The Holy Grail of Human Society
Here is a piece that will open thine eyes to the true source of it all:
The mixture of a mind boils down to two essential ingredients, society and nature. These two conflicting forces define the two sides of a man: what he shows to other people, and what he is to himself. The cover is never the man. It is just that, a cover. The cover should never define the man. Society instills the cover and represses the nature. That is the true struggle that man is faced with as an individual. Man is born with nature, but raised through society. That interminable struggle decides everything in life. Society tames the nature, but it does not suppress it. It lies dormant and it will awaken. Once it awakens, man is given two choices: to persist suppressing, or to subject to his nature. To decide one over the other will define the man. Suppressing will perpetuate the struggle. Subjecting will begin the process to end it.
Whatever man is born with, man retains. Nature is intrinsic and instinctive in the composition of man. But it is society, and not nature, that ends up shaping and defining the man. Why the paradox? To understand, one has to search for the root cause. Society creates meaning. It created the meaning of every single thing known to man and will continue doing so as long as it exists. It is up to the individual to react to the meaning and apply it to his nature. Nature will remain unchanged, for nature cannot identify meaning, it just exists as it is. The paradox, however, lies not in the fact that these two forces are any different, but in that they are one and the same. Society’s birth giver is nature. It mirrors it. From the first trace of civilization, society has been molded by nature’s struggle to perpetuate itself.
There in lies the source of every complex, of every tragedy, and of every struggle known to man, for if love and life be matters of perpetuity, humans would not weep over love’s break and life’s end. If nature were unlimited, then society would not place limits on the mind. The mortality of all things molds human society. It reflects the very nature that forbids the immortality of the individual, for the individual, just as nature, wishes for an interminable future but, unlike nature, receives none of it. And thus, society molds nature accordingly to shade the disturbing truth of man’s fleeting life.
In society, death is forbidden territory. It presents a crisis of thought that is insurmountable. When attempting to stare through its curtains, a cold stream of nothingness stares right back. That crisis penetrates in the deep chords of the human soul and makes the society of a man crumble, for society is nothing but an illusory blanket to continue the illusion of immortality. Although some animals may grasp the concept of death, man is different in that he fully understands death's implications through his imagination. The human mind was now capable of effecting change in the environment. Therefore, man sought to perfect his condition to make the transition of death less sufferable. Civilization was created out of that simple, yet disturbing necessity. It was created to better preserve man’s existence and to relieve him of the fact that although death would come, it would not come as quickly as before.
Man continued his struggle by creating for himself an after-life within the limits of the imagination that he could possess at the time. The first instances of this leap came 30,000 years ago, when corpses of cavemen were buried with jewels, statues of deities, and other treasured items in the grasses of Gaul and Iberia. This change indicated that man had already imagined for himself an after-life and that the dead were being prepared to face it. But the most important leap, the start of a primitive form of morality, started at first in Egypt more than five thousand years ago, and then evolved in Babylon and Judeo-Christianity two to three thousand years later, when humans were led to believe that to reach the afterlife of salvation they had to perform a variety of deeds in life and live according to certain rules. If they ignored these edicts of ethics and morals, they would suffer, in the former’s religion, the extinction of their souls, and in the latter ones’, a place in the deep reservoirs of hell.
This change of society meant that the limit between the physical and the mental had been breached. Society had now gained the ability to mold hundreds of thousands of people’s minds. People who followed and were forced to follow the tradition of religion regimented in themselves a set of boundaries of what to do and what not to do, even though many of these newly imposed limits defied the intrinsic nature of man. Man was no longer free in nature. He suppressed his own self in order to conform into society. The mind was a slave of society. Petty superstitions and poorly formed beliefs would fuel an imagination of uncertainty in the ancient man and devise illogical manifestos of religion and ethno-cultural antagonisms that would add barrier after barrier to the mind of an animal that was capable of suppressing instinct but incapable of extinguishing it.
The two great molders of the mind and of society started more by chance than by planning. The first great molder of society began when humans felt a need to try and explain and express their existential situation. Man looked around for answers but could not give logical meaning to much of what he sensed around him. Imagine living four thousand years ago (or six hundred, for that matter), growing up without any pretense of science or of how the weather works, and seeing a thunderstorm in the works. How would one explain such an occurrence? One would look to the clouds and one would see what would appear to be a great fight of fire and sound. How else would one explain such majestic power without subjecting to the thought of magic or the supernatural? That is the human condition. That is how man created his first answers. He saw what was unexplainable and what was impossible with his own limitations, and he explained it all through the unexplainable source of all: god.
God differed from civilization to civilization. Some civilizations and societies had dozens of gods while others’ had hundreds, but they all sought out to explain the same unexplainable things of nature. There was the god of war, the god of fire, the god of thunder, the god of the river, and so on, all created to give meaning to who we were and what we were doing on this earth. Satisfying these gods was an essential part in the every day life of the ancient man. If man was not praying, he was sacrificing for his beloved deities. If he was not sacrificing for them, he was building them monuments and temples.
Then monotheism, through Akhenaton, was invented, and what a powerful god he made up. He created the god of all things. He was a god so powerful that all other gods created had to either subject to his power or become past false inventions of man. The god of Abraham was created from this new concept, and now society did not have to regiment itself by the morality of dozens of different deities, but by the morality of just one. A great leap in Western society began; a leap that has incarcerated the minds of entire populations for more than four thousand years. Starting in Egypt, it quickly disseminated to the Middle East. Although suffering setbacks in the Judaic form, it would ignite fire during the imperial Roman Empire when Christianity was born from a carpenter Jew. Christianity spread like wild fire after a few trivial decades, mostly because the empire suppressed its practice (what you suppress, you promote). Within three hundred years, it had become the official religion of the empire.
