Social Nature

Man is at continual odds with his culture, his sense of self, and his innate systems of behaviors.  Culture’s function is in part to create standard codes of conduct which creates a social matrix within which he is to function with other humans.  Without this matrix, men could not exist within such highly populated societies without engaging in ceaseless violence.  His innate inclinations towards violence would constantly pull him into violent altercations with other strange men, for that is his nature.  Culture therefore allows for societies to exist in magnitudes that could not occur without policing forces of man’s natural and aggressive behaviors.

Now if men were not so darned self-aware, inclined to introspection, philosophy, and spirituality, to name but a few attributes, his lot would do just fine, for he would not care that his culture and his natural inclinations were at odds with one another.  But this is not the case, and instead man is tormented with an inner and an outer sense of self, which becomes combine into essentially a neurotic individual.  Man feels some behaviors as naked as the day he was born, but is compelled to believe that these feelings are unnatural and evil.  His social nature takes this a step further.  Because he wants to be seen in the best light, and because his cohorts all pretend to believe in their inculturations, or rather inculcations, he too pretends to believe that which his society propagates as the correct way to be.  Deep down, though, man still feels otherwise, and feels the guilt, cognitive dissonance, and discontent from being at such odds with himself.

Ah, the perpetual plight of man, to never be at ease, pulled in one moment by his natural inclinations, the next minute by his desire to be seen in the most favorable light by those significant to him, only then to be drawn into the facade of how a man should be according to culture, to lastly being sucked into some shenanigan through the power of peer pressure, leaving behind a shell of man whose only repose is chemical relief through endogenous or exogenous addictions such as booze or  gambling.