The question, are we wolves, sheep, or merely half-awake children was not posted as a frivolous matter.
If we wish to improve our social structure we must know what humans are at a very basic level. The sciences of psychology, sociology, and psychiatry have determined that we have a neutral nature. We are not inherently selfish, evil, and self-destructive SOBs as we sometimes appear to be.
We are merely half-awake children and thus we can fairly easily turn around this lousy social structure we have invented if we can awaken the masses. I have decided that it is my duty as your Dutch uncle to awaken these young slumbering giants; and thus my posts. I have decided that I must ride through the towns and cities crying “awaken young giants, there is much learning to be done, go quickly to your nearest library and begin, the hour is very lateâ€.
Time is late because we have constructed hi-tech toys that can easily destroy us. We cannot continue, foolishly playing with matches, while sitting in a pool of gasoline.
Some have identified the generation that fought WWII as the greatest generation; for good reason. That generation had to kill and die in battle to save civilization; they did it with courage and dignity. Does this generation, the one just coming of age, have the courage and dignity to save civilization from self-destruction? This generation need not kill and die; this generation needs only to develop an intellectual life. Perhaps our society has generated young citizens who find it easier to kill and die than to learn and lead.
Hi-oh Silver, away; who was that masked-man mounted on the white horse; perhaps the apocalypse–perhaps our guardian angel?
“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought” -Martin Heidegger
In order for man to order chaos he must be able open himself to chaos, to go outside himself to encode flows.
Selfishness? Destruction? Why the negative conotations? How long will we enslave ourselves to Socratic idiocy? How long will we sit around and cry about the end of man and history? There is no end.
The real challenge is to make killing and dieing an end in itself.
Heideggarian fear of technology aside, and without implying the issue is frivolous in any way, I’d ask you why this has to be an either/or question?
Surely humans are sufficiently complex that we can grant them the quality of pluralism? Is it not possible for us to be all three, either simultaneously or alternately?
Possibly, the greatest threat to our existence is not resolving your question in favour of one of these attributes? Possibly, we could never favour one, and still keep living? Possibly, the danger comes from elsewhere and we have misdiagnosed the threat?
No, it is the oldsters who compel the young people to kill and die. It is the oldsters who have created a society where intellect is given a backseat to obedience. It is the oldsters who made these vast weapons of horror and continue to brandish them.
We can only hope that the youngest generation abandons wholesale the tenets of fear and danger and oppression that your so-called greatest generation have foisted upon them.
It is only in that way that civilization can be saved from destruction.
Coberst’s concern is obviously and absolutely right-on, and so is his metaphor.
Thus the oppositional defiant response you just gave him is what I would expect from you, Membrain, in evidence of that half-awake adolescent to which he alludes.
We are neither wolves nor sheep, but men. Anything less that is an insult to those men under the metaphor. Compare the Iliad (see, I use humanities, not social sciences) where Hector is seen as a good man, and the Achaeans are called in comparison to various animals. In the end the enraged “lion” Achilles killes the man Hector.
My point being that expecting men to act like, or understanding men as like carnivores on their own people, or objectified submissives for another’s exertions of power, – neither of these do justice to the nature of the rational animal, man.
“I am not an animal – I am a human being.” – The Elephant Man
