" There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an over-abundance of life. I've always found myself in the second category.
When you come to think of it,almost all human behaviour and activity...is not essentially any different from animal behaviour.The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship... bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between,say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human...is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human.The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved.
Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress...but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes? No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people... from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that's this:
Which is the most universal human characteristic--
fear or laziness?"
-From the movie "Waking Life"
Good one Raunaq! I was very much appealed by your narration. On your question: " Which is the most universal human characteristic-- fear or laziness?" I thought of drawing your attention on an sample test psychologists generally do to study learning and human intelligence: they fit their quantified data (based on IQ, EQ, g factor...) vs number of people in terms of a Bell curve, which is a normal distribution. Here, average percentage of sample falls within one or two standard deviations of the normal distribution. But the ones who fall away from one or two standard deviation (tails of the distribution) are analysed as follows: the fraction of people who fall on the left side of the tail are "lazy"; they take things very easy and don't work towards their aim (they need a lot of push to go towards the average behaviour), while those on the right side of the tail are those who work too hard towards an ultimate perfection; in the meanwhile they get too tense and get fear attacks! Psychologists categorize them as abnormal and suggest that they need to be pushed back towards normalcy! This kind of (limited) experiment suggests that both laziness and fear are characteristic traits which limit ultimate knowledge that can be acheived by humans!
ReplyDeleteThank you for ur comments ma'am. I actually got this from a movie called waking life. It is nice to know that you take interest in psychology as well. It is true, as you said, that laziness and fear are both characteristic traits of humans. Considering that we are all part of evolution, I find it hard to place laziness in this evolutionary cycle. I can understand that fear could be there as a part of survival instincts, as a way of recognizing danger. But I don't know why there is any need for "laziness" to have set in. Does it at all do good in any way?
ReplyDelete@Raunaq:
ReplyDeleteAs far as laziness in considered it has two meanings:
The positive: When you stop working on a problem and you decide to take a break( decide to be lazy for a while) and go out for a walk and when you no longer think about it , you suddenly get the answer.
Like how it happened to Kekule. So laziness has its positive side, it is in fact a key factor for creativity.
The negative: Which is called dullness of the mind due to unhealthy food and practices. Budha suggests number of remedies for such a thing, eg: talking a brisk walk, pouring cold water on the face etc.
As fear is considered it stems from ignorance. When true knowledge comes fear disappears.
Sathya
@Sathya
ReplyDeleteWhat u r saying must be true. I had similar inclinations. Laziness does slow you down to nurture the subconscious. It is characteristic of any scientist to observe long periods of silence between successive creative periods.
And I have a feeling that fear also plays a role in natural selection and that fear supports creativity in a sense as well. Extremely fearful people may be assumed to lack rationality and generally these are the people that fall out of life's race prematurely. Though this may be over-simplifying things, it is my conjecture that fear to a certain extent filters out the less rational brains and promotes the other.