human duality: whether to be animals or angels.

"okay i get it already!!" you say. "i get that we are but beasts masquerading as angels on earth believing ourselves to be of a pure and benign race of non-animals" you continue. "so now what??" you ask.

well we are sort of stuck in a sort of limbo. we live our lives caught between behaving like an animal and behaving like an angel. we all have both behaviors in us. should we drop one in favor of the other? should we strike a balance? what should we do?

the problem with striking a balance is that our animal behaviors are mostly the very opposite of angelic behaviors. our instincts give us anger, greed, self-centeredness, promiscuity, and murderous tendencies. how can we strike a balance between those natural tendencies and the angelic ones of sacrifice, monogamy, peacefulness, sharing, and willingness to put others' needs before our own?

you can see that it is very hard to have a society based in both sets of behaviors by looking at our own. it just isn't working.
-we have people exploiting one another left and right in order to fulfill their greedy tendencies. these very same people are then shocked when other people try to steal from them in order to fulfill their own greediness. our society says that it is alright to exploit people to attain wealth but only to a certain degree. the corporations are justified and doing "good" when they exploit but regular people are criminals and thieves when they do the exploiting.
-we are told that we shouldn't kill and that we should lead peaceful lives but when it comes time to beat down a protest, execute a prisoner, or to wage war we are told that we are doing the lords work and that he is on our side and wants us to kill thy enemy. it is only when we take killing into our own hands that we are considered violent animals.
-most of us pretend that it is easy to be faithful to one person in a relationship but we don't stop to realize all the times we stop and think "hmm yeah that person over there would do nicely right about now." most of us do not get the chance to be unfaithful and so we readily remain pure at heart. if more people had ample opportunity you would see the rate of unfaithfulness increase.
-we are all told that sharing is what we should do but then why do people hoard everything and build ridiculously large houses for a family of 4? they are not looked down upon as selfish but are instead admired by most of our society for being able to attain such wealth. what happened to sharing? why is the world so full of haves and have-nots if sharing is so valued?

so this idea of being angelic and still holding on to our animal instincts is not working. some people are trying to be as angelic as they can but they will only get taken advantage of by the more animalistic of us. and if we all revert back to living as animals and following our natural urges, we will probably kill each other off for a while and then group up for protection and then start this whole modern civilization thing all over again. we need to progress. the only thing we can do then, is to become more angelic and drop our animal behaviors. most every view of the future has us acting less and less like animals and even our history shows us acting less like animals as we progressed along.

we currently try to teach angelic values but it isn't working. we teach them from the perspective that we all start out good and end up bad. people get horribly confused when they then get bad feelings and now think that they must have turned bad. we should teach that we start out as animals and that it takes great amounts of learning and practice to suppress our animal instincts. we have to teach what exactly our instincts are and how to recognize them and how to then suppress them. we have no choice but to suppress our animal instincts if we want the peaceful and benign society that we are all taught to strive for. and if we do not suppress them then we will have the imbalance that we have today with the more animalistic taking advantage of the more angelic. face-it, your instincts make for a horrible society that feeds on itself.