Thousands
of years ago, hunter/gatherers began to realize that there was a way to
live more rationally and sensibly. Rather than just thinking about how to
survive for the moment, humans started thinking about how to survive best for
a over a longer period of time. With this need in mind, communities were
created. Communities offered more
protection, better ways of accumulate food, and other benefits which meant
surviving more easily.
But do
our natural human instincts for self-survival ever override our motivations to
coexist in a community? For example, communities developed governments and laws
to provide "rules and order to the growing masses of
population." These rules can have negative impacts on the members if
they prevent the members to pursue what they please. An instance in history where
a community might not have been beneficial to its members was in monarchies
where the leaders made decisions that didn’t take they community members’
interests into consideration.
Even
though a leadership structure is needed to enforce laws and to keep the
civilization running, people can find themselves in a situation or in
circumstances where