The Way We Are

Lately I've been reading a most unusual, challenging, insightful, and provocative book, The Way We Are, by Allen Wheelis. It is very short, weighing in at only 141 pages, but is as dense and compact as it is brief. He opens chapter 1, The Nature of Man, with the following propositions:

"Only the first life fed on nonlife. Thereafter, life feeds on life. Big fish eat little fish. Jaws develop fangs. Hawk falls on hare, bird takes worm; wings flutter in the teeth of the fox. Man eats hare, fish, fowl, lamb.

"We are both predator and victim. We kill those who have more to eat than we, or who threaten to take what we have -- or who do not threaten but whom we so imagine.

"We kill to take the female or the territory of a rival. A rival is one who has a female or a territory we desire.

"Property is a function of the willingness to fight. Titles are written in blood. Dusty deeds rest on old murders.

"We are children of slime, our teeth break bone, suck marrow, we live on others; we devour their lives without ever seeing their faces. The magic of money and commerce keeps them far away, their screams unheard."

In Chapter 2, The Group, we find a most telling observation:

"The rules that shape our lives defend the interests of the holders of power."

Later in the book we encounter this assertion about the way we are, with which I will close:

"We tend to assume that we know what we are, that our nature is obvious, given to us by direct observation of others and of ourselves: Just look around the world and look into your own heart and you will know the human condition. It's not so. What it is to be a human being is not clear at all, but deeply shrouded. Because, in the evolution from animal life to human life, along with the gain in knowledge and awareness, we have gained also the ability to deceive ourselves. We arrange not to know our nature, not so see what we are up to. Our self-deceptions are so dense, piled on so thick, like layers of paint on a canvas already painted, layer after layer, laid on from school and pulpit and lectern and TV and Internet, that it is all but impossible to break through, to get a clear view of what we really are.

"Behind our loudly professed values of freedom, justice, and equality lies a propensity to violence far stronger and far deeper than is known to any of us, even the most cynical. It is all but invincible, invades even the bedroom, corrupts what we call love. We indulge in vast hypocrisies, flagrant and subtle, to conceal from ourselves this destructiveness. We are in fact largely the opposite of what we think we are."

If you would care for a no holds barred, brutally honest look at "the way we are," you may want to take a look at this book.