Animals of Conceit

When you look at a cross-section of a human you see the organs and skeletal makeup of a biped animal. Many of our bones match up with the bones in many primates, especially apes. You can go farther back and match our vertebrae with older species. The evolutionary path has become clearer and clearer as science discovers more.

An objective person, a truly objective person, sitting in a busy city plaza drinking an iced latte can see the way people behave; their mannerisms, irritations, posture, the direction of their gaze and many other traits of the human animal. This viewer, with the right training, could attach most of the human behaviors to animal behaviors. This is, again, because we are animals. When law enforcement looks at the death of a wife or step-child, they focus on the male in the household. This is because of statistics that show a preponderance of the male in the household being responsible. In the world of primates, the only thing that prevents males from killing the young is the male that is the father of the young in species that mate for life, or the level of promiscuity that makes it difficult to establish paternity without a doubt. In the former species, when a male father dies, the other males will kill the mother’s young so she will go into estrus and mate with one of them. We detach ourselves from the statistics when confronted by the animal side of primates. It is because the majority of humans do not want to believe they are animals.

This has not always been so. Humans in the distant past realized this because they had to hunt and act like the intelligent animal we are. They tracked seasons and migrations and knew all aspects of the earth. They slaughtered animals for their meat and on occasion they slaughtered and ate humans. We know this because of the fossil records that have been found. Science has compiled an amazing store of evidence of our movements as animals in packs with shared genetic backgrounds.

The motivations for our denial of the animal that is us extend back thousands of years as well with the development of civilizations, religions and philosophies. These creations distanced our species from our animal existence. Hunting was still done, but a lot of the protein we ate was raised domestically. There are many people today who would decry such an idea that civilization was not a true human activity and more of a human conceit that arose out of philosophy and religious dogma. These thousands of years that we have lived as if the earth is an infinite source of the things required to build civilizations. The science that defines us has moved into defining both our early existence as an animal and our new existence as the despoilers of earth.

The challenges the truth faces when confronted by humans is alarming for that objective observer referenced in the first paragraph. Most governments are blind and move on with the industrialization that spews carbon into the atmosphere and waste into the earth’s rivers and oceans. We do not view beautiful mountains and lakes as scenes of nature, but as minerals to be exploited. We press for increased population to fuel economic booms without the thought of what it will take to feed these people. We despoil our farming land with fertilizers that eventually leave many of them fallow. We cut down the forests that provide oxygen and remove carbon dioxide with thoughts of profits. The degradations caused by our conceits is endless and the few voices raising alarm are ignored or shouted down. Our new god, Economics, runs the world and requires yearly growth as if a plant. In reality, it is our cancer moving through us until society reaches a state of Cachexia. Then we will bemoan our fate and wonder what we can do to stop the cancer from killing us.

Why don’t we think about the cancer of consumption now before Cachexia occurs. Why don’t we control our conceits and realize we are a species that needs to be integrated with the earth. No amount of philosophy or dogma will allow us a way through this. It will take simple rational acceptance of our place as an animal that, at its highest pinnacle of achievement, is on the brink of a collapse that could lead to our extinction.