The Tragedy of Humanity

To start off such a complex topic, it is well in order to first define the WHERE.

Where is humanity?

Is a topic many have pondered on throughout history. Placing our species from the center of the universe to the nihilistic tiny unimportant spec floating in the nothingness, but through all of those interpretations a missing and yet very important thread was overlooked: what’s beyond the physical where? What is the where?

This is an even harder to topic to ponder on and we’ll beyond the scope of this essay, but for now it suffices to say that through the centuries two foundational properties that define our Where have been observed:

In a Where where the only fixed thing is so incomprehensibly eternal, and seemly out of reach for one single human, the world then becomes only the noisy observable, only the apparently chaotic flux of impermanence.

So like our attempts to sort out the Laws through their effect on the observable, it stands to reason that to define a human, the observation of the effect of Material Change in a person is in order.

Most people have a set routine, on which they rely to further progress in their lives , but unlike most fixes sets of actions, the day to day tasks all are attached to the permanence of material things. You can’t wake up without a bed, you can’t brush your teeth without a sink or a toothbrush; and you can’t do any of those things without a proper income and job to keep them around. A small scale set of action, reliant on tangible things, driving our sense of identity.

You can’t be you without the daily commute to school, or your love for your favorite pair of jeans. But what happens when you lose your job, your jeans worn out or you graduate school. Change is inevitable, and we deal with change through Trauma.

Trauma: the death or challenging of one’s self identity. The destruction of ego, when all one’s marks of continuity are gone.

Like a the Greek tragedies of old, the more we try to prevent change, the harder it will hit us when it inevitable come, and the more lasting the Trauma and subsequent neurosis will be.

The INEVITABILITY OF TRAUMA is the tragedy of humanity. A material specials, reliant on material constancy to be, in a universe where the only constant is immaterial will be forever bound to trauma. Forever cursed with the knowledge that change is coming.

But if the ultimate state of humanity is neurosis, and dark despair and constant trauma, then why do we keep on going? Why do we still roam and push forward after 200.000 years?

In the ancient Poem Pandora and the Jar, men was first set as a race of ignorant yet happy fools, living in service to the gods of Olympus, representing the most basic of impulses of men, until Prometheus brought to them a piece of the fire of knowledge and the gift of foresight leading Zeus to set on humanity sickness and despair, clouding the already limited foresight with failure and mistakes and loss, but also leaving Hope.

There are many interpretations to this myth, as any other, like how the fire represents birth; or it being the collective memory of the trauma our species went through after developing foresight and sentient, with fire being the turning point; but for the sake of this essay, the one interpretation that makes more sense is the one whose meaning has shown over and over again through humanity: The curse of Foresight.

Is a feeling many echo today. A feeling hard not to empathize with after the trauma of two demonstrations of industrial warfare, but a feeling that’s not exclusive to the knowledge acquired by the 19th century men, but echoed by 16th century men who just witnesses the post reformation wars, or by the 15th century men after being overwhelmed by a round world.

With every discovery Trauma follows but with trauma a will to push forward, and to keep uncovering, almost as overwhelming as the neurosis and angst, and a hope that this innate sense of curiosity will lead us closer and closer to the ultimate truth and peace.

In the end we are left with a limited knowledge of the constant laws, the creeping fear of mistakes those limitations can cause and the trauma that comes from such neurosis, but two traits are immutable to every human:

Everyone may manifest the will to be in a different way, some more efficient than others, and some may manifest different degrees of hope depending on their current circumstances, but humans are nothing but Hope and Will.

With them humanity came to where it is today, and through the trauma of the last mistakes and discoveries and hubris still permeate our collective unconscious, Hope will prevail, the dust will settle and in the end our Will to Be will resume

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