Love is a many splendored thing
as precious as a diamond ring.
Mummy polar bear and cubs,
sweetly embrace with calmness and grace
a fine example to the Human race! ... Misha
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But it’s not only the giggle. Don’t go thinking you have got an excuse. The human race might be clever and bright and brilliant. It’s also savage and venal and relentless. All the anger out there on the street. The lies, the righteousness. Thats human. That’s you. That’s who you are. Using your intelligence to be stupid. Poisoning the world. And hating each other, you’ve never needed any help with that!
- The Doctor
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If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays, 1890
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"To embrace humanism is to embrace the concept that caring for our fellow human beings is our highest calling."
-- Sean Faircloth
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It's so interesting to me how obsessed we are, as a species, with Missing Person cases. Someone gets lost in the woods or stuck in a cave and a few days later it's national news, with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on rescue attempts. I don't need to list any examples, I'm sure you can think of your own, that's how prevalent they are. The failed rescues are talked about for decades in podcasts and video essays, and the successful ones turn into blockbuster movies.
I think it makes sense. There's a very tangible and relatable horror to being lost and alone. It's ingrained in us, it's perhaps the most primitive fear: "Dying Alone in the Wilderness". We spend so many resources saving these people because we want to believe others would do the same for us were we to meet the same fate. That fear is universally relatable, one of the only things that can unite us as humans.
I'm not implying we shouldn't spend those resources, we obviously shouldn't just abandon people to the elements because it'd take too much effort to find them.
But I think it really highlights some of our most deeply set biases. It highlights how even as an "advanced" species, our base fear of Nature overwhelms us, causing us to appear as hypocrites.
What I mean is, why do we send hundreds of people to search for someone if they're lost in the woods, but if someone is lost in a city, with nowhere to go, they're often just cast aside, labeled homeless, and left to die alone under a bridge. Where are their rescue crews? Their national news coverage? Why is a life lost in the wild more valuable than a life lost in suburbia?
It's easily, tragically, explained. That kind of death isn't as relatable. We have no primitive monkey-brain fear of being abandoned in a city, we made those wilds ourselves. It's easier to rationalize, easier to dismiss. You have to consciously consider how terrible it would be to die alone in a city, it takes a moment of effort; it's not a pre-programmed fear.
I don't think it's actually as binary of a difference as I'm making it out to be, there are obviously more factors at play. For example, many homeless people are not really in contact with anyone, they can go missing and there's just nobody there to raise an alarm. It's tragic, but you can't blame innate human biases. I think the real indicator here isn't the lack of help we offer these urban cases, but how seriously we dedicate ourselves to the wild ones.
Idk, it's just interesting to me how we like to pretend we're an advanced species, how we're above our base instincts, beings of intellect and cognizance, but every so often you can look at us as a collective and point out where the monkey brain takes control.
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He realized that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race.
"The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" - C. S. Lewis
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Some of them ain't gonna make it 🙄
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I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.
J.G. Ballard
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