I have come to the darkest conclusion that we are simply not built for civilization; or rather, that civilization is not built for us.

We have done ourselves the gravest disservice of allowing the development of our civilization to dramatically outpace our capacity to evolve a constitution to work in harmony with it’s principles.

We see in our civilization a uniform application of monogamy, despite the reality that we are not biologically monogamist. We have agreed upon a universal disdain for the emotions we cannot escape, regularly bearing witness to the horrifying results of asking individuals to repress their emotional selves.

We inflict countless traumas upon one another with one hand, while stigmatizing the treatment of trauma with the other.

In our natural being, we are creatures of force, expected to take what we can in terms of territory, partnerships and food. However in the civilized realm, acting on these natural impulses is rewarded by severe punishment.

This is not to say that the natural condition should be equated with some sense of objective morality. It cannot be. This is partially due to the reality of morality as being a component of civilization, and it should be our primary endeavor, however, it the inverse may be more true, that entirely ignoring our natural condition is consistently immoral.

After all, there are aspects of our natural condition that are relevant to established psychological needs. Maslow outlines a set of needs in addition to our basic physiological needs corresponding to our social, psychological and emotional needs. The basis of these needs is realized in the understanding that the ignorance of these needs, or more clearly, the result of these needs not being satisfied is almost always psychological trauma.

These trauma are then destined to manifest as abnormal or maladaptive behavior. The sex deprived become sex obsessed. The freedom deprived become freedom obsessed. The safety deprived become excessively defensive. The socially deprived become acceptance obsessed.

So as the examples go on, it becomes more and more clear how our conservative culture is set up in so many ways to traumatize any and all trapped within it’s influence. Indeed the most powerful influence on that conservative culture has been religion, and if we’re being honest, religion has rarely offered the best answers to human questions, only periodically being the best guideline available at any time in local history, until the scientific method came along and replaced it’s explanations of the natural world with a much deeper method of understanding and much more consistent predictions for our natural world.

If we understand religion as being the first philosophical attempt to understand our universe, our health, and our souls, then it is not at all audacious to say that religion has been rendered obsolete in every application but one.

And now here we are. Despite the obsolescence of religion in it’s efficacy to guide our understanding of our world and health, it has remained influential enough to continue dictating the structure of our civilization. Therefore our civilization is doomed to remain stuck in it’s cycles of archaic, traumatic cruelty, until our scientific understanding and acceptance is allowed to supersede our addiction to tradition.