Saturday, August 10, 2013

I, Cannibal.

We are cannibals. 

This statement is meant in more than one way, and the statement itself is going to make you want to debunk me, but you really cannot, because you're the shock-ee and I'm the shocker (code for scientist and/or philosopher.) 
Welcome to planet Earth. 



The way the food web works on planet Earth, where most of you are from, is cannibalistic. This was explained to me at a very early age by The Lion King, but it extends to humans and to our behavior. 
The modern homo-sapiens have been in existence for an estimated 6 - 7 million years. That is quite some time, although not long compared to this planets actual existence, but definitely long enough for quite a bit of decomposition to happen. Every human being that has ever lived has or will die, and their bodies are burned or put into the ground. 
In less (supposedly) civilized times, humans did not put their dead into the ground as we do now. Bodies would be left behind, put into the woods away from the tribe, or, in many cases in every race throughout human history, eaten. 

This still happens. Many cultures eat their dead or eat their victims they kill in battle, sometimes in full view of the grieving enemies. I'm not going to go into all the different rituals, all the reasons, who still practices blatant cannibalism or where it is still a social norm. The bottom line is that you are a cannibal. So am I. 



Everything we consume physically was once a dead body. A dead lizard, dead bird, dead tiger, dead dinosaur, and likely, due to where we grow our food in already populated areas, dead human beings. Your green beans are the product of you g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-great grandmother. Your steak was fed off of grass that was fertilized by a distant cousin. You're consuming other human beings. 
And that is the natural order of things. 

Examine this further with a psychological bent. Have you ever heard someone tell you that a problem was "consuming" them? That your own eating disorder is "consuming" you? That someone else was emotionally consuming everyone around them? 
Part of being a social creature, as humans are, is that we feed off of eachother. Sometimes this is done in a healthy way, but when it's actually mentioned, it is never healthy. We cannibalize ourselves as often as we do others, allowing our problems to destroy pieces of our identity, turning us into something else. Just like eating a deceased relative would keep them in you and a part of you, an honoring of them, we let our circumstances come into us and alter us; it becomes a part of you. This is our inherit narcissism that cannibalizes us. 
When others do it, they become a part of our lives in a way that we cannot function as ourselves - we alter ourselves so that pieces of our identity (money, emotional, or otherwise) can be used by someone else, altering them for their benefit - just like eating a deceased relative was never really an honor for them, as a comfort for those left living. 

In the majority of societies today, cannibalism is looked down on and feared, despite that fact that every single one of us participates in it on a daily basis, save those who don't eat and don't interact with the outside world, which are few and far between for obvious reasons. The Church of Euthanasia is the only pro-cannibalism group I can think of off the top of my head, and their reasons are related to population control, as well as their anti-child and pro-suicide ideas. 
We often fear what we are. At the beginning of human time, we were cannibalistic, either in a grief-driven or battle-driven way (other than the times it was used for survival only) just as we were murderers, just as rape was the most common form of sex. 



Human beings greatest fear is not death. The greatest fear we have as a species seems to be something we are in constant denial of - what we really are by nature. Our greatest fear is what we have lurking in our brains, what we would have been if it weren't for how we were governed by birth. In nature VS nurture, our greatest denial is exactly how much of us is being suppressed by the latter. 

Cannibals.



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