The code of ethics and morality of modern-day Europe, the whole of the American continent, the Middle East, and parts of Africa are the result of a long struggle within the mind that originated with the creation of Akhenaton’s God. India, China, and most of the East Asian continent never suffered a revolution as extensive as the rest of the world in this respect. This is not to say that society has not placed limits on the mind of the Eastern man in the past. It has crossed the frontiers of the mind and suppressed nature before, but the concept of a singular god was never applied to the philosophy of Eastern cultures. Hinduism and Buddhism, religions marked by the absence of one god and the prevalence of a universal spirit, molded and influenced Eastern cultures for thousands of years. In effect, wherein Judaism, Christianity, and Islam destroyed past societies and formed strong new foundations based upon the pretense of an unquestionable and omnipotent God, Eastern cultures escaped that path by creating a sequence of cultures whose essence de l’etre were never constant and whose doctrinal beliefs based upon the universality of the one and the all never pervaded or penetrated the real structure of a people for periods of more than one century. Nature in the East was saved from the long moral struggle of the West, a struggle which monotheistic religions and cultures are fighting to this day and which seems to have no end in sight.
To understand why this is so, one has to realize that man will fight against anything that is against his nature. A monotheistic God defied man's nature, while a universal spirit flowed in unison with it. The true source of the struggle between monotheistic religions, from crusades to jihads, lies at the very meaning of God himself. The true source is found in the internal conflict of every believer and fanatic; innocents who were born with animal elements but whose society tells them that their nature is a sin, and hence, an act against God Himself. Their fight is internal, their hate is internal, but that conflict, though started in the mind, reverberates in the soul, and in the right circumstances of instability and in the absence of order, is transformed into violent action. That action is a rebellion against the limits of society and a cry of subjugation to the power of the monotheistic God. It is not a coincidence that poverty and instability breed intolerance, hatred, fervency, and violence. It is not a coincidence that while Europe was buried in the dirt and in constant feudal war in 1096, the proclamation of a religious Crusade had such extensive popularity and success with the general populace. It is also not a coincidence that the adherents of Islam in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Tyre, spoilt with the riches of the land and having lived in a successful and prosperous culture, did not unite and defend themselves against the Crusader threat at first. It is not a coincidence that the present Middle East, which has been suffering from civil strife, bloodshed, and poverty for the past one hundred years, has demonized the West and has waged jihad after jihad on Western land. Or that the present West, spoiled with unimaginable luxuries and wealth, has 'forgotten God' and has still not fully reacted to the Islamic threat. All is due to a God who suppresses instinct and enslaves the minds of His followers. The God of Abraham is paradoxical to human nature. He is an enemy of what is intrinsic and instinctive. The extremes of man's world are but demonstrations of the struggle between nature and society. The patterns are always cyclical, always round. History provides the strongest evidence of the perfect circle of balance in the universe. History is but a diagram of this circumference, and although the rate of its velocity might change from time to time, it is proportionately equal to the measurements of the circle.
How can a man reach such a point of religious fervency so as to give his very life for Him? How can he give it all away to a god that he has never seen and that has never been proved to exist? The Ten Commandments, the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an, books supposedly written by the very hand of God, have placed impenetrable barriers on what we judge as right and wrong. An intricate circuit of moral rules to live by was placated onto Western society, and the greatest disillusionment of nature, death, was devised to safeguard its execution. Two distinctive paths were drawn out to preserve that morality: the path of salvation and the path of damnation. From then on, who people were and what they did in life had a definite result on their trajectory in the after-life. It was but an intricate illusion; an invention created by either brilliant sages or insane prophets that took root for its earth-shattering power and changed society indefinitely. Humans had become slaves to their own selves. They condemned their very nature and sought out to redeem themselves in the after-life. And although animal instincts were suppressed for the betterment of society, what was devised, instead, was a monster; a vicious cycle that was to haunt humanity with war and bloodshed and that was to instill hatred and resentment in the soul of man.
That hate was very present in the heart of the Crusader soldier who prayed for victory over the worshippers of Satan to Jesus of Nazareth, a man who lived his life dedicated to the message of non-aggression and peace. And in the artisan from Baghdad, who raped a lowly peasant only to go back home and pray to Allah several minutes later. And it still persists in the heart of a Muslim mujahedeen, who pretends that Islam is a religion of peace but uses it for the exact opposite. And in the Christian, who preaches to "turn the other cheek" and to "love our neighbors as we love ourselves", but raises her children with bigotry and intolerance towards everyone who does not share the color of the moon. Man, filled with hate and with guilt for his nature, a guilt and a hate that was instated by society's morals, but enacted by the instinct of the animal, surrenders his will to the all-powerful God when he finds himself helpless to cleanse himself from sin and to rid himself of the torments of his mind. That act of submission represents more hate than love. It is hate disguised as love and enslavement. Man is defenseless in ignorance. That is why a man can take his own life and give it to God as his present. It is not a question of the lunacy of man. It is not a question of whether man is unnatural and different to anything else in nature. It is a question of what society forces man to do against his natural will. Every man is enslaved by society, and thus every man is limited to society. No... The virus is not man. It is society.
It's not finished and the project will include a vast array of specifity in the future. Hope you enjoyed this.
Sib
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Originally Posted by Sher Khan
