Two Hundred and Ten

If it’s wrong to live for others, what’s right?

We’re social animals, after all.  It’s our instinct to live in communities.  At least that’s what we used to tell ourselves.  But we also used to tell ourselves that we alone among all the animals have left instinct behind, and live by reason. 

Both are myths.  We haven’t left instinct behind, no matter how much we try.  Nor do we live by reason, no matter how much we try.  We live by myths.

We tell ourselves other animals live by instinct, and are no more than Descartes’ meat machines, so we can kill and eat them with a clear conscience.  We tell ourselves other people are only animals, and we alone are human, so we can enslave them with a clear conscience.  But we’ve always known these are myths.    

Every living being knows, if it knows anything, that it lives at the expense of other living beings.  Yet most animals still seek the company of their own kind.  Even the most solitary organism is a community of cells.  But at the cellular level, solitary individuals vastly outnumber communities.  So why do communities exist at any level?

Because there's safety in numbers, but only for the community.  The weakest individuals fall victim to predators, but the strong survive, leaving the community stronger.  Individual cells die, but the multicelled organism survives.

We neither know nor care about the fate of our bodies’ individual cells, yet we used to imagine that the body of which we’re cells, and sometimes called god, cares about us. Now we know our love for it is not returned.

If the cells of our bodies were as sentient as we are, they would think as we now do.  They would value their own individual needs and wants more than those of the community to which they belong, as we now do.

If the cells of our bodies were as sentient as we are, they would begin their lives as we do.  Their world would seem to lie before them like a land of dreams, beautiful and new.  But soon they’d learn, as we do, that it has no love for them, nor help for their pain.

We all live in pain because whatever we think we want isn't what we really want.  We seek what we think we want in this world of illusions, and are disappointed if and when we find it.

We begin our lives wanting to love and be loved, but sooner or later we’re disappointed, and end up wanting power instead; the power to take from the world what it won't give us.

I know they’re as disappointed as I am, even more than I am.  But I no longer care.