On Similarity of Human Nature

There is a difficult question, which hasn’t been asked enough. As you’d expect, the answer isn’t any easier than the question. First, I need to look some things behind this question, the context of the whole problem as I see it.

We are humans, all of us: no matter the color of your skin, size of your nose (a fact which late Michael Jackson seemed to dismiss), the amount of fat around your stomach, quantity of arms and legs, size of your shoes, your nationality, your religion et cetera – humans, all of us. Still, if there are these several rather massive differences between us, what binds us together? Our collective DNA? Culture, perhaps?

No and yes.

Still carrying on with this point I’m trying to make: if there’s something that binds us together, it would have to be universal (by definition), something to do with all humans across the Globe from infants to elders. As mentioned, this thing wouldn’t be any physical (ab)normality, nor would it be cultural standard (universal moral values, ethics etc.) since I, as a relativist, don’t believe in such things (f.e. Plato's Forms is just plain stupid theory). What is there left, then?

 Emotions, feelings, my dear friend. Laughter is a universal sign of joy and happiness; joy and happiness both occurring (in one way or the other, varying from culture to culture and from individual to individual, but still basically in similar ways) universally among human species. Sadness is also universal; same as love/affection and hate/anger not to mention all the other feelings that are more or less similar across the space-time-continuum.

However, I see all the feelings listed above to be “only” versions of something more primal, some feeling that lurks deeper in us all: survival. “But survival isn’t an emotion”, you are screaming, and you’re right. Survival is an instinct constructed by several different feelings, but without this construction the whole species would die eventually. That’s some natural selection for you.

I see survival as an construction built on two basic (proto-)feelings: lust (not to be confused with love) and fear. Without lust the race would die fairly quickly; without fear for your or your loved-ones' well-being the race would die. That’s more than you can say about sadness or anger – and to me that makes them more primal, more important for the species overall. Thus these feelings are more universal, occurring in human interaction more similarly than some other universal feelings listed above.

Out of these two, which is more important? Before giving you my answer I’d like to stress out that – as mentioned – they both are extremely important and in my answer I’m not trying to dismiss either of these factors, but rather underline the importance of the “arch-feeling” of choice.

To me, a horror-fiction writer, the answer seems clear. No matter what the perspective is – sociological, historical, fictional, anthropological or biological, scientific or religious – fear unites us, every single one of us.

I would argue that every single human being can be made scared under clinical (perhaps a poor choice of word, but what I'm after is ”scientifically” similar conditions) and similar factors – fear factors, if you will. Self-preservation (in other words, primal fear for the preservation of individual's race/family/life/etc.) can be triggered by factors which are much more universal than factors triggering the will for the expansion of genetic pool (in other words, lust).

Here is a hypothetical situation: Someone is chasing you with a hammer (or other weapon of choice), and if this anonymous bogey-man catches you, he will kill you. I’d be scared shitless, pardon my French madam. If we add also dark woods, full moon, starless sky, owls, thrilling music and other horror-clichés, the chase-scene would have more flesh over its bones, but the basic structure would still be there: he’s after you and won’t rest until you are lifeless at his feet. Fear, primal self-preservation, would grab you by the throat and it wouldn’t matter who you are, where were you born, what is the color of your skin etc. Fear unites us.

But this isn’t the only possible fear-triggering situation. Consider this: someone is holding your kids (a son and a daughter) at gunpoint, urging you to do something, because in few seconds he’ll blow your sons' brains on the floor and, after that, your daughters'. Would you be scared motionless or determined to do something, anything? Again, I added some elements to the story to give it touch of sophistication, which is unnecessary for the point I’m trying to patch through: this time you aren’t in immediate danger, but in fact your offspring is. Still, the basic horror, that gut-grabbing terror, is there.

Lust doesn’t work the same way. Even though The Almighty Natural Selection has written a piece of code into our DNA to feel lust at the first sight of genitalia differing from your own (or, in some cases, same genitalia), the relativity is much more clear when we talk about more complex situations. Beauty is sort of a follow-up to lust: we lust what we consider to be beautiful, and we also think beautiful things are lustful. And there is nothing wrong with that, just stating a fact.

 With fear it's – again – different: there is no similar ”follow-up” for fear as there is for lust, no single emotion (more or less) directly derived from the proto-feeling of fear. What we fear is what has a power to harm us. But there is a twist in this: there are way more things that could possibly harm us than we have a brain capacity to use for fearing these things. Someone might fear (for a good reason, granted) snakes; someone else might fear (for an equally good reason) spiders; someone fears cars, someone airplanes etc. All objects of fear are rational by any definition of the word, but no-one (at least I hope) is afraid of everything that could possibly harm this individual – even lying in bed will eventually be harmful and thus to be feared. If you'd fear everything, you'd kill yourself for the sheer pain of existence you'd be having from simply being alive.

Even if we don't actively fear everything around us, with some good convincing and reasonable arguments, these phophias could be triggered. Consider this situation: You're on your routine check-up at the doctor's office waiting for some vague results from a test you really don't understand due to medical jargon the doctor was using. Through this facade of non-understandable words you still catch ”heart failure”, ”cancer” and ”mortal illness”. Every now and then fear of cancer or other serious illness has crossed your mind, but for the first time in your life you are face to face with a possibility of having cancer or heart problems, often as not fatal.

In this situation you'd be (rightfully) afraid; your fear of cancer (or other illness) has been triggered.

 Lust is much more simple: you see something which rocks your boat and your animalistic lust is out of control. The trigger could be anything from an attracting representative of an opposite sex to (and I'm not making this up – there actually is a fetish for this) peeing in your pants. Still, not everyones' lust can be triggered by peeing in your pants, whereas everyone will be afraid of cancer in the situation described above. If you wouldn't be afraid, you'd be a sociopath or some other lunatic.

Is this fair – comparing possible diagnosis of cancer with peeing in your pants? No, but my point is there: even if you weren't afraid of snakes before, after thrown into a pit full of 'em (in a same fashion as one famous archaeologist with a hat and a whip) you'd be scared – again, I'm sorry for the profanity – shitless. Same cannot be said about peeing in your pants or (again, not making this stuff up) breaking glass with a woman's shoe: even if I'd pee in my pants along with everybody living in the same city for two weeks in a row, I would have absolutely no sexual fantasies about it.

Of course I'm exaggerating, but still you get my point. After all it boils down to this ”simple” statement: from the perspective of natural selection, it's more important to stay alive or keep your offspring alive than make more offspring, because if you'd be dead, you'd be unable to make more offspring, but if don't make more offspring this very moment, you can make them later, but that requires that you stay alive. Man, that's a long sentence – a lot of rambling.

A very short conclusion for those who were too lazy to read the whole rambling: Out of the two most primal human emotions (lust and fear) I consider fear to be more profound to the survival of human species, and therefore more universal among human individuals. I also argue that by similar conditions everybody can – and should – be scared.