The bugged man

Why are we in midstream, mired in ill-being, even though we manage to produce more than necessary to ensure the physical security of all men ? Why can't we go take the next step of the "philosophical republic" and why do we try to extend the intermediate phase which might destroy the planet and ourselves ?

Freud, in "Civilization and its Discontents'' talked of drive of death (Thanatos) (see in Wikipedia).

Without doubt we must return to what makes the human species. We are a vulnerable species. Our survival is probably due to our ability to make voluntary alliances with our fellow human beings, which could have brought us the ability to communicate in speech and hence intelligence (see my post on "and if we were not so individualistic? "). Yet the development of intelligence requires a longer time to the little man to achieve autonomy. Even while we are being born, we are a kind of premature which keeps on growing outside the womb (see the concept of neoteny). We exceeded our physical and mental vulnerability by becoming allied with others (not with all but with a limited number of what Hume called a sphere of privileged sympathy) and by being brooded longer in the family. But feeling vulnerable also leads us to either flee or to attack. Vulnerability leads to... preventive war.

It's undoubtedly in this feeling of strength and vulnerability that economic war and the need to turn around against the weakest must be seized...

We find most of the time two approaches in front of this difficulty:

The misanthrope tradition which considers the human being as the cause of all evils (in religion with the original sin but also in some ecological currents that consider mankind as a mere parasite on the planet or in certain economic visions where human is superfluous facing the forces of market's regulation).

The idealistic tradition which tries to put back the human being to the center. But it does not solve the problem: the drive of destruction of the human being which feels vulnerable.

How do we get out of this dilemma ? In both cases, we just try to "blow the lock" as if, once it is done, humanity was reconciled with the universe. But this "lock" is actually the starting point. Becoming human is a long way and we are in "hominescence", according to the words of Michel Serres.