A few days ago, I posted a brief tweet expressing my frustration with the manner in which society at large has decided to respond (or rather not respond) to the current state of affairs in our world (i.e. the catastrophic rise in COVID infections across the world, the exorbitant number of wildfires all over the globe, the ongoing genocides that no one seems interested in ending, and so on ad infinitum). In response, a mutual inquired if I could expound my thoughts on this particular notion. This resulted in me replying with a flurry of tweets in which I hoped to encapsulate my thoughts in the most concise manner that I could manage. However, as is often the case, brevity leaves much room for speculation. As such, below I have endeavored to further refine my thoughts to such a degree that they are more apt to share with a broader audience.
This is the tweet in question. As is evident, the tweet is rather general and could use further context in order to its intent to be better understood. However, my frustration with society at large is clearly evident.
Over the course of much reflection on the topic, I have continuously arrived at the conclusion that humans are burdened with a subconscious suicidal predisposition. This predisposition, in my estimation, is a result of the trauma caused by a fundamental failure of our consciousness to reconcile the chasm between our will to live and our own mortality. As someone once pointed out to me, consciousness requires that people to be slightly insane in order to fight for survival while being completely aware of the nature of our reality. It seems to me that the reason so many of us adopt self-defeating behaviors is because we cannot reconcile the will to live with the deeply demoralizing understanding of our own mortality.
It is undoubtedly completely disheartening to live with this knowledge, and in order to move forward despite this understanding requires a measure of denialism in order to ignore such knowledge until the moment of our finality comes to pass. Therefore, our seemingly universal drive towards fatalism seemingly serves to prove my hypothesis on human nature. As such, it is idiotic to debate whether humans are inherently good or evil because the reality is that we are neither. What we are instead is inherently indolent. We are forever attracted to the solution that requires the least amount of effort. Thus, we almost always take the easiest way out. That predisposition usually leads to wrong doing, malice, and defeatist tendencies. At its core, every human struggle truly stems from this deeply ingrained tendency towards the facile.
The reason that we struggle to keep society intact and fail to progress towards a better world is because we are constantly fighting against a human tendency towards fatalistic incompetence. The majority of our species would rather put their heads in the sand and enjoy a final moment, in whatever moment that may occur, rather than invest the effort necessary to enjoy a million moments across a future that is continuously seen as not being guaranteed.
As such, we will happily die in the current second rather that be burdened with managing the next. This is possibly the most disappointing thing about our species.
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