Mans biggest fear

What separates man from animal is that man has got an intellect.

It could also be the way that man choose to use his or her intellect against themselves.

How do you create war? You set some criteria for what matters, and then you decide that everyone who thinks differently is on the other side, and so must be killed. It doesn't really matter if it's about sharing the water of a river or having different perspectives on what happens when you die. (When it comes to having different takes on afterlife, killing others in war because of different opinions can be considered a particularly paradoxical activity, since nobody will be around to tell who won.) In this case, though, the men who make the decisions rarely fight in the war, and so their decisions do not inflict any personal damage.

On a more personal level, we have something called anxiety, angst. It comes in many forms, but is always carried out by the individual. It wasn't until having lived with severe angst through many years, that I suddenly realized the problem is not angst itself, but the capability of creating chains of thought long enough to make one feel insufficient. Some people would boil this down to having too much time to think. In that case, getting a hair cut and a job might solve the problem. But I would like to explore this further than that. What is it that drives us towards hurting ourselves with our intellect?

Decisions

I miss my grandmother. My grandmother always knew what was right. No doubt, just bam, here you go. 

Like a really fast sorting machine.

Care or Career

Once I wrote an essay about the correlation between being poor, economically or socially, during upbringing and the tendency to feel responsibility for the environment later in life. The material was in itself too poor for me to make any conclusions and the essay didn’t pass the scrutinising eye of the nature science teacher that was supposed to give me the thumbs up. But – I still thought it made a good point, namely that among the people I interviewed, there was a feeling of responsibility for the environment, that the more fortunate didn’t acknowledge. Although it’s not up to me to judge the individual hell of every person (no doubt we all have our own), let’s pretend there is a division between us for now.

So, take a closer look at these people that so fervently fight for the rights of the environment, the human rights and the generations to come. What else do they have in common?

I don’t know much about other generations; I had a job at a place where the environment was in focus, and I didn’t understand at all where they were coming from. Flying everywhere, printing papers en masse, talking behind each others backs, constantly competing for affirmation of their work and being devoted to the old fashioned phenomena of hierarchy – how they execute their business doesn’t follow my thesis at all. But, hey, they weren’t all bad and there might be loads I don’t understand about governmental institutions. Point being, I felt lost being there, because I had expected them to be different than they turned out to be. Alas, don’t take my thinking too seriously; I don’t have any scientific support for it.

There are also those who have discovered the environment coming up on the agenda as a career opportunity. You can now pursue an exam in environmental studies like you used to do with, say, economy studies. There is no need for you to like it, or put your heart in it. Complete it, be a good student, and you can get a job with a big income. Start your own firm, call it something with “green” and it doesn’t really matter how good or bad you are at what you are supposed to be doing, because all your clients will be in such a desperate need of your services, they won’t bother checking how serious you are as long as they get some kind of certificate in the end. That’s nice, provided you are not the environment, a people in great need or among the generations to come.

So, what about those who actually care, who have a fire burning within them?