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Edited on Sun Apr-25-04 02:40 AM by kgfnally
Our intellect is the natural balance to our instinct. Prior to us, there was only instinct. Self-awareness was a major leap, and we don't know how it happened, else we would already have or know how to create true artificial intelligence.
We can overcome our violent instincts, just as we overcome our other instincts. One of the most basic of these is the need to urinate. Animals do it wherever in general; some in a specific place for a time and others (like birds) wherever, whenever. Humans, however, 'hold it'; we use a socially agreed place and partition ourselves while we expose our organs. When put that way, stalls seem a bit silly.
Nonetheless, we continue to resist our instinctive reactions, be they to our detriment or our benefit. I'm thinking of two cases in my own life.
The first was when I met a man who ended up being very dishonest. I did what was right and gave him a chance as a friend, but in the end he deceived me and stole away the objects I am now left with only memories of. And this from a person I had opened my home to for a time.
I instinctively knew it was a bad idea, and yet I let him stay there. I resisted my instinct because I knew his circumstances, which were real and visible, and it was to my detriment. In the end, I knew it was all lies.
Another time, when I was much younger, my father was walking down the street with me after a very heavy ice storm. The storm was the worst fall of ice I've ever seen in one evening.
The storm is on record; it was the night of New Year's Eve, 1984-1985. Southwest Michigan experienced an amazing amount of ice. Many, many thousands of people were without power for weeks because it was so damn dangerous to do anything about it until the ice melted.
We were walking down our street admiring the incredible beauty of the ice covering every object in sight in the morning light. I can't begin to describe it.
I didn't hear a sound, but I was looking at the morning sun to the right. Since I wasn't looking up, I wasn't aware of all the big limbs above us. I really should have thought of that, in retrospect, but I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life (and I mean that. If you've never seen it, when you do, it renders you speechless. Really.), and so I wasn't paying attention to much but the play of the light through the ice and the utter quiet of everything around us. I did hear limbs groaning, but continued walking.
My father slammed his hand down on my shoulder and pulled me back. From nowhere a limb the length of a mobile home and well over a foot thick crashed to the ground not thirty-five feet in front of us.
My father's instinct was to protect his child- me. If we had kept walking, we might have gotten hit with something. If we had move faster from the beginning, and had my father been fearlessly reckless rather than fearfully cautious, we could have been killed. In that case, obeying instinct (ice covering everything = Bad Thing, Stay Home) was the correct thing to do.
We can overcome our instincts to destroy ourselves. We simply need to use our heads in a way that balances our hearts.
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