In my opinion you can tell a lot about people’s minds by observing simple things in life, and today I want to talk about the humble lock, designed to secure some property, owned by somebody.
It could be a gate, a suitcase, a house, a business premises, a church or temple of worship, a car, a bike…you name it, if it is owned by somebody, youll be sure to find a lock not too far from it!
So why do people lock things? Well, in case you haven’t already figred it out, humans are fundamentally untrustworthy!
We can’t help ourselves, can we? If someone owns something they immediately fear losing it, and then lock it, and the thiefs immediately try to find ways to break the locks.
We even have ‘virtual’ locks on our phones and computers now so that people can’t access our data!
So ladies and gentlemen, despite thousands of years of technical innovation, it turns out tht we haven’t learnt a fundamental part of being human, to be trustworthy, and trusting!
I’ve always been very trusting of people, but inevitably, people have stolen from me, cheated me, and defrauded me! More fool me, you say!
The thing is I can’t understand why people steal. If I buy something I don’t immediately try to secure it, it would drive me mad trying to keep my property safe! I’d rather feel free to trust that people will do right by me, even if they don’t!
It seems that the more you have, the more you fear losing it, so rather than put up with the mental anguish that fear of loss causes, I’d rather have nothing. It’s simpler. Amd allows me to spend my precious time on earth thinking about better things!
I have noticed in my life, that if I have an old car, I never worry about it being stolen, but a few years ago I bough a new porsche! (mid life crisis they say!) and the instant I bought it, my life changed!
No longer could I park where I wanted, I even had to stay in good hotels with private parking. People treated me differently, and I constntly worried that someone ws going to steal the car (or rob me at gunpoint and take it!)
Needless to say, I got rid of it after a year, and was very happy to blend back in to society without a possession making me a target for thieves!
But why can’t you have nice things? Why can’t you have a nice house without the fear that someone is going to break in and rob you? It just seems very strange to me.
You’ve worked hard, you’ve educated yourself, you’ve paid your taxes and now someone thinks that it is right to take it from you, by force if necessary.
Maybe it’s an inherent sickness in the human brain, but I can’t see how it developed, unless theft was a biological program from the start.
But if we came from nothing and had nothing, how could this be?
But the human mind is tricky and there are many things that I can’t understand! Perhaps all of these characteristics had some evolutionary advantage, like survival of the fittest and all that, so I decided to investigate whether this happened in the animal world as well..turns out it does!
They’re known as kleptoparasites and these are animals and birds who have adapted to stealing food from other animals in order to survive.
So maybe this is just a hangover of our old brain, doing what it needs, in order to survive.
In fact aybe many characteristics of modern humans such as fear, aggression, jealousy, greed, etc are just remnants of a past when we did what we needed to do in order to survive and ensure the survival of the species.
But we’re different now aren’t we?
We have this new part of the brain, capable of evolved thought and highly intelligent, but it seems that some people aren’t using it, they’re stuck in the past, several hundred thousand years to be exact!
So what do we do with these people, those who are running on automatic ancient pilot? Who steal just to survive? Do we egage with them, and understand what is going on in their brain and help them evolve? No, of course not, we invent technical solutions to stop them from stealing our stuff! And if they do manage to steal it, we have a new system in place to punish them, for ‘theft’ and we imprison them with, you guessed it, locks! The very thing we invented to stop them stealing in the first place!
If you are like me, and you believe that humans need a quick shift into using their higher brain for a higher purpose then you will see that the whole cycle is flawed,
We buy possessions. We lock them up to stop people stealing them. People steal them anyway. We lock them up.Repeat.
There has to be a new way.
And we must break free of the cycle as it is helping no one.
We also must break free of our old brain, and learn to use the higher brain, capable of creating a beautiful world for everyone.
Deluded? Possibly. The right way forward. Definitely!
