In which, JR ponders the dichotomy between a modern human being’s sense of entitlement and the more basic and primal survival instinct that all sentient beings possess.

Lately, I’ve noticed that I view a lot of the situations I find myself in, both the mundane and the extraordinary, from two points of view.

The first is that of a modern human being living in the United States of America; the type of person who drives if his destination is more than a few blocks away, and can’t imagine what life was like without the ubiquity of internet access, cell phones, air conditioning and fast food. I think I deserve these things by virtue only of my existence in this environment. I do not appreciate the conveniences, I take them for granted, and I am easily annoyed when they are absent; I am angry when the ATM is down, or when Wendy’s is out of caesar side salads. I do not scrutinize the methods by which these things are provided; I do not hesitate to pay convenience fees for receiving electricity bills via email or $15 a month for satellite radio. It is simply life, as I know it, and there is no reason to question it. In fact, I find it laughable that those of prior generations do not understand this point of view. I suppose that’s true of every succeeding generation, though.

The second is that of primitive peoples, or perhaps any living animal. It is survival. Almost immediately after the aforementioned viewpoint is hatched and processed, a comparison is made to early humans. I think about what my reaction, and the reactions of people in general, would be if all the protective systems and rules were gone tomorrow. What if you woke up, and there was no currency system, or traffic lights? What if there was no military to prevent invasion? What if there was nothing in place to guarantee you food, shelter or safety, aside from yourself? Would you know how to find food for you and your family? Would you be able to keep your neighbor from entering your home and robbing or killing you? Has the instinct for such things left us because of convenience?

When I use my check card to pay for food, I usually get distracted by the previous iterations of payment methods. Credit cards, debit cards, checks, cash, bartering… How would my grandparents have paid for this meal? How will my children’s children pay for this meal? If the banks collapsed tomorrow, how would I eat?

When I get in my car to drive from my house to 7-11, I think of nomadic tribes that walked thousands of miles. I think about the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. I wonder, if there was no more fuel, if there were no more roads, could I get where I needed to go? I think back to earlier times in the country’s history, when homes were sparse and there were no cars. Did people just stay home all the time? Was family more important then? If everything ended tomorrow, would people even know how to get back to that?

When I use my computer to talk to people spread all across the globe, I think about pen pals and long distance phone service. Would my great grandparents have taken having a friend that lives in Russia or Thailand, whom they could communicate with daily for an almost negligible amount of money, for granted as we do today? Would they have conceived of being able to order clothes or books from any country in the world and pay only $10 for shipping? If the world ended tomorrow, how would I talk to the people who have become so important to me?

I think about certain war-torn areas of the world. These regions are microcosms that perfectly illustrate most of the apocalypse scenarios that I’ve described above. People are reduced to thinking constantly of survival and nothing else. They focus on finding food and protecting themselves and their family from constant threats. There are no comforts. It is life at it’s most basic, and I’m not sure that our leisurely, protected life is any more real or special.

This weekend, my aunt died, and it sparked a lot of these same thoughts. I have not had anyone very close to me die, really. My godfather died many years ago, but I was still very young when it happened. It didn’t create quite the same sense of loss and mortality that it would now. I was never very close to my aunt. I have a few childhood memories of her, but she never made much of an impact on my life. When she went into the hospital, I went to visit her with my father. Seeing her lying there, unconscious, on the precipice of death sent my mind into a whirlwind. I wrote an entry about the experience, and the questions I ask there have not been answered.

It invoked those dual perspectives, though. On the one hand, had she not “given up”, she could have lived an indeterminate number of years more. She would have been in a wheelchair, with a colostomy bag, and required constant care. She most likely would have had further health problems, and from what I was told, she had no insurance. But she would have been alive.

On the other hand, from a survival standpoint, a being with such injuries and disabilities would not be able to survive outside of the advanced medical care of our modern society. She would not be mobile, she would not be able to feed herself. She would not make it.

