An Examination of the Human Condition

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have fallen victim to more violence than any other species; random violence perpetrated by other humans, attacks by hungry beasts, even accidents have struck us more. Why? Because humans are senseless. People have lost faith in their instincts, and in doing so have suppressed them. We hear sounds in the night, but how many people know what they are? Who hears the difference between the house settling and the burglar trying the door? We can no longer distinguish between sounds, so we have taught ourselves to fear them all.

Fear causes stress, and stress further dulls the senses, causing us to fall victim to dangers even we, the deafest of animals, should have recognised. Constant stress also causes adrenaline poisoning, which leads to tunnel-vision, vertigo, hair loss, and urinary problems. There are two ways the modern man is likely to go from here: he will try to ignore it, and make it worse by worrying, or he will go see a doctor. If he decides to visit a doctor, the doctor may give him pills, which introduce other mildly unhealthy chemicals into his body, or the doctor may call him a hypochondriac and send him to a psychiatrist. Let our modern man go to the psychiatrist. The pshrink is likely to do one of two things: tell the man to lean more about the world around him, or put him on mood altering drugs, which will most likely either cause irreperable kidney damage, or permanently suppress the right brain. And so dies our modern man, on kidney dialysis, which the doctors swear has nothing to do with the medication, after losing his job to a 'saner' man; and to think, it all could have been prevented, had he learned the sounds of his environment.

Man is too comfortable in the box he has built around himself, and this box leads him to commit violences against his fellow man, for the modern man, like his primitive ancestors, assumes that what is outside his box is to be feared and hated since everything good is obviously in the box with him. If only our modern man realised that bigger boxes were available...


Street Exit

Sophia '97