Intro

A Chapter by Tyson

What is the only thing a person can be sure of? Humanity doesn’t even know what it is. At its basic core, when we slice to the center of it, what is the essence of a human being? It’s perhaps, symptomatic of a greater fault in our nature that we spend so much time pondering such a simple question. Yet we find no answer.

A philosopher may tell you that a man is what he makes himself. Simply an accumulations of decisions and stances, ever changing and flowing like water through the circumstances around him. A preacher may tell you that a man is a pawn in a larger game of chess. A faithful devotee to a higher and kinder calling. A scientist may tell you that a man is a product of a random set of circumstances that lead to our evolutionary cultivation. But what none of them will tell you, is that deep down, even they are not sure. No one who has ever peered into that pondering abyss has penetrated its void.

All we really know is that we are here. Gifted with free will and burdened with conscience. Most of us see the world in some semblance of how it really is. As children we are told of knights slaying dragons, but adulthood brings upon us the confounding reality that one persons hero is another's devil. Perspective and shades of grey creep in and suddenly our moral compass is not so simple. What is wrong and what is right? Many of us answer that question with a solem shrug and move on with our lives.

So how does one go about sorting this all out? When a person looks at the world, each must decide whether it is with optimism for the way things may be, or disheartenment for the way they are. While one person looks into their lovers eyes after a long kiss, another somewhere in the world is crying over their beloveds coffin. For every birth, there is a death. For every act of kindness, there is an act of cruelty. Every peacetime ends with war.

Recognizing the wrong in the world is a very common human characteristic. Having the ambition and follow through to try and change it...Now that’s something quite scarce. And, one could argue, arrogant. Every person's vision is, in some way, flawed. None of us know all and none are without intellectual prejudice. What disregard for their own defects must a person have to feel entitled to force change onto an unchanging world?

Our history is a bloody one, full of such people. At any one time, there are likely a handful of them. They go into different fields depending on their passions, and come from different places depending on their parentage. But, as is humanities way, they almost always find a way to clash.

When that happens you get war and bloodshed. Fire and pain. You also get technological advances and space races. Dirty political campaigns and friendly sporting competitions all come from these conflicts of perspectives. Men and women desperate to make their marks on history, to change the world in some way, small or large. A determined human being is without hesitation, unyielding, without barrier. They will rip and claw and tear and compromise normal standards of physical and moral limitation.

To an outside observer it may seem insane, even animalistic. But in the minds of those competing for humanities reigns, it all makes such perfect sense. Because what is the only thing a person can be sure of? That they are right.

prev chapter