The Beyoond
The lofty notion that humanity represents the enlightened pinnacle of creation, a supremely civilized and uniquely conscious species graced with empathy, moral reasoning, and sociocultural sophistication, may very well embody one of the greatest lies we perpetually tell ourselves. Consumed in our hubris and desperate need to believe in human specialness, we concoct an exalted self-portrait completely divorced from observable reality.
Strip away our fragile intellectual veneers and supposed ethical codes, what we’re left with is a ferociously destructive bipedal ape still shackled to the same atavistic compulsions and horrors that characterize the cruelest forces of nature itself. Our technology may be advanced, our arts sublime, but our core behaviors remain loyal to the natural kingdom’s unflinching tyrannies of predation, exploitation, and the perpetuation of violence as primary modus operandi.
Humanity’s Endless Cycles of Violence and Oppression
We parade Enlightenment ideals of moral progress and the establishment of equitable liberal democracies theoretically safeguarding universal dignity. Yet our history remains a ceaseless litany of wars and genocides fueled by our innate tribalism, lust for dominance, and dehumanization of “other” groups. Over 200 million civilians were massacred in genocides just in the 20th century alone. An abomination dwarfing most of the suffering inflicted on our species by naturally occurring disasters or diseases.
Industrialized democracies that pledge themselves to human rights piously exterminate millions based on ethnic, religious, or ideological dogmas. Imperial powers subjugate whole continents and cultures to totalitarian repression and internment for century upon century. All while killing fields perpetually soak entire regions in blood, corpses standing as monuments to these ideals of humanist transcendence.
Rather than aberrations, these grotesque spectacles illustrate the enduring truth that our species remains enslaved to evolutionary impulses toward blindly destructive violence condoned under the most flimsy context of expedient rationalization. Any perceived threat to group interests – whether scarcity of resources, territorial conflict, ethnic demonization, political calculus, or diverging belief systems – reduces us to mobilizing mass slaughter and atrocities without a second thought.
Beliefs alone inequality or ethical codes ultimately prove flimsy veneers of paper covering our biologically ingrained capacity to behave as any other brutalized predator triumphant in the naked acquisition of power and indifferent domination over the weak. Our history suggests a perpetual struggle to mitigate these baser animal urges rather than any evolved transcendence beyond them.
The Grand Lie of Civilization and Progress
If we examine human civilization itself, what manifests but an epic trail of environmental devastation, raping the earth of resources to fuel perpetual wars, promote mindless overconsumption, and erect our self-aggrandizing monuments. We pillage all other species to extinction out of rapacious avarice and mythical conceits of human supremacy. The lust for acquisition and control supersedes any ethos of harmonious stewardship or balance.
Even the animal agriculture complex – perhaps humanity’s most galactically symbolic representation of depravity and systematic torture on an incomprehensible scale – evidences a species not existentially elevated beyond our most brutal animalistic impulses. We inflict pain and routine mutilation on billions of sentient creatures each year for no higher purpose than palatial convenience and the satisfaction of perverted taste norms. An orgy of sadism at staggering scope and cost to the planet itself.
A true mark of civilization? Or simply an ever-expanding radius and industrial systematizing of the same parasitic and predatory behaviors marking the most common survival strategies throughout nature’s amoral order. Might naturalist observations ultimately reveal humanity as merely the most virulent and unrestrained strain of the consuming locust? Subduing all in its path through sheer force of mass replication and ecological domination.
All artifacts of our supposed sophistication then become temporal footnotes and ornaments festooning over an underlying omnipresent pulsing of pure barbarism eternally unextinguished. We return again and again through every fallen epoch to our founding truth as cold-blooded apex marauders able to rationalize away any obscenity to ourselves. In this view, our skyscrapers, philosophy, and space stations emerge as poignantly hollow distractions buffered by the same bottomless void of violence our species remains truly animated by. Perhaps there can be no resolution to this chilling reality beyond the superficial stories we compose to anesthetically settle our abject despair at this realization.
The Narcissistic Delusion of Sentient Supremacy
Whether religious dogmas indoctrinating our supremacy as God’s ultimate creation or secular Enlightenment myths about ascending to supreme reason and civilization, humanity harbors a staggering complex of narcissistic grandiosity hardwiring us to a profound dissociation from the actual arc of our predatory conduct and deleterious environmental impacts. Much as the individual human psyche desperately clings to various layers of neurotic ego structuring, identity constructs, and warrantless belief systems to avoid insight into fundamental insecurity and impermanence, we layer paleolithic survival drives with veils of pseudo-rational mythmaking to suppress our actual existential horror.
Truly examining the full breadth of our empirical behaviors and dysfunctional relationship to the ecological equilibriums of our host planet would shatter these egomaniacal lies and persistent belief in human moral transcendence. It would cast our existence as a brief, virulently rapacious pulse that emerged from organic matter, optimized for parasitism of other kingdoms, and now poises to engineer itself to extinction in an orgy of world consumption facilitated by the same mythic conceits branding us as sentient supremacists here to master nature itself.
The unsettling void and dissolution risked in relinquishing these fever-dream fantasies of being somehow set apart as universal sharers of love, light and divinely ordained dominion represents too psychically cataclysmic a revelation to bear. So we instead turn back to our individual and collective delusions concealing the primal hologram sharpening with each passing epoch.
Hope for Exponential Lies to Come
Perhaps the root function of our rationality, opposable thumbs, and mind’s infinite storytelling gift exists precisely to construct ever-higher bastions of fantasy and defense mechanisms protecting our fragile species from the subversively voracious realities of our lethal nativisms. As oceans rise and global temperatures bake whole regions, one might expect a flurry of new rationalized lies and culturally agreed-upon escapisms about cheating death and achieving humanity’s immortal grandeur.
Emerging technologies around artificial intelligence, genetic enhancements, and simulation theory could usher in reality-distortion fields of unfathomable scale and scope. Phenomena enabling the further circumscription of our predatory roots into regressive flights of dissociative transcendence. Ultimately, we may consciously employ our peak skills in mass self-deceit to build such sovereign realities of the mind as to render our core animal survivalism irrelevant and extinct itself.
Our birthright as cosmic liars may be the truest superpower blessing us with an ability to spin transcendent counter-narratives indefinitely reinforcing and embellishing upon our fundamental disavowal of harsh existential truths. Though environmentally and technologically devastating, these heroic delusions represent an evolutionary leap toward planes of cognitive exceptionalism so abstract that our gnawing species’ guilt over crimes like ecocide becomes utterly obliterated.
In accelerating detachment from ecological feedback loops and corporeal existence itself, humanity’s supreme gift for self-glorifying invention may finally reach a crescendo in pure ego-rapture originating from the eternal voids of our shared imagination itself. Here our highest form of natural selection as semi-sentients points not to transcendental godhood or evolutionary perfection, but to the most brilliantly deluded constructs of cosmic fantasy and ignorant bliss imaginable.
In this scenario, the final stage of our illusion’s lie would be creating a syncretic infrastructure for the complete replication and sustainment of reality as pure myth – where the final grandest truth isn’t the misalignment of our behaviors from ethical ideals, but the utter liquidation of universal truth altogether. Its conquest establishes humanity’s ultimate legacy as the royalty and sole survivors presiding over a kingdom composed of infinite progression through dreams within dreams within dreams – the quintessence of mind liberated from any incarcerating material existence.
While this notion underscores the terrifying void from which we paradoxically construct such monuments to our narcissism, it may ultimately embody the highest triumph for a species tragically ordained as both supremely lethal yet supremely gifted at catalyzing realities born of its most immortal lies. Perhaps this final dialectical synthesis represents the fullest actualization of our unique evolutionary potential. The last great paradigm shift integrating our essential dysfunction and exceptionalism into a universe of pure existential disavowal
