Why do we do the things we do?
I am not sending out this question to the cosmic vacuum, but is looking inwards into myself and asking this question.
Why do we do the things we do?
It’s been hard for me to comprehend the workings of this world. I can reasonably assume that it is equally hard for most people around me. At least to the ones I have come across — in person and through the books, shows and movies they produced.
We live in incredible times. Despite the easy access to information, we see people miring in a quagmire of misinformation and is more than willing to fall prey for propaganda.
My question is pretty simple here — do we really have a choice?
If you look at India, we were part of Gondwana land some time ago. There was a huge Ocean named the Tethys Ocean that separated Indian subcontinent from the Eurasia.
We sailed across the Indian Ocean, collided with Eurasia and created Himalayas and we consumed Tethys Ocean in the meantime. If you don’t believe me, go to Spiti Valley, Himachal. You will find fossils of marine animals as old as 250 million years being sold in markets for as low as INR 50. Incredible India!
Those fossils will tell you about the Tethys, our journey across the Indian Ocean and us being this landmass attached to the Eurasia.
Your religions, your nations, your ideologies and everything that you call yours — including the language you speak and your conscience — it all came much much later.
Our species wandered this planet for almost 100,000 years before we started farming. Things changed pretty fast afterwards. Before we go to the changes that happened in the last 6,000 years, I think we should spend some time with the last one million years.
Our ancestors have been walking in the East Africa Rift valley for the last 20,000,000 years. I don’t want to throw in the word ‘million’ — look and feel the number of zeroes here! These zeroes signify the amount of f***s this planet and the cold universe outside it gives about your thoughts — you religion, region, ideologies and whatever!
Then there were a handful of hominids that walked this planet. Fire wasn’t invented by Homo Sapiens. We believe that one another species — Homo Ergaster invented it. We know that Homo Erectus walked in China and Eurasia before Homo Sapiens walked out of Africa.
Neanderthals inhabited Europe as late as 28,000 years. That means they have came across our ancestors (I mean Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals are out ancestors too, I will get to that) and lived with them.
In fact, we have plenty of genetic proof that they even had sex with Homo Sapiens! Their legacy is frozen in the Neanderthal genes that many humans carry to this date. Not just Neanderthals, but another species — whom we call the Denizovans — have slept with Homo Sapiens too. A lot of people around Australia carry their genes.
Now, I can’t be really sure it was the female Homo Sapiens who slept with male Neanderthals or vice versa. May be it happened both ways. But we are pretty sure that they indeed have sex and the babies were raised by one of the populations. These babies merged with the populations and when they reproduced, their genes spread through the population.
If I exercise some creative freedom and imagine a Homo Sapiens female sleeping with a Neanderthal male (a scandalous affair, love jihadh of sorts, I enjoy demoliting that patriarchal ego!), it throws in something.
While having sex, would have they been thinking about where to build the Temple? Or what about the Triple Talaq? The Muslim Conquest of India and the need for a retribution?
The growth rate of GDP? The quarter life crisis and the work pressure? What to eat and which all places to go? A life in frustration? The Crusades and Caliphate? What came first — the chicken or the egg?
I know that the above sentences doesn’t make sense. But that’s exactly my point —
They don’t make sense!
Our ancestors have spent considerable amount of time foraging this planet, just eating, fighting, reproducing and dying before we built this civilisation.
With all due respect to the great effort that went behind it, let me tell you that it doesn’t matter much. We are just an extension to their lives. And our children will be an extension to ours.
Well, I forgot tell you something.
The last glaciation, the last great ice age, receded some 12,000 years ago. Since then, the world is a warmer, cosy place. That allowed us to develop agriculture. We call this era the Holocene — and this is the era in which Homo Sapiens built everything that you see around you.
From Indus Valley Civilization to the Achaemenid Empire to Alexander and Mauryas, the Guptas, the Greeks, Romans, Genghis and the Turks, the crusaders,the Mayas, Incas, Abyssians, the Qing, Ming, Manchus, the Shogunates, Samurais, the European conquest of the world, the world wars — every piece of history you know — happened in this small window of climatic realm that is favourable to Humanity.
Do you realise how small this window this is, this much hyped greatness of entire history of ‘modern’ man?
I know I sound like a Nihilist, but that is not the purpose here. I think if we develop even a slightest sense of appreciation to this grand theme of things, our bigoted beliefs will simply melt away.
This is not some hyper-consciousness BS that mystics have been selling to us for a long long time. We, the land of snake charmers, are especially susceptible to this. But I am not going to ask you do that. Just look at the bigger picture and tell me, where do we fit in that hatred!
Again, we are so normal! I do cry at a love lost. When someone so dear leaves us through death or partition, I do mourn. The small lives of us revolve around this bodies of ours that are nothing but hormone bags that somehow learned to think and communicate. A great achievement indeed, but the world that we are immersed in — the one that produced all this through mere chance — is still oblivious to our depredations.
This too shall pass, epochs will come and go and Humanity might transcend this phase. I have no way of knowing.
May be, we will transform our consciousness into Silicon. Brain functions happening on some inorganic chip that is freed of the power hungry, inefficient (oh the irony!) biomass. Actuators getting things done for us. No need of any biological beings anymore.
Who will care about ecology and biodiversity then?
Humanity, in the form of flesh and bone having vanished from this planet. Just a series of solar panels that dot the equator (may be at tropics, if you account for the clouds and insolation) that power computers in which entire humanity is hosted.
We would want to make the system redundant so as to eliminate earth as the single point of failure. Human ‘souls’ travelling in spaceships in different directions in search of new ‘homes’. By then, we would have truly transcended our roots.
Writing about future is a risky business. Perhaps we will just go extinct before we could do all that. Who cares (wo)man! None of us are seeing it.
May be the ones who have invested in cryonics, though I honestly think that a later day administration will simply dispose off their bodies. Think about China taking over Germany in 2165 — they might create organic fertilisers out of all the German bodies kept at -196 degree Celsius for the past 150 years or so.
Of course, I am just ranting here. But there is a catch - We don’t know why we do what we do, because we weren’t made to do all these. We didn’t evolve to do all this things — my fingers doesn’t know what I am doing with this keyboard. My palm probably is keeping an account — plotting to give me Carpal Tunnel Syndrome someday!
So we might well let go off all the steam and listen to the inner voices that guide us. I know that this ‘voice’ doesn’t exist. Truth is that we create them for ourselves. This help us to live when all the morals, all the codes of conduct, everything that is in place to control us — break down.
Just like the Joker remarks in “The Dark Knight”, we can’t really trust this world. All this structures that support our world hangs on carefully crafted dogma that somehow survived centuries. Everything works because we, as a people, wants to adhere to them.
This however, isn’t a bad thing. If agriculture didn’t enter our lives, If state systems didn’t evolve, If we didn’t kill each other and went through all those mess to create the science and other systems of today, this population of 7 billion wouldn’t have come to existence.
In 1900, there were just around 1 billion of us. If we created 6 billion humans in the last 100 years, the breaking down of all these systems can’t be constituted without considerable loss of human life.
Catastrophes of that scale, my mind can’t fathom! Anarchism goes out of the window.
Perhaps I am just overthinking here. But one thing is pretty clear to me — hatred isn’t worth it. May be its hard to love. Love may not be meant for every one. This concept of love transcending the space and time we occupy might be a bit old fashioned for 2017.
But despite all the running, I come back to this concept — Love!
Now, if you still want to build that temple or establish that Khalifate or elect this bigot/imbecile as your leader, well…fuck you!
