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I did a lot of thinking about the human animal. Evolution crafted humans, like all living beings.
Ancient humans lived cooperatively with one another, otherwise they would never have been able to overcome their predators and competitors for subsistence. Women and children may not have been as strong as the males, but they were nevertheless prized members of the community. Everyone contributed and everyone was valued. The oppression of women and children, I learned later, came much later and was not a part of our physical evolution.
Why are we social beings who genuinely want to help one another? What if we hadn’t been? We wouldn't have survived, because we were never strong enough nor fast enough to overcome the big predators. This idea that people naturally love one another and want to care for one another is contrary to what we're taught. I didn't come to realize that love was our natural state until I was 25. The revelation came to me in a conversation about cows.
I asked a respected psychologist if people were like cows. That is, do we have a natural herd instinct that causes us to protect one another, to actually work for one another's benefit? Cows do that, I knew from my farm experience, but I had no idea if it applied to humans. "Of course," he said, then went on with something else. He didn't know that he had shattered my preconceived notions about humanity and put me on an ideological course that would change my life completely and forever. But he did.
People do have something like a herd instinct. If we were behaving naturally, the way evolution crafted us to be, we'd be looking out for one another and wishing each other well.
That wasn't what I had been taught. I had been taught that life is "a jungle" and we have to "look out for number one" if we weren't going to be suckers. At that time, I didn't think about the reason I had been misinformed, but I knew I had. Hatred and alienation are taught.
“You have to be carefully taught,” as the song from “South Pacific” goes. Children have got be taught to hate, to fear, and to stop caring.
The alienation forced on us is the chief cause of our unhappiness and discontent. Fighting that alienation is the key to contentment, but it isn't easy. Our society promotes alienation. I think it was Thoreau, or maybe his friend Emerson, who wrote, "Society is everywhere against the manhood [humanhood] of every one of its members."
One reason that people are so overwhelmed when they experience romantic love for one special person is because it is virtually one of the few kinds of love that is accepted and encouraged by those who set our societal norms. Embittered and discouraged from normal love for all, the sudden discovery of a socially endorsed channel for love leads to the flood of mighty dammed emotions which overwhelm us.
Homophobia is one form of the alienation that is forced upon us. The proscription against loving someone of your own gender effectively alienates us from half the world’s population? Oscar Wilde called homosexuality, “The love that dare not speak its name.” We are literally afraid to care very much for anyone of our same gender.
In some cultures, homosexuality isn't a big deal. It wouldn't be so contentious here in America if we didn’t make such a fuss about it. One early way we teach homophobia is when we tell children that they have to stop going to the same bathrooms as people from the other gender. From there, in thousands of ways, we promote alienation.
One might think that I am encouraging people to just drop everything and madly go around stroking one another. That's not true. Very quickly, I had to amend my original theory about the cows. We may have a herd instinct and want to help one another, but instinct is hardly enough for intelligent beings. We may be like cows in this way, but we aren't cows. If we truly care for one another, if we really want to benefit other people, there's a lot more to it.
We have to use our entire intellect if we hope to make any difference.
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