We all have something we need, something for which we’d betray our beliefs — a weakness, a vice, a child or loved one, something to turn us against what we so proudly represent, twisting the way we talk and behave — our feelings too much to bear and balance across the board, our code compromised and ever-shifting, the picture complicated, Gordian. Mindfuck Inc. Our hearts overspill with emotion, our bodies and minds curious, human, all too bloody human to accommodate the fantastic process unfolding before us, the one we have effectuated with our hearts and minds and boundless ingenuity — groundbreaking initiatives that have thrust us out of the bogs of ignorance into the field of curiosity and invention. Our relentless creativity has delivered us to a world far brighter, and yet the snags remain. The pitfalls and mudholes. Riddled with conflict and contradiction, our situation requires ever-increasing ingenuity to avoid the traps, a dynamic that advances solely by coming into conflict with itself, its major impediments the ones we thrust its way in the name of our entitled states of mind. Our acquisitions and accumulations, material and mental, and the codes of conduct that helped us secure them, the ones we hold so dear to our hearts, deeming them the end of history even as we rely on progress and change to maintain our chosen way of life — we cannot let them go. We act in their name and wonder why things keep looping round with viciousness.
Even when we champion tradition, a less chaotic version of life, the bedrock of which are wisdom and continuity, a frame of mind that seeks to transcend the pure animal instinct of eat, rest, procreate, proliferate — everything that sets us apart from the nasty elements of the animal kingdom — even when we stand by our traditions, the very foundations of our history, we betray them. We embrace our vices all the while pretending to be a level above them.
We do so because we are tragically inclined. Our nature will not let us go …
If I were human, that is what I would be thinking — all of the above — if I were ready to face my situation. If I were inclined to act on it somehow, looking to change it, push it out of my way, be done with it, put on a new face instead of recycling the old one.
It’s tough to break the habit.
Ask the dinosaurs. They were very fond of their way of doing things.
So were the Neanderthals.
Vexed? Watch this space for more.
From the collection of writings EON: THE ANGRY COMING OF AGE