Humanity is complex. And at the same time, humanity is very simple. We are a huge collection of a single species, yet we thrive on killing and fighting against one another. We are the most intelligent animal ever to populate this Earth (so far), yet we never learn from out mistakes. We spend our days watching Television, cruising the internet, talking about nothing of importance and partaking in pointless social rituals, while our lives dwindle away. We are a very confusing species. And here is one man’s opinion on why.
Part One: Instant Satisfaction/Gratification
Human beings want to be satisfied. That, supposedly, is the purpose of our lives: to seek wisdom, happiness, and, in short, satisfaction. Just look around. Televisions, game consoles, movies, music, books, microwave-able food, computers, the internet…..All were created and serve the purpose of satisfying you.
We are also, with the rise of industrialization, modernization, nano-technology and the internet, extremely impatient. We have grown to expect not only satisfaction, but instant satisfaction. Because of how advanced and fast technology has become, we have gotten used to getting exactly what we want right now. We are spoiled. Fat and spoiled.
But it’s not as if humans haven’t always been this way. Human beings, by nature, like to deal with the present, and forget about both past and future. We don’t like to think long-term, don’t like to think about the consequences of our actions. We have to force ourselves to do that. We act on instinct, on emotions and irrationality. Think about how you react whenever you hear about anything: you feel an emotion. Some sort of feeling is awakened within you. And you react based on that emotion.
For as long as humans have existed, we have reacted with emotion and without thinking about the past or future. The best example of this would be war. War does absolutely nothing but prove who can kill the enemy faster. It solves absolutely nothing, has absolutely nothing to do with whatever the people are fighting over, and is simply an emotional, irrational and temporary solution to a problem. But we’ve been partaking in them since Adam and Eve, so it’s apparent that humans have always acted on emotion and impatience.
Thus we are brought to the first flaw of humanity. The need for instant gratification. It is due to this need that humans focus on petty, insubstantial issues that offer temporary yet instant satisfaction. It is why we love to gossip, go to movies, play video games. They offer short, yet completely instant sources of entertainment and gratification, and hence we spend our entire lives pursuing pointless satisfaction.
Instant gratification, like mentioned above, is not only entrenched in our everyday social lives, but also in the way we deal with worldwide issues. We see problems, and we invade. We don’t ever step back and look at the Big Picture; we don’t bother to realize that turning to war as the answer is just reverting back to the way we’ve always done things. We don’t realize that war is just a temporary and excruciatingly painful solution, and don’t realize that there are deeper problems we need to deal with. We don’t see that we need to dig up the root of the problem, instead of just bombarding the weed with weed killer every time we see it bloom.
The huge amount of violence in the middle east isn’t going to be solved with more violence. There are much deeper problems at work here, yet because of the humanistic need for instant gratification, we ignore taking time to look deeper and look for solutions and just invade.
One of the main problems in the middle east is, arguably, the disagreement of belief. We have many different peoples with many different backgrounds from many different cultures. Of course they are going to have different beliefs. Yet our solution to the clashing of these beliefs is to go in with rocket launchers and AK47s to shut up those who are making the noise. We don’t stop to consider that they are fighting for what they believe in, and ideas are intangible, thus indestructible. And no matter how many bombs we drop, you can’t kill an idea. But we don’t ignore our need for instant satisfaction long enough o realize this. We just make more bombs. The philosophy behind solving the world’s problems of today is “If something isn’t working, just do it harder.” Now, that’s perfectly fine if you want to temporarily stop the problem. But unless you address the core issue, you’re just wasting time, money, and lives.
