As humans, we’ve always had two different facets of fear; the evolved fear and the learned fear. At first, they seem as though they’re not associated in the least; yet with repeated stimulus and exposure to fear, the learned and the evolved facets of our fear fuse and are hardwired into the central part of the amygdala. When we see a crime being reported on the news, we get hardwired to getting anxious in regard to a certain ‘bad guy’; what we forget to realize is that it was the delinquency that we are afraid of rather than the person who committed it.
Now, the question arises- what exactly is this delinquency? What kind of atrocity are we afraid of being subjected to? Our fear centre is constantly triggered, leading to apprehension. What else could we call these anxieties? Racism? Sexism? Hostility toward youth? Islamophobia? Anti-Semitism? Domestic violence? Sexual harassment? Gun violence? Mass shootings?
It has been noted time and again that nature is an experimenter. It has been constantly experimenting over billions of years- and as a conclusion, it has relinquished every single creature that hasn’t adapted to the ceaselessly changing atmosphere. As humans, we’ve been bestowed with a higher echelon of intellect and pragmatic conceptions and that’s very true; however, it doesn’t mean we can’t be discarded by nature if we fail to put up with it’s frequently changing spheres.
If we step out of the primitive clunker of our brains into the supercomputer-like dynamic thinking system that we have been blessed with and pull a long, hard look at the current situation, admit it or not, we find thatit’s we humans who’ve brought the disastrous situation upon ourselves.
The problem has been our own consciousness all along. We’re living and experiencing life in separation, and this separation driven consciousness has its own repercussions, and we see it in the world; we are, in the form of the present situation.If evolution weren't significant, our actuality would be incoherent. Even being crafted by God, we need what we perceive and comprehend by science to have bearing on the natural world we call ours. We need to thrive and blossom.
For the first time in the history of the world, we are gaining dominance over our own evolution; the question remains as to whether we choose to make a world where nice people finish first, where love and kindness are priorities, or continue to let the greedy prosper with bank accounts in the billions and trillions.
Looking at a more technical aspect of evolution, let’s take up the example of the very computer I’m using to write at this moment; it is the very symbol of hope for what we may achieve, and shows us how far we’ve come from being apes trying to figure out how the hammer works. Our environment dictates our social evolution, our social evolution determines our biological evolution. So, there’s this urgent need to develop a loving and kind environment that supports populations, that enables our brains to prosper in healthy ways, promoting our empathy, logic, self control and ability to be a member of a socially complex species.
Nature has programmed us to nurture for good reason. It is time we paid more attention to the subtle positive environmental forces of love, cooperation and trust.To stay in survivalist-type Darwinism is a lock-in to a fear paradigm, to accept the shift of focus onto empathy, love, trust and nurture, is to lock-in to a love paradigm. And this is our choice for dystopia or utopia, hell or heaven.
(The writer is a Standard-X student, DAV Public School, Unit-8, Bhubaneswar)