Musings on Human Nature

Every living being on this planet shares a survival instinct, refined and reformed over millennia by Darwinian evolution. Each plant and animal engages in a variety of functions which are aimed at survival for its particular species. The singular purpose of every organism is to reproduce, and thus to ensure species survival. A chicken’s only evolutionary goal is to produce as many eggs as possible, and to give them the best chance to survive until they too can procreate. Understood through this framework, it is simple to look at any animal’s physical characteristics or behavior and realize that it is all driven by this evolutionary mechanism of nature, which we will term the survival drive.

Each individual member of their species is merely acting out of evolutionary impulse to further his personal drive to procreate. This survival drive is composed of natural tendencies, of engaging in actions based on the laws of nature. All living things have this drive, and it is a particular drive, composed only of moments of necessity in time. Thus the senses are a product of this drive, as they are each organism’s individual mechanism for physically navigating through the world. This drive then depends on the individual, and the specific place and time in which he is doing the experiencing. Despite this dependence on the individual to physically navigate nature, it is important to realize that in the sense of having meaning, there is nothing at all different between every living plant and animal on this planet, as each one has emerged as it has in its specific time and place out of a long series of evolutionary choices made by the survival drive, and its particular manifestation is unimportant. Despite its particular manifestation as an individual organism, it has no claim to individual importance, being merely a set of impulses and instincts.

At some point in the distant past, however, which contemporary research suggests was about 200,000 years ago in Africa, there emerged a new species. This was a species unlike any other. It certainly contained the survival drive, as it was a living thing, and thus its members often behaved in a fashion which was fitting with that concept, attempting to procreate and further their species. However, it had the unique ability of self-realization, with which an individual member of this species could look upon their actions and consciously recognize the heavy hand of the survival drive as a compulsive force. While we may never know who made that first revolutionary realization, we can imagine a situation where a primitive man looks upon his actions, suddenly realizes that he had been engaging in them out of a compulsion, and begins the eternal struggle to resist the survival drive’s hitherto unchallenged rule over the actions of all. This capacity of resistance is what makes man unique in the cosmos. Having been fitted with self-realization by the process of evolution, he can now resist the compulsion of nature, and seek to make decisions based on concepts of knowledge, to advance a concept of morality and ethics, of the eternal and unchanging. This ability we call his rational drive.

Here it is important to note that we can never fully escape nature, nor would that escape be desirable. We, as human beings, cannot fully conquer our survival drive, as that would be synonymous with saying we are no longer physical beings. Clearly, we will always exist as physical beings within nature. Thus, while we may, through the utilization of our rational drive, make specific decisions based on our concept of the good, instead of in our self-interest, we can never fully escape our predilection for acting in our own self-interest.

We must now consider what that means, and to explore more fully how this interacts with our rational drive. This drives finds truths across space and time, which are eternal regardless of the individual experiencing them, and the specific time and place in which he is doing the experiencing. Perhaps man can exist without this drive, but he will do so at the expense of his humanity. If man becomes only a product of his survival drive, he ceases to exist as a human being with content, and becomes merely an instinctual force, driven on by his natural tendencies, simply reacting to each situation as it arises, following his feelings, much as any other organism within nature. Conversely, if man becomes only a product of his rational drive, he ceases to exist as an individual, and thus has no form, but is merely an automaton existing outside of time, with no individual identity (an impossibility, or at least outside of our conception).

Our unique human condition is thus found in the interaction between our survival drive and our rational drive, and the way this manifests itself within us. This also makes each individual unique and sacred, as through self-realization one can escape being merely a cog in nature’s complex system, and become a being which has the capacity to make decisions opposed to the designs of nature. Thus, while we always exist as specific instances in space-time, we also have the ability to connect these instances with unchanging eternity, and concepts which are valid regardless of their specific manifestation in the physical world. This is how we contact ethics and a sense of acting for the good, not simply for the pleasurable or for sensory satisfaction. Humanity, then, always has the compulsion of the survival drive, but can only sometimes act in according to the tenets of the rational drive. Having established this framework, we will go through a brief overview of human history, in order to explore how these two drives have manifested themselves throughout history, and to gain a better understanding of how to build a good political community.