So how do you decide which is better? I’m not sure that being alive is always preferable to not being alive. Imagine the guilt she would have felt and the pride she would have lost at becoming an invalid and depending on her husband and brother for basic care. I’ve imagined what it must have been like for her, waking up in the hospital, missing a leg, unable to move or speak. People would have been telling her that her life would never be the same, that she would never be self-sufficient again. The hospital bills would be piling up. What hope would you have, what reason could you give yourself to carry on? She had no children. She lived in a hotel. Her husband was apparently a huge drain on her resources. I can’t say I would have fought to hold on to that, either.

If the hospitals collapsed tomorrow, would anyone know how to take care of themselves? Could you cure relatively small ailments on your own, such as the flu or a snake bite? If you broke your leg, would you know how to set the bone and make a splint? Would you know how to find someone who does? Or would you die from an infection the first time you scratch a scab from a mosquito bite?

Would any of us know how to find information without google?

As I was sitting on my father’s deck, watching him cry, I thought about his health. I thought about what the convenience of vices had done to him. Alcohol, tobacco, fatty foods, asbestos, a lifetime of hard work have all but broken his body. I thought about the similarities between he and his sister, beyond genetics. They both smoke. A lot. They are both overweight, though he is much less so. Neither eats particularly healthy. Is the same fate waiting to claim him? Will this death be a wake-up call for him? Is it too late?

Are those vices any worse than the dangers that a more primitive world would present? Is smoking 3 packs a day worse than the constant threat of being eaten by a predator or not being able to find shelter during the winter?

I thought about the afterlife. As I said in that previous post, I do not believe that there is such a thing (but I could be wrong). I kept largely silent while my father talked about her death, his regrets and anger, and the preparations that needed to be made to bury her. I did not want to tell him that I thought she was better off, not because she was in heaven now, but because she had ceased to be, and had escaped the torment of her life. She would not have to struggle anymore, she would not wonder how her life had become what it was, but she was not somewhere else now, happy and benevolent. She was gone forever. My father is a somewhat religious person. Those views would have been insulting to him.

I thought about the rising number of atheists in current society. I thought about the role that religion and belief in an afterlife played in primitive society, and why it was necessary. I thought about how the relative total safety and security that most people take for granted every day make belief in some kind of overseeing father figure, or an eternal life after death where your deeds throughout the whole of your life are tallied and you are judged accordingly, is not really needed. Many people still cling to it, and I do not fault them for it. In truth, I admire it. Having faith in something is an admirable trait. But if everything ended tomorrow, would people flock back to church? Would it be only the casually religious that rekindle their faith, or would the “end times” convince those of us who have never felt a divine presence that our ways were flawed? The death rate would skyrocket in such a scenario; would the losses sting more, or less? Would the frequency of it help us to cope?

Invariably, when the duality of survival overtakes my mind, I picture myself as the primitive man trying not to be eaten. I wonder if I would be a wholly different person for having been raised in a completely different environment, or if the various failings of my mind are predetermined. I am not a neurologist. My knowledge of the brain is limited to bits and pieces I’ve picked up from websites and the Discovery channel. From what I know, the brain’s makeup, outside of physical deformities and damage, pretty much maps itself during your formative years (which seem to range from birth to anywhere between age 8 and 25, depending on who you ask), and those mappings determine your traits. It’s not really a matter of one person’s brain being faster or slower than another’s, although that certainly does occur. It has more to do with the method by which your brain reacts to stimuli and resolves it, and those mappings determine the route that those stimuli travel to get to that resolution.

So would my mind be different if I’d been raised in a different time? If I were a 25 year old guy in the 1800s, would I still be deathly afraid of social situations? Would I still clam up and shut down when thrust into any kind of a spotlight? Would I still be unable to speak properly? Would I be racked with so much guilt? Would I be so afraid of rejection? These attributes have no place in a game of survival. I suppose my question is…

Would I live or die?

As it stands, I would most certainly die.