When we explore animal populations living in their natural environments, one of the most striking differences between them and the western human being is that chronic and degenerative ‘diseases’ do not flourish in them as they do in us. We see this difference in the frequency of chronic and degenerative ‘disease’ also in the few human populations that are still living in the natural habitats that have supported them for thousands of years.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO LIVE A HEALTHY LIFE, LOOK INTO NATURE
In fact the only time that we see chronic and degenerative ‘diseases’ proliferating within these two ‘wild’ populations to the same levels that we see in the western world today is when they are brought into domestication. In the domestication of animals we see all the same chronic and degenerative illnesses that plague humans, both physiological and psychological. It is in fact one of the most horrific and troubling phenomena to witness a once wild and now domesticated animal suffer the ranges and depth of psychological illness that humans experience under states of extreme stress. But our conclusion must therefore be the acceptance that the western human being has become an extremely domesticated species and we are in turn now suffering the mental, emotional and physical strains that such domesticity inevitably brings.
HUMAN V’S ANIMALS
This juxtaposition between the relative health of wild animals over domesticated human populations is rather ironic due to the fact that it has been a long-standing claim by scientists over the centuries that our superiority and mastery over the natural world around us is due to the natural worlds lack of intelligence compared to us humans. This is of course stated as if we humans were somehow separate to the natural world around us and that our intelligence was birthed out of a non-intelligent universe. Some of us may see this claim of intellectual superiority to be rather egocentric, but then of course humanity is famous for its egocentricity both on an individual level and as a species.
Now it does appear from a certain level of magnification that the human being is superior to the animal kingdom at least in a certain type of intellectualisation. For example no other animal has been known to build a tool anywhere near the complexity of the computer – the animals that do use tools, as we commonly think of them, a limited it seems to hammer-stones and pokers, although this use of tools by animals is a very recent discovery of scientists. The fact that I am currently writing this manuscript on a laptop is a credit to the intellectualisation of humans and for that I am very grateful, however we must begin to acknowledge that every intellectual development we create births a dualistic pair.
This fact is becoming more and more obvious by the day as we continue to hear about the environmental decline of our habitat due directly to our exploitation of the natural resources of the planet. It has become accepted in fact that it is precisely the superior intellectualisation of humans that appears to be destroying that which we rely on to survive. And in exactly the same way our own intellectual desire to make life ‘easier’ for ourselves and to achieve instant sensual gratification has led to the current western health crisis.
So what kind of intelligence is that? What it appears to be is at best a failure of foresight and of understanding the natural principles to which we a bound, and at worst simply a rather complicated way of committing suicide. Either way, it is difficult now to claim an absolute intellectual superiority over the animal and plant kingdom of the planet, but only that we appear to have developed a unique style of thinking and conceiving the world – one that is both a great gift, and possibly our undoing.