Dear Editor,
Human beings are an inexplicable mix of contrast. Our reservoirs of human activities and ways of being are populated with copious amounts of polar opposites and mysterious contradictions. We experience internal conflicts, which at times are so intolerable and unbearable we would rather discontinue self-insistence and self-preservation, opting instead for self-erasure. We hope with optimistic fervour for desirable and favourable outcomes in our lives, only to be reminded ever so often by bouts of despair that hope is its binary opposite.
We endeavour to love and not to be deluded by the subterfuge of love, but our minds ceaselessly fall prey and victim to love’s cunning trap. The very object of our love suddenly ceases to be beautiful for reasons we often cannot explain hastening us to aim arrows of hate at its heart. We mistakenly love an object because it is beautiful but seldomly find an object beautiful because we love it.
Our perennial need to be authentic, to discover the “I”, to be an individual, to gain freedom from being helpless slaves of circumstances is constantly in conflict and tension with our sense of belonging, our need to be social creatures forever seeking to be a part of the herd.
Humans establish strict moral and legal codes to control and censor their behaviour, which so often militate with and prick their conscience. We commit an unimaginable amount of resources and authorise the use of institutional violence to slaughter and maim fellow members of our species, but pay scant regard to the suffering and destitution of many.
We enter into social contract with the state, trading aspects of our freedom for security and order only to be rudely reminded that we are forever at the mercy and discretion of the state. We choose government and its politics of representation over anarchy but instead receive the oppressive boot and shackle of the law.
We claim to have the luxury of free will but continue to apportion blame to others whenever misfortunes and unwanted circumstances befall us. We attribute the misfortunes of others to bad character but blame circumstances for our own. We aspire to live long, rewarding, happy and fulfilled lives but simultaneously engage in activities that hasten and threaten our existence.
We accord immense value to capital and profit, ends for which we become subordinated to the means. We subject our bodies to severe levels of wear and tear to acquire material possessions only to be left with irreparable bodily damage, which we somehow hope can be medicated with the objects in our possession.
We condescendingly and snobbishly accord superior and pedestal-like status to those of high social and economic standing this very moment, but withdraw our snobbishness and condescending ways when they plummet from grace the next. We conceptualise ideals and ideologies to orient and guide us as to how we should live but constantly stumble as we approach their signposts.
We cultivate rational minds to help us navigate our treacherous lives but so often suffer betrayal when our faculties of reason have been exhausted by all known logical deductions. We create works of art as an act of the imagination, imagining alternative ways of being and new realities only to have our imaginative liberation insulted and fiercely criticised when our invented realities are at variance with the status quo.
We satirise and hold up to great scorn and ridicule our vices and follies, deriving humoristic pleasures from our limitations but scarcely recognise the absurdity of our foibles before we have done harm to others and ourselves. We try, almost all of us, to mentally overleap moments we are not desirous of experiencing, but remain totally unaware we are drawing closer to us the moment when we will cease to be.
Humans remain a strange collection of subjects filled with conflicts and contradictions some of which we are unable to harmonise and reconcile.
Orlando Patterson
