Post by Alpha on Jan 9, 2014 20:05:48 GMT -5
Hi, you may or may not know about me. Either is fine.
But I need you. I'm in the process of writing a story, and I need names. So I need your pretty little name to make the story advance.
I need around 20 names if you are interested, please say so, and add a little comment about yourself. The reason for this is because I don't know everybody so I need to know a bit how you're like so that I can make you as accurate as possible.
Anyway, here's a short intro. Have fun reading. Please excuse how poorly it is written. I haven't written something like this in a long time, and english is not my native language
A mans' folly:
Prologue:
What kind of horrors' lie in the human mind?
One cannot begin to fathom the answer to this question. Even though, well we are human... And yet the brain and the mind stay intriguingly unknown to us, their users. We know more about space and the bottom of the oceans than we know our brain. What are we really?
The normal citizen would answer that we are the reigning species on this planet. The slow witted would reply that we are simply superior because… Well simply because. The intelligent being would define us as the pinnacle of evolution. We may not possess claws to shred our enemies or our food to pieces, wings to escape predators, a heavy coat of fur to shield us from the cold, or not anymore at least, gills to breathe under water, and yet here we are.
The human race.
The ones that Prometheus created from clay, and who he forgot to give attributes to, in his glee of giving wings or fur to different creatures. The ones for who Prometheus defied the Gods, by stealing Hephaestus’s fire and, for whom he sacrificed himself to an eternity of suffering, just so we could have a shot at the world.
Darwin believed that the species who were able to survive were not the strongest ones, or the smartest, but they were the ones who adapted the quickest to a situation. Survival of the fittest one could call it. The best examples are of course, the shark, who from its gigantic ancestor the Megalodon, has only lost in size, and the crockroach, who hasn't evolved in a few million years. We humans are quite "recent" in comparison. We have gone a long way from the Homo Australopithecus to our current Homo Sapiens Sapiens, be it in evolution, or even in population.
Evolution has a funny sense of humor when you look a bit more in the details on the evolution of species. Chickens are direct descendants of the dinosaurs. Anybody who has seen Jurassic Park movies from Steven Spielberg understand how terrifying a velociraptor or a Tyrannosaurus Rex is. Now remember what Darwin said. Survival of the fittest. Both those species were at the top of the food chain during their eras, and yet, now their descendant, the chicken and their eggs, garnish your plates. Evolution has a weird way of working, but it always finds a way.
Seven billion souls as of today. We are far from being the most numerous, if you compare to insects, but we are the reigning species. We have evolved into a creature whose potential is neigh impossible to utilize fully. In fact, we are incapable of reaching this body's full potential, whether it be physically or mentally.
Our body is almost too evolved for us, we cannot use its full potential. Examples of people who use their body efficiently are high level athletes or natural geniuses. So you can guess, not everybody can do it. We are not all born equal in body and mind.
The mind in particular stays a mystery to us. It is known that we only utilize 5-10% of our brain at the same time. We don’t need to use everything it proposes at the same time. Seven billion people, and not one of them is capable of using it fully, or is close to understanding its inner workings. This is quite a saddening thought.
We have the highest skull capacity, and the most developed brain, but we are incapable of utilizing even half of it. What if we couldn't use it because Nature has decided to de-evolve us? What if we weren't fit to rule Earth again? What if since the first Homo Sapiens Sapiens, our brain was getting weaker and weaker? What if we were too dangerous for ourselves in the past?
One funny thing with our mind is the memory. We forget quite easily it would seem, we can’t seem to remember the lesson we had yesterday, but the publicity from 10 years ago stays ingrained in your mind. Good memories stay longer than bad ones, or at least the most horrible ones. Why should some things be easier to remember than others? Do we need to forget our own stupidity?
Seeing the current state of stupidity certain countries like the United States of America or even France are able to demonstrate with the different social networks, reality TV shows or sports, it does seem like a possible explanation.
But why? Some people will say that it’s due to our Work Memory which usually is able to keep between 5-7 items in memory before it enters our Long Term Memory. Some memories though pass better than others.
Everybody has once asked for a better memory, wishing for an eidetic memory. Being able to remember everything, it does seem like a good thing, like not feeling pain or being immortal. But as those two last examples, it has some serious drawbacks. Being unable to feel pain, it doesn’t let you know when your body is in danger, or when your bowels want to release themselves. Being immortal, you keep getting older, losing gradually all of your senses, being unable to die. Being able to remember everything that has happened to you? You remember everything. Absolutely everything. Every embarrassing moment, every fail you have had, without being able to forget.
There is a popular belief that when we are about to die, we see our life flashing before our eyes. And what if not only ours, but we could see and remember the lives before. Every experience, pain and knowledge from before, and you can’t forget it. Wouldn’t that be maddening?
There is a human reaction that has always intrigued me. Shootings. People going to the premiere of a movie and in honor of a fictional character, start killing people. People going in Universities with a Machine Gun and also start killing colleagues, students, friends...
The favorite prey for the media is of course war movies, and video games. The media have found perfect scape goats with those inventions. In my personal point of view, this is completely idiotic. The world was a lot safer before it's well known.
Before playing as a fictional character whose role is killing people, peoples’ favorite past time was actually killing people during a war. There were just as many deranged psychopaths. Ted Bundy or Jack the Ripper didn't need video games or war movies to kill.
I have another hypothesis, people kill to try and ease the pain. Their pain to be exact. Some are people with a heavy psychosis who weren’t diagnosed on time that is true, but the others… What if they knew that no matter what they do on Earth, they would come back at some point? Take the “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray. After reliving the same day over and over, he does more and more dangerous things.
I believe a similar phenomenon happens with some people. Their bodies change but their minds stay intact, more or less, and they relive, life after life the same process, growing up the pains of the heart, of the body, of the mind. One would simply go mad after some point.
Maybe everybody has the potential to remember their past life’s but not everybody can access this knowledge. What if our brain has put some mental blocks to keep us from remembering? Maybe it was done to save humanity from itself. If everybody could remember everything that has happened to them, everybody would have a screw loose.
To quote Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, "Anyone who fights with monsters should take care that he does not in the process become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back at you".
I don't know what is worst... The finality or the action... If you try to fight it, you become madness, but if you try to stay away from it, simply watching it from the sidelines, it becomes a fear. You know what you'll become eventually, and that knowledge will drive you mad.
In short, it would seem that life’s finality is madness itself. Knowledge would be madness. And yet we couldn’t escape that madness because death is denied to our mind.
Extract from A man's folly
Dr. Jean-Marie Metivier, PhD, Psychologist
(I've seen your name around, probably whilst reading* past games, but welcome back any way).
