Well, before human society, as you have all heard and thought about in the first chapters of your history and biology classes, perhaps, animals have been playing a game. This game, as you well know, is called evolution, survival of the fittest, natural selection, etc. Essentially, we all fought each other for resources, our abilities to survive clashed, favorable traits were selected for through their trials in the face of normal routines of hunting and existing or sudden devastating natural disasters. As you would think, watching your National Geographic programs, this life was and is barbaric, grueling, and appeals to our baser instincts. Our species died, a lot. A lot of people in this terrifying rogue-like MMO, without medicine or phoenix downs, were left bereft of life by earth, wind, fire, water, and beast, changed into feces and fertilizer.
As participants in the society we have today, we receive this information with a figurative deep sigh of relief. Why? Because we're past that! We're safe in our developed cities filled with law enforcement and beast-chewing highways! Yup! Humanity's as connected as ever with the internet and a sense of warm community!
...In reality, the game of evolution hasn't gone anywhere. We're just in a different league now.
Let me ask you, what's the difference between spearing a buffalo in the wild and taking some aptitude test that colleges will pay attention to? performing well at your job day after day? Well, admittedly a bucketful of innards to be cleaned out of the beast, but otherwise, nothing. You are fighting to prolong your life in both cases. You miss the buffalo, you either starve or die. You fail the aptitude test, you suffer a slow death, emotionally and possibly physically. You cannot provide for yourself easily and so sink into depression and hunger. You may possess life, but it is debatable whether you are really alive.
What this realization has done to my conception of society is made me realize further that our existences here are a sort of ultimatum. It's sad, because society promises community, a warm connection between you and your fellow human beings. You do agree its sad, don't you? Because, what this amounts to really, is, "make us enough money so you can collect your share and keep on surviving long enough to do more for us." Rampant capitalism has turned much of the view of a human being from a fellow human that one can connect with on the deepest levels to essentially a beast of burden, a cog. And within this evolutionary game, if one cog works better than another, the latter is trashed. And the standards only raise higher and higher...
Pictured (for Mass Effect players): the Human Race
Now what am I calling for here in lieu of the system I have described? Well, I'm not entirely sure myself. I simply think that this deserves some thought, as it's a pretty terrible irony. I don't think that every human should be babied to the point that it resembles the right-wing stereotype of socialism, yet I think that the current way things work severely devalues the human and does not engender any form of true community. It is not unlike the Christian doctrine of original sin, in which one is born with a debt on one's head. It's not fair and it expresses clearly that this society does not value the individual, only his industry.
True community amongst human beings only arises, I say, out of recognition and true sympathy and compassion and love between one fully realized human being and another (or those who are on the road to becoming such). Something must be addressed here, or at least there should be a place for those who don't wish to participate in this quasi-family of humanity, searching instead for the real one.
