Reality, Stupidity, Hypocrisy And Humanity by Santosh Jha (read any book txt) 📕

out of this contemporary liberal and consumerist meme that ‘I Know and I Know it Right as it is Visceral to Me’. This seemingly embedded over-egoism of ‘I’ and its avowed ‘super-hero’ imagery has fueled this penchant for all things visceral.

This populist perception to validate all shades of desires and wants of our instinctive urges and drives however is only a very personalized value, which has become a meme but has no roots in logic and objective prudence. Interestingly mystical seems the realism that what happens to us, felt obviously by its deep-seated ‘desire-drive’, is more believable and acceptable than some distant and ‘external’ prudence of objective logic.

But then, scientists warn that most human drives or instincts are without conscience. They do not care about long-range effects. It seeks only immediate personal gratification as to most of us, feeling one’s own desires is the easiest thing and many believe – All good things need to be simple.

Modern knowledge of brain realism also accepts that consciousness is very localized. It instinctively being a reactive mode facility cares for only short term utility and worth. And as deciphering one’s personal desires and gratification needs are the easiest wisdom, most of us fall for this utility of ‘intelligence’.

However, visceral drives and their utility apart, what singular objective logic says is –

‘If conscience exists, it exists in the intellect of the human, not always in instincts. To be human is to allow the intellect to preside over the utility and worth of every important action-behavior over the dimensions of time, space, people and processes. It is this necessary intellectual control of the instincts which makes a culture successful.’ Interestingly, intellect is also an evolved and holistic element of nothing else but instincts itself. If viscerality creates stupidities, viscerality itself has the wherewithal to decipher and discount all stupidities!

Globally, there are studies and researches going on, which are looking into the dynamics of individual drives and social viability and they see clear trends. We see contemporary cultures in loads of drift and flux because majority of people are behaving true to their instincts (Visceral Wisdom), without much intellectual control and conscience.

Interestingly, even though this intellectual self control is a learned function and is called self-discipline, to over-ride less desirable instinctive behavior, the very seed of this need for self-control is deeply wired in our instincts itself. The guilt or remorse or even this ephemeral ‘second-thought’ that often follows instant-self-gratification is also instinctive and visceral. We seldom accept it this way.

That is why in most advanced contemporary cultures, where liberalism has unleashed uncontrolled instinctive drives of humanity, sans any intellectual self-control, the governments of the day have to spend huge moneys on police, jails and other emergency measures. Most modern cultures are failed cultures as the level of self-control in people in personal and societal spheres are very little and diminishing fast. The element of self-regulation and self-discipline, in the domain of ‘collective unconscious’; is gradually going down. The best possible example of the eroded self-regulation and self-discipline is the language of men and women, which is brute, growingly devoid of the sanity of expression, sexually loaded and off specificity of intent by miles. The growing detachment of languages from the co-existential respectability of ‘Others’ is remarkably perceptible.

One such powerful instinctive drive of humanity, which has shattered most modern liberal cultures, because of ever reducing intellectual self-control is Sex. This over-encompassing sex drive has lost its evolutionary role way back and it surely looks like an obstructive vestige of the obsolete evolution. Still, it dominates the human thinking and worldview in biggest possible way, overriding even survival sanity.

There is a ‘Be Yourself’ mantra of instinctive viscerality, which believes, food and sex are two primary instincts of humans and every human by very virtue of being alive and in possession of these two primary drives, knows what his or her best choice about food and sex is. This is some stupidity and hypocrisy humanity has to unlearn fast but only a handful actually admit anything ‘misplaced’ about contemporary human practices about food and sex. This must be understood clearly.

The utility of food is for ‘health’ not ‘taste’ or gratification. Human drive for food is designed to live, sustain and survive. This drive evolution probably linked to taste buds for survival excellence, not mindless over-eating. Few million years back, when human design was being shaped, food was not available as it is to a young man or woman. In contemporary world, where obesity and food habit related diseases are crippling humanity, every rational human being knows that the food we have available in markets and eateries are not meant for health but taste and therefore, majority of humans are actually eating completely against the ‘body-mind’ instinctive design. Human food habits in contemporary world are as corrupted and against visceral sanity as sex. We are not even willing to understand our own drives and instincts.

Sex too has similar destiny in modern times like food. Similar to human need of food for health and survival, they need ‘intimacy’ too for health and survival. Science has proved it beyond doubt that all men and women need to be in good intimacies for ideal homeostasis. The human drive, like food is not for sex but intimacy, sex being just a small ‘part’ of the holism of intimacy. A man or woman shall keep changing sex partners if he or she fails to find ‘intimacy’ in relationship. However, deep and poised intimacy shall make sex a bonding factor, as the evolution designed.

As is the sad reality of contemporary humanity, men and women shall experiment with loads of varieties of food but as these foods shall not fulfill the health and homeostatic requirements of human body, they shall never feel happy and satisfied. Food indulgence, gratification and over-eating shall be unending and happiness, satisfaction and wellness shall remain missing. Same with sex. Sex indulgence, gratification and promiscuity shall be unending for men and women yet, as true intimacy shall remain elusive, satisfaction, happiness and wellness shall remain missing. This stupidity and hypocrisy however remains unaccepted. Viscerality is blind to the real and true nature and role of the drives and instincts and humanity shall keep suffering.

One needs to understand sexuality in details. Evolution, at one point of time, many millions years back, switched from non-sexual reproductive procedures to sexual one as it had definitive benefits for species survival and genetic excellence. Evolution embedded sexual drive in neural wirings to ensure that human excelled over other species. This evolution then created gender roles and suitable physiological as well as neural differences were created in males and females. This scheme of things required that men always looked for sex and women used sex as selection tool for best mating option. This scheme itself was a continuation of a successful survival mechanism in other higher organisms, before human evolution.

Things have changed in modern cultures. Evolution’s game plan is no more valid and no more required as traditional gender roles have changed and in liberal cultural scenario, sex has lost its old and tested evolutionary purpose; for both men and women. Moreover, in modern living, humanity does not have the old challenges of survival and species proliferation, as we are many times more in numbers on this planet and have managed to live quite long.

We do not need to go into details as everyone knows, how modern cultures have placed sex in a rather demeaning and diminutive imagery as fun thing, thrill-tool, boredom-buster, just time-pass activity, even a dangerous tool for many shades of psychosis, rather than a reproductive tool. The evolutionary idealism of intimacy being the ‘holism’ of the drive, with sex just being a small ‘part’ is not even mentioned, let alone practicing it.

In modern civilization, where success of cultures depends on how intellectual self-control is exercised over instinctive drives, just the inverse is happening. Sex was once an instinctive drive, designed for species needs millions of years back. Now that modern human life-living situation and overall cultural advancement has made those needs obsolete, what we need is intellectual self-control over this powerful sex drive, which has lost its primitive usage but still rules our subconscious choices. This stupidity, wired in our design must end and for that we need to accept sex in a totally different light and perspective. The design sure cannot be changed yet there can be a profitable cognitive change in the way humanity handles it.

Though, it is a long and complicated scientific explanation as how our brains have been designed in long years of evolution; we just have to know and accept that unlike other human organs, human brain is not a single organ. It is rather a cooperative of many parts, evolved during different times of evolution, with each part being an addition to the old one, not a replacement.

Therefore, what we need to accept is that our brain is not doing this favor of intellectual discretion to us. It still has the primitive brain, over which the new parts have piled up. That is why our brain still has the primitive instincts and drives. It also has modern logical parts but brain is not doing any automatic pruning for us. We have to exercise learnt and nurtured intellectual control over our instincts. Both instincts and intellect are part of our brain mechanism but this self-control thing works well only when we have evolved a higher consciousness.

Contemporary humanity needs to see and accept that this modern-day wisdom of ‘Be Yourself’ visceral ideology is a qualified wisdom. Just being yourself or blindly following what our instincts leads us to is stupidity. True meaning of ‘Be Yourself’ is seeing, understanding and accepting the drives and instincts through a tough and objective process of ‘self-actualization’ and ‘self-dialogue’ and then install intellectual self-control over all our visceral desires. Skepticism of ‘self’ and innate utility of its evolutionary design is what catalyzes this process. This surely doesn’t come by the virtue of being alive and in possession of drives. It is a learnt behavior, acquired through a tough process of eligibility of self.

As ancient spiritual traditions as well modern science has been telling us – ‘What we seek is what we want and all that we want is not what we need.’ There is this fine-line between what we ‘want’ and what we actually ‘need’. This is the prudence of evolving and maturing as a human being. Our visceral self shall always lead us to our primary drives of 3Ps – Possession, Preservation and Perpetuation. These drives are wired intelligence, so that we all survive and excel. However, our drives are value-neutral and very localized. In collective modern living, we cannot solely rely on our drives and justify it by professing to ‘Be Yourself’ viscerality. We need to apply intellectual self-control to prune our old and obsolete vestiges of drives.

There was an interesting survey in USA, where a group of people were asked whether they would accept $100 right then or forego it to get $500 after six months. Study found that overwhelming majority of people accepted only $100, not bothering to wait for six months in anticipation of better gains. This is some viscerality, which we need to unlearn. Be Yourself drives and instincts can be good, but not always and not in all situations. The visceral consciousness is designed for localized and short-term perception but, in modern life-living, this needs to be unlearnt. Our drives were created when humans lived in precarious life-living milieus. We now live in reasonably settled and structured milieus with complexities. That is why, we cannot and should not rely blindly on such old and obsolete drives, which have lost their utility and worth in modern milieus.

Instinctive behaviors are auto-mode, intellectual initiatives are not; they are conscious and valued choices after holistic judgment process. Therefore, the intellectual self-control needs to be inculcated and persevered through conscious practice. This presupposes quality time with self. Contemporary life-living of constant drift and flux drowns us in auto-mode reactive decision-making, conditioned by our