Reaching great heights from negative beginnings
Question from the Internet:
“Why does human life by default have a negative value, and everyone starts out owing a debt to society and to the environment?”
This is a very accurate and important question, and it is a topic most people try to avoid or dismiss whatsoever.
But the truth is — and with our historical and contemporary experience, we can easily prove it to ourselves — each and every human being is born with an inherently self-serving, self-justifying, subjective, and individualistic ego. In fact, nothing else differentiates us from other animals but this human ego.
It is only this human ego that fueled human development, making our path and existence so starkly different from the life and development of other developed primates, for example.
On the one hand, humanity is searching for intelligent life throughout the Galaxy; we are dreaming about colonizing other planets and developing society, culture, and technology with breakneck speed, while chimpanzees and orangutans, for example, remained virtually unchanged for millions of years.
On the other hand, other animals, even developed primates, always remain within the general balance and homeostasis of the natural system; they exist within the optimal parameters of natural necessities and available resources and do not destroy the natural system that provides them with existence. Human beings increasingly exist and behave like cancer, consuming everything in their path, ruthlessly trying to control, manipulate and destroy everything in their path, following our limited and distorted, egocentric, and subjective mindset and calculations.
From birth, we start sensing ourselves as standalone, separate, and individual beings that need to succeed and survive at the expense of everything and everybody else. This is how nature’s evolution programmed us.
Thus you are right. We start with a negative value, with a negative balance the moment we are born, which negative value and balance only grows as we grow and develop — as long as we grow and develop blindly and instinctively according to the inherent nature evolution gave us.
But evolution also gave us the conscious and intelligent ability to recognize this inherently negative trait, the negative internal program in us. Evolution also gave us the possibility to learn how to harness nature’s developing forces to actively and purposefully change and further develop ourselves.
By doing so, we can willingly and consciously correct our negative value, balancing it with a new, positive value. We can install different, nature-like, life-creating, and life-sustaining software to complement our original software.
This way, we can become integrated and partnering elements of nature’s system like all other animals. Still, there is a huge difference.
Human beings — by proactively and methodically integrating into nature instead of destroying it — become the only truly conscious and partnering elements of the system. All other — still, vegetative and animate — parts of nature are born inherently integrated, without actual awareness of it, simply fulfilling their predetermined roles in the system.
Only human beings have the ability — through the above-detailed proactive and purposeful self-development — to get to know nature’s system from within and become the system’s internal observers and equal partners.
It is something we have to achieve, not for the usual, self-serving and self-justifying, and exploitative reasons. This is something we need to achieve for the sake of the system in order to fulfill evolution’s plan and justify the system as perfect. Only when we approach this unique human development with such intentions will the system actually help us to develop?
Otherwise, we will continue the present path, where recurring vicious cycles, growing crises, and intolerable suffering make us develop blindly and instinctively.