The Savage Beast

We are complex, we human animals. The range of human emotions occupies a wide stream, wider than the Nile or the Mississippi on a rampage. Perhaps it matches the Amazon at flood tide. From the ultimate of self-sacrifice for what we believe in to the ultimate in cruelty and hate for what we believe in, there appears to be no limit to what the human animal, his animal part, is capable of.

Surely all of us have felt these waves of emotion coursing through our veins? Overwhelming love for another person or a cause can render us almost senseless, making the heart race, the limbs tremble. Anticipation can make us stop in our tracks, seeking to hold on to something solid for fear of falling over. Imagine our rage when our path to the realization of our dreams is blocked and we feel totally impotent?

What if that rage is stored away, husbanded for expression on another day? What if that rage over the experience of impotence is retained within the psyche of a person who attains power? What if such a person knows how to rouse that rage that exists in all of us, and learns how to harness it, and add the power of numbers. Then he can achieve things on a scale he would not be able to do alone? How many men do we know of who have done that?

We have history to attest to the capacity of humans to harbor rage against others in their search for conquest and  possessions. It seems sometimes that human history is the story of one wave after another, one group after another, making war for this purpose. The seventy years of relative peace we have had during our lifetimes is some kind of anomaly. The dogs of war can be unleashed at any moment. Witness the recent actions of Russia and the re-arming of NATO in response.

Can we forget the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, a war of conquest and one of ideology? Indeed, ideology is often the mask that the drive for the possessions of others wears. Putin talks of strategic vulnerability of his homeland, citing past assaults. Iran speaks the Deity’s imperative that the whole world worship a supreme being in the Shiite form. The Chinese leader trumpets unification of the Chinese peoples, compensation for past insults, and the triumph of the Chinese economy.

The power of religious ideas like those of Christianity and Islam, and their thirst for adherents, the drive for empire by the Greeks and Romans, and the ancient world’s ravages by Assyria and the Mongols, in the end it was all about the victor gaining the spoils of war. The beast in human nature was in full display and the carnage included the incalculable loss of human lives. 

Along with centuries of advancement in the technology that has improved our lives, has come our capacity to end life on this planet. We are now in a race between two elements of human nature, the instinct to survive and the savage beast within us seeking power and possessions at any cost to others. Shall we choose the savage beast wearing a mask promising blessings for all the chosen but catering to our baser instincts? Or shall we choose the leader offering only hard choices that may lead to survival and better lives for most of us?

Which one are we most likely to choose?

Is this the kind of story that people want to hear?

                    


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