Thursday, October 1st 2009

By Peter Goffin

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s wrong with human beings. And there must be something wrong with us, right, because never in our history have we been able to just settle down and get out of our own way and stop destroying the environment and each other and Earth in general. Peculiar behaviour, isn’t it bud? And I think, now, that I know what it is that we do that has us so goddamn screwed up. Other people might say our problem is that we’re inconsiderate or ignorant or selfish or chauvinistic, but as far as I can tell the basis for all our problems, with regards to human nature, is that we fight too much and fuck too much. Just like McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that’s our curse, that’s what keeps getting us into trouble.

Fighting serves no purpose. But we keep doing it anyway. Because a lot of us like it. And often times we fight because of fucking. Sometimes we think that fighting will lead to fucking. Like if we fight over money and power and influence and we win, we’ll be rich and powerful and influential and more people will want to fuck us. Other times we fight because nobody is fucking us and that makes us mad. And a few of us fight because we would rather fight than fuck, because violence is all the pleasure and excitement we’ll ever need. Most of all though, we’ll fight to protect our right to fuck or to secure a safe and free place in which we can have fucking and everything that goes along with it, like a partner and children and a home.

Fucking, on the other hand, does have a purpose. It can be fun. And, more importantly, fucking makes more people. But the problem with fucking is that then those new people grow up and learn to fight and fuck just like everyone else and the whole production starts all over again. And even if those new people, created by fucking, grew up to be peaceful generous people, fucking would still be the root of all our problems because we don’t do it the way we should.

Jesus. Is there a way we ought to be fucking that we don’t know about?

Well we could find a way to do it that doesn’t result in creating quite so many new human beings. Because a few new human beings is good. Even necessary. But too many new human beings means that there is less of other stuff to go around. Stuff like food and water and space and money and dignity and survival. And when that situation arises, as it often does, we have to fight to grab what little we can before some other fucker snatches it up. Other times fucking can make us sick, which circumvents fighting altogether because it kills us without any fighting ever having taken place. The reason we get sick from fucking is also that we don’t do it the right way.

Coincidentally, the countries on Earth which have the most people getting sick and dying as a result of fucking also often happen to be the countries in which the most people die as a result of fighting. Make of that what you will.

Now I guess a little bit of fighting wouldn’t be so bad and with a couple of alterations to practice, fucking could go on unabated without doing any damage. But at this point in time, at every point in time to date in fact, we have fought and fucked to excess and with reckless abandon. Which could almost be admirable, if it weren’t so destructively over-the-top.

Why we fight and fuck beyond our logical capacity I don’t know. Like, I’m not a psych major because I don’t have the head for neuro-science. But the fact of the matter is that whether we have a good reason for it or not, that’s what we do. And I don’t see us stopping anytime soon. We have too many people telling us that we have to fight for one reason or another, often so that those people who tell us what to do can avoid fighting themselves and get back to fucking. We also have too many people telling us exactly how to fuck and that fucking in any other way is bad for us, bud, because it will anger God or otherwise hurt us in some way. Coincidentally, the people who tell us to fight never actually do any fighting themselves, and the people who tell us how to fuck never actually do any fucking themselves. But we trust their judgment in these matters anyway.

And I don’t really know where we go from here, you know. I mean, this is sort of the end of self-analysis, because that’s sort of the be all and end all of causality – the ultimate problem statement. Fighting and fucking. I also don’t think that this is one of those cases where a rhetorical solution is good enough. Like, we can say that we’ll try to curb fighting and fuck only in a manner that does not make people sick or over-populate Earth, but I don’t see people being all that receptive to being told how to perform two of their favourite pastimes. Maybe we’re at least on the right track now that we know what the problem is, but I wouldn’t bet on it.