Factual Pulp: The Human Transgression

I like to call myself an intellectual. Modesty forces me to explain the context I use the word in. It sometimes happens that I go into deep reverie when thinking about something very simple and I will end up with a very strange idea. It’s a regular pastime for me. One such sequence of thoughts went like the following:

Everything in the natural world wants to survive. There are plenty of examples- leaves of the huge Amazon forests fight with each other for sunlight; the cacti in the Sahara protect themselves from thirsty animals through thorns; the bacteria deep in the ocean beds have mechanisms to withstand the high pressures and low temperatures; etc. All species seem to have an unwritten law that tells them survival is all-important. All of them have a 'survival instinct'. Now I asked myself, for what? There must be a purpose. Or is the very necessity of existence of purpose a purely human notion?

Anyway, assuming there was such a purpose, I set about looking for one. There were lots of actions every species indulged in - feeding, excreting, etc - but all of them were to help the individual live body to survive and not THE ultimate purpose I was looking for. Finally, I set my sights on reproduction. It seemed to fit the bill from every angle. All individual beings seemed to be living just to make sure they disseminate their genes widely. In fact there are some insects which actually die immediately after the act itself. And Lions are known to kill all the cubs in the pride so that the lioness comes into heat again. The point being that even death, the antithesis of life, is a mere stepping stone for life's pursuance of the ultimate objective. This, for me, confirmed my hypothesis.

Supposing I am on the right track till now, I will rattle forward with my little train of thought. If there is this supreme purpose in every being's life, of which it is subconsciously aware, or at least appears to be, then there is one glaring contradiction to this general statement. Homo Sapiens.

Its not that human beings do not want to reproduce. The “dissemination of the genes” certainly seems very high up the priority ladder for our species (and I mean Men, of course). On a more serious note, the Second World War was about the Nazi Party’s belief that their Aryan race was superior to every other on the planet. Similarly, such line of thinking can be seen in old British imperialism or even the neo American imperialism. One could go on drawing such parallels for all cultures of all times. But there is a difference for humans.

“The problem is Choice” – as the Wachowski brothers have so pertinently suggested in The Matrix Trilogy. As a species, we seem to have scored over others with the gift of Choice - at least the mirage of having one. At any point of time even if Biology forces us to act one way, we can choose to do otherwise. Or even Society for that matter. Hell, even the Almighty himself!

You know what I am talking about. If a guy has to take a crap, it can wait if he has an important meeting to go to. No animal – dog for example – would worry about something like that. The real skewed part is about the “ultimate purpose” I talked about earlier. Birth Control. Suggestively, one of the many pills in the market is also called ‘Choice’. Ha! Direct contravention of Nature’s/Life’s/God’s ‘purpose’?

The Darwinian theory of Evolution tells us that Humans are right up the evolutionary ladder. Then why this deviation?

The above has been adapted from my journal entry dated 4-12-2006