What differentiates human beings from the rest of Nature?
Question from the Internet:
“What is something every human from every timeline has in common?”
What is common in human beings, the only thing that differentiates us from other animals — including other developed primates — is the insatiable, irrepressible human ego, an incessant desire for selfish fulfilment and excessive consumption, accumulation of everything at the expense of everything and everybody.
Although animals also have a “selfish, subjective” instinct, desire for existence and survival, to cater for their basic necessities, they do so within the finely balanced framework of Nature’s integral system. In that system, strict, unchanging and unforgiving laws dictate and sustain the general balance and homeostasis life and optimal development depends on.
Animals never break that balance, they never leave their natural environment and they never consume more than their necessities which they instinctively sense as automatically integrated parts of the whole system.
Human beings are born without such an instinctive sense of belonging and integration. By birth, we sense ourselves on our own, forced to constantly compete and fight for existence and survival. Moreover, since we are not part of the commonly sensed mutual integration, “mutual guarantee” of the Natural system, we also have no idea what our true natural necessities and what actually available resources are.
As a result, as we developed through history and became more populous, we have been developing and existing increasingly like cancer in this integral system. And now, on multiple fronts with multiple opportunities, we are ready to self-destruct. Either we mutually exterminate each other through wars, or Nature finishes us off since in our present form we are utterly incapable of achieving the crucially necessary positive, mutually responsible and mutually complementing cooperation our problem-solving and collective survival depends on.
For the first time in human history, we have to start learning how to become similar to Nature above and against our inherent difference, opposition to Nature. We have to consciously, willingly learn and implement how to build Nature-like mutual integration between human beings above and despite everything that separates and rejects us from each other. We have to become a single living Human “superorganism” without suppressing or erasing any of our unique abilities, qualities we need to strengthen and sustain our special unity.
This is obligated by Nature’s evolution and the system’s laws, so we will reach it either willingly, consciously or as a result of wars, crisis situations and intolerable suffering.