What makes someone human?

The Power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.

There are two kinds of men who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else.

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

The good devout man first makes inner preparation for the actions he has later to perform. His outward actions do not draw him into lust and vice; rather it is he who bends them into the shape of reason and right judgement. Who has a stiffer battle to fight than the man who is striving to conquer himself.

Men of strong minds and who think for themselves, should not be discouraged on finding occasionally that some of their best ideas have been anticipated by former writers; they will neither anathematize others nor despair themselves. They will rather go on discovering things before discovered, until they are rewarded with a land hitherto unknown, an empire indisputably their own, both right of conquest and of discovery.

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.


I'm not talking about what makes us Homo Sapiens as a species. That's a fairly easy question to answer. I'm talking more about what makes a man a man, what makes someone their own person. Obviously, I am very well qualified to speak about this. I am 16, I read a time article, and I'm a week in to a Sociology class. I have alot of experience in this. Obviously.

Alright, anyway. I've got a theory. You're born, and while you have SOME semblence of a personality(Y'know, genetics and shit.) alot of it is based on upbringing. But that's not my theory, that's pretty much a fact. My theory is that we're born as very confident, very strong, very loving, very intelligent. We have all the good qualities, and it's more up to the parents to keep the child from forgetting these things about themselves, then actually giving them these qualities.

Of course, there are the fringes. Those who are brilliant, and geniuses, I'm talking about those 5 people who are ridicuously smart, and who I feel sorry for. Those who, for whatever reason, have some genetic defect that causes whatever thing. Mental retardation, etc. There's also the sociopaths and the pathlogical fringe, but I don't think anyone understands why they are what they are. I don't think you can get that effect from plain bad enviorment.

Anyway, back to my main point. If people are born with all these awesome qualities, what happens? Because, I think, we can agree, there's too many people who are...questionable. I mean, come on, "hey wazzup guys how r u, lyk rly?" isn't exactly giving me more faith in humanity. And there's enough wars, and murders, and thefts and crimes that it appears something has gone wrong. And I also don't think that there's alot of parents sitting there are night going "I bet I can make my kids stupid, and shallow...If I only knew how." But it appears to happen anyway, on a pretty wide scale.

I suppose you could blame some of it on just bad parenting. They can't be around as often as they should, because of jobs. And there's like a 50% divorce rate, so maybe that's not good either. Though I think I turned out fine. But I don't think it's a good thing either. Just a point. Society could be it. I mean, getting influenced by MTV, and allll that. You want a rounded off experience, but watching Jackass every day probably isn't boosting your intellectual capability all that well.

I don't know. I sometimes wonder if we were better off in the past. I kinda hope that someone would go all Fight Club and bring us all back in to an age where we had none of this shit. As they say somewhere in that movie, I think, hunting deer around the ivy covered Empire State building. I mean, sure, there's no vaccines, there's no computers, there's no TV, there's no Pacemakers. But for all that, what have we also made? Nuclear weapons, a shitload of guns, tanks, aircraft carriers. God knows, it's not the equipments fault, and having stuff like that is pretty cool. But it has still has the ability to destroy our world like 400 times over. That's a very very small margin of error. I mean, people got murdered, and there was war way back when. But did 50 million die over the course of something like 6 years? No. Less of a population, I suppose, but there was no...feeling that we would wipe out our entire race.

And then, perhaps we might have been better off, spiritually, emotionally, whatever. I mean, is sitting in a cubicle(Yeah, I'm aware that not everyone sits in a cubicle, but tell me how many people just LOVE working.) better than hunting mammoths in an outfit made out of skins, and wearing wood skinshoes, using a spear you made out of a tree with a stone knife? It just seems somehow perferrable to me. Maybe it's just some nostalgia, but whatever. I just think that somewhere, we went wrong. And that people aren't really being people anymore. We're capable of too many things, like murdering 7 million Jewish and other ethnicities, or causing the starvation of 300 thousand in ONE country. Too obdient. We rely too much on others. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wonder if we were capable of that 2000, 5000, 10,000, 30,000 years ago. Maybe we were. But maybe it was less of a percantage. I just think that somehow, we're losing our humanity in favor of other things. Of easier things.

Yup. That's all.