Whatever we see human beings doing must be included in our definition of human nature. Since we do not believe that people actually get inhabited by devils, when we see people acting devilish we are witnessing human nature. Since we do not believe that there are muses hiding behind vases and coffee pots, when we see people creating we are witnessing human nature. Human beings kill, create, sing, rant, trip one another, and pick one another up. This makes for one strange creature.
You have to chuckle at the idea of a god creating this sort of creature. If you want to go down some occult road, it makes much better sense to posit gods than a god: don’t we seem made by a committee whose main feature is a failure to communicate? One god adds the cannibal touch. Another god adds the brilliance necessary to come up with general relativity. A third god wantonly tosses in a sex drive that disrupts everything. A fourth god … well, you get the idea. No coherent god would have made us this way. Only a bedlam of gods working at cross purposes would.
A philosophy of life must take this riotous human nature into account. You can’t understand why Trump is adored by so many millions by saying “Oh, his minions are just racist” or “Oh, his followers just think he’s good for business.” Ah, the mischief goes much deeper than that.
And if your philosophy of life doesn’t credit that reality, that millions of your fellow-creatures are very deep into the woods, you will not protect yourself well enough or make good enough sense of the spectacle of history. Witch hunts. Pogroms. Slavery. Killing fields. Civil wars. Leave all that out of your philosophy of life and you are left with fantasy.
Does Christianity do a wonderful job of honoring how strange, sinister, sweet, sour, and singular human beings are? Of course not. Does Judaism? Does Islam? Does Buddhism? Does Hinduism? Does Taoism? Nope. None start from the person. Each starts somewhere else, with cosmology myths, with fables, with homilies, with wonderful fantasies. None start with the person and so each is false right from the start. Imagine a philosophy of life that does not start with, “Look, here’s who we are.” It would immediately take off on the wrong foot.
In kirism, we look man in the eye. Many folks are sad today because they had secretly banked on an upgraded human nature that does not exist. They had banked on ideas like progress, conscience, humanism, and civilization. Now they see what they knew all along, that human nature can make a delicious soup and poison a well, can play the violin and break somebody’s leg—and, preposterously, do all of that in one-and-the-same person. Millions are in despair because human nature has once again revealed itself. But we have known this forever. Nothing is new. So, why despair? Live instead!
Live, upholding the best and denouncing the worst. You will never, ever, ever eradicate the monster in human nature. Forget about it!
So, live under threat, but live. These times have sapped our motivation and our confidence by presenting us with too clear a picture of human nature. But that picture was always clear.
We just hid it behind those other pictures, of summer picnics and self-defrosting refrigerators. Seeing it again, we can sink to our knees or we can live. Which will it be?
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Eric Maisel is the author of 50+ books. You can learn more about him at www.ericmaisel.com, subscribe to all of his blog posts at https://authory.com/ericmaisel, learn more about kirism here, and write him at [email protected]
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