Humanity is wicked and you are a part of it

Who doesn’t love sunsets, music, the feeling of being loved and being in love. Who doesn’t feel happy reading great poetry or getting lost in the imaginative world of non-fiction? Who doesn’t love eating a delicious meal, after a tiring day, to fall asleep cozily when the eyes say — “No more today.”

Those are pursuits of mankind. We Homo sapiens are not the only humans that lived here. Homo erectus lived for nearly 2 million years. The species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to is Homo sapiens. During a time of dramatic climate change 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. So humanity doesn’t real concern all the previous species that are extinct. We are here and maybe we are the ones that matter.

In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the dawn of man was shown in a way where couple of apes were messing around — being eaten by larger carnivores, eating plants and leftover animals and fighting with other tribes of the same specie. Upon the fall of Monolith (an object that grants unique characteristics such as consciousness), one ape suddenly realised that the bones around could be used to cause harm to others, a tool to fight and conquer other beings and maybe some of his species too.

That was maybe the beginning of using tools, we make tools for surviving and navigating the world with ease. There is scholarly support for “microscopic traces of wood ash” as evidence for use of fire by Homo erectus beginning 1 million years ago. Since then, we kept on making tools that once protected us and now we have protect ourselves from.

Humanity is not a force for good.

Collected from https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/

Homo sapiens played a key role in the mass extinction of Australian megafauna. That was our first significant mark on the planet earth. A mark of terror and violence.

In a research published by Monash University, the researchers found that the major environmental shifts of the last glacial cycle had little impact on the abundance of megafauna, as recorded by the dung fungus Sporormiella, and megafaunal extinction commenced within 2000 years of humans colonising Australia and took less than 2000 years to complete.

The debate is ongoing about other regional extinction. Many scholars say that the megafauna’s extinction was driven by Climate Change. In the North American megafauna region, every mammoth was a source of vast quantity of meat. In one study of deciphering the diet of a woman who lived 12,800 years ago, Megafauna made up about 96% of her diet, with mammoths comprising about 40%, followed by elk, bison, camels and horses, and a negligible contribution from small mammals and plants.

We set our teeth on Mammoths, Mastodons, Camels, Horses, Gomphotheres. And that was just the beginning.

And…Technology is great right? The more advanced we become, the easier it is to live and navigate through life. Before the Industrial Revolution, there was an Agricultural revolution. The time we learned to control plants and domesticated plants that gave us resources to live on.

What Agriculture offered was: repeatedly digging hard soil, carrying heavy buckets, grinding grain by hand, performing the same movement again and again, working in awkward positions for prolonged periods. Which made life awesomely terrible.

Of course an average human was living a greater life than the one lived in terror of being executed without knowing when. But the things kept getting worse. Humans kept breeding and having more children only as a medium of immortality and legacy. Our selfish desire for symbolic immortality bring kids here to suffer as an ornament to be owned and displayed. Ranging in billions now — what a great job we have done!

After all of these messing around, we started forming values and groups. One where we can be assured of staying safe and protected. Can’t leave without mentioning the best kings of our times, the dictators that made millions of lives a living hell.

We have been through a lot afterwards. Medieval tortures, Genghis Khan, potentially responsible for massacring millions of people simply because they were his enemies. Adolf Hitler, the architect of systematic genocide and aggressive war, who caused millions of people to suffer. One thing that could perhaps be written about him is the words of a Jewish prisoner who carved into a wall: “If God is there, he would have to beg my forgiveness.” Joseph Stalin: state terror, executions, repression, deportations — an inducer of suffering on an unimaginable scale.

Technology is great right? The more advanced we become, the easier it is to live and navigate through life. Before the Industrial Revolution, there was an Agricultural revolution. The time we learned to control plants and domesticated plants that gave us resources to live on.

What Agriculture offered was: repeatedly digging hard soil, carrying heavy buckets, grinding grain by hand, performing the same movement again and again, working in awkward positions for prolonged periods. Which made life awesomely terrible.

For the humans that once roamed around freely, at what they, with a short life span lived more than many of us, agriculture seemed like an absurd raise.

Leading extinction of animals, human caused climate change, massive wars and genocide, while domesticating plants, we thought it would be a good idea to do the same with sentient beings that have subjective experience.

More than 60 billon land animals and trillions of aquatic animals are killed for food. Pigs are gassed to death, fishes die suffocating, calfs are seperated from their mother, cows forcedully made to reproduce every 60–120 days.

Chickens that would lay just 1–2 eggs in a month are made to lay 1 egg/day. They grow into having heavy bodies that make it difficult to stand or walk.

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Photo by You Le on Unsplash

It is sometimes amazing to see how far people will go in every possible direction just to avoid doing the main thing.

That day, I was watching an interview with Ed Winters and some Canadian politicians, where a woman was advocating for pig slaughter or something similar. She asked Ed, “Well, if you’re not killing them in gas chambers, then how would you kill them?” And Ed was like, “You don’t kill them.”

And then the conversation becomes: Well, what if you have to? What if you really, really want to?

But that’s the thing. You don’t kill the pig.

Sorry, Ed. We will do it as long as we don’t.

That’s about food right? It’s used to feed people. How about we talk about something even more absurd? How about Chinchillas?

Because of their beautiful, soft fur, chinchillas have been hunted for a hundred years now.

To make a chinchilla fur coat, approximately 100 to 150 chinchillas are required. This high number is due to the small size of chinchillas. After food, the ornament we display on our bodies is some voluptuous fur coat made of sentient lives of hundreds of animals.

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Image from PETA Investigates

Sigmund Freud said, “As long as we are afraid of death, religion will always stay there.”

Ancient religions began their journey around Egypt. Slowly, they spread. Hinduism remains the only religion that has survived for thousands of years with its presence. Of course, it has evolved.

At the end, we don’t really stick to religions; we stick to ourselves.

With scientific exploration and discoveries, we came to know that many of the things that were explained by the force of religion are not true. Religion and its dogmatic indoctrination have been imposed upon us since childhood. It’s almost as if, the moment we open our eyes after being born, we see a couple of people staring at us, and they have already decided our name, our religion, our nationality.

At the end, just as these things are assigned to us, we spend the rest of our lives defending them.

We came here without our choice. We keep being here without our choice, with the only option being to kill ourselves.

It takes no telling that Religion got its morality from Humans. There is no objective reality to govern us. We are here all by ourselves, making meaning and destroying them the very moment they are no longer important to us.

Religion became a thing that kept us happy, gave us a community and helped us to navigate through the world with ideas that required no justification.

It also became a poison. Because once you can affirm to people that you bear the word of God, you can literally make them do anything. That is how ritualistic suffering, human sacrifice and barbaric wars have been pulled on. The faith in an imaginary being governing over us all, gave us the strength to continue on with the want of an eternal salvation.

Life is already difficult. What makes it even worse is human-induced suffering.

Human-induced suffering can include the institutions, governments, and frameworks created by humans that suppress people from pursuing themselves. By pursuing themselves, I mean acting freely, acting according to their wants, and acting on goodwill — things that, in many ways, our systems and institutional frameworks prevent.

The rise of consciousness didn’t necessarily give us much, except the capacity to gain knowledge and thousands of years of philosophy to study. Yet it also continues to show us dull dreams.

Our whole notion of life seems to be constructed by a few people at the top of the hierarchy, who tell us what to feel, what to worry about, what we should see on the news immediately after waking up, and what our concerns should be.

Such a life is deeply limiting.

This began with agriculture and continued through the Industrial Revolution and the entrepreneurial age. Human-induced suffering doesn’t really stop.

Amid all the suffering that seems inevitable to existence depression, ailments, and the chaos of the mind we are presented with further human-induced burdens: expectations about living a good life when we didn’t even come here by our own choice.

The authoritarianism of institutions and governments, which keeps us from being ourselves, is what makes existence even less worthwhile.

At the end, humanity is surely not simply a force for good. It is also a force for suffering. We humans may have created more suffering than any other species has ever caused, and we continue to do so.

And in the end, you and I will be part of this world for perhaps a hundred years, and then we’ll be gone.

The chain will continue.

And perhaps you and I will no longer care — just as the people who came before us no longer do.