwed love is. Or maybe they wouldn't understand it and do their best to analyze it. Or maybe it will piss them the fuck off and they'll distintegrate us all, sterilize us, or find a way to please our women and lull them to their crib with the best view of Saturn's rings. Then again...if they were smarter than we are, they'd know better than to do that - women can take anything and turn it upside-down.
Perhaps when the Romans re-wrote the Bible to reflect how they wanted to change their society to make it more docile (while saving their skins by adopting the religion and calling it Roman, which they also did to the Greeks) they got something right by making Eve out of a man. Eve represents everything that Adam could not be; Adam is a senseless moron without Eve. I assume that is why we want to know each other (in the Biblical sense, while we're on Christianity); to become whole. We each realize what is best in us belongs in the other person. Half of us might believe that means our dicks. We understand that what is worst in us could be erased if only mingled; joined in passionate, fiery, primal union with the opposite sex. And when it fails, no one is really left satisfied. Even children aren't a perfect union of two - they still have a gender, our society still tells them what and who to be, and we insist separation if only to have classification. In romantic languages, there are even male and female words - the way we converse is gender biased.
Could there possibly be a more simplified version of what fucks us up? Surely you've heard, "behind every good man there's a better woman backing him up." I know some men who would beg to differ; claim behind them is a huge man backing up his intestinal tract, not to mention some women who have a liquor store behind them as they get back into their Mercedes-Benz to drive home and pass another night with Jack, Jim, or Jose'. What merit does this have to it? Is it true, that good things only come of a union between male and female? Is this not also the source of our greatest failures?
Joey-John beats Mary-Sue halfway to death because his milk-packing job just isn't cutting it to pay for the mobile home and the kid she so foolishly dragged into this mess that only the truly intoxicated could call a marriage (by the way, why do they say 'man and wife'? Is this some subjugation of women?) and he just can't bear to hear he's a fucking deadbeat who will never see a hundred dollar bill go into his pocket? Does the man with the money who neglects his family as he snorts coke off a hooker's asscrack do any better to provide? Is there truly a balance in this fucking world?
To portray this in the technologically-astute world we now live in fluently and correctly so that all might have a shot at understanding; Instinct is a Mac, Intelligence is a PC, and politics, economics, and values are the blinking "12:00 AM" on your VCR that they never did include a fucking direction on how to program to the right time, as if you'd so much as fucking glance at them were they put in the box. Non-compatibility is amazing. We're paradoxical beings, the lot of us. I don't think it's just because I'm an American, either - the Arab world has got the same issues. Their instincts tell them to have multiple wives and fuck them all, their mind tells them to hide them behind concrete robes so no one else can have what is theirs, and their society that they've created from these two things not only tells women that what crime is being forced upon them is right and correct, but tells the men that the only way to truly love and care for their family is to strap a bomb to their kids and send them towards the nearest human being that's actually trying to help their opressed, impoverished, gender-biased culture as if either one were any were more right or wrong than the other.
We never want what we have until it's too late and we lose it, or until we think we're going to lose it; but if we can continue to get away with more and more and still get what we like then we'll push the boundaries until we're so fucked we can taste what we had for dinner in the fucking uterus. And then what do we do? We blame our neglect and failings on the world around us - whether the dog we beat, the job we hate working for little pay, the parents who raised us, the generation we grew up in, the society that forged the mindless drones that shaped our lives or the mythical man in the sky (never woman, unless you ask the pagans in which case it's the woman under your feet) who made us this way with their supreme sentience.
I say our problems lie in God, too - in all our human creations. That's all God is - a scapegoat for dealing with what hardships we create for ourselves and each other. To fuck our lives, as that is how life is created. If there is a God, I'd love to hear his voicemails and missed calls. I don't blame him for not answering - a billion people calling me, asking me for shit they don't need or could have if they got control of themselves - all while I'm watching Idol - would make me put my latest 'Fitty' ringtone on silent and empty my mailbox, too.
I don't know what to think, or how to fix myself. It is the futility that causes me to put this into these male and female words for others to read so I can prove my stance until the point of offensive, ridiculous statements only meant to anger so that I can piece together my pride and ego and put the blame for my basic instincts fucking over what I intellectually should know and what society tells us is should be valued on some outlandish, prophetic, symbolic, philosophical, "Point W" idea that only a truly fucked up person could pull out of their ass.
If you would excuse me, I gotta pop "The Notebook" into my blinking VCR as I download songs to my PC and transfer them to my fucking iPod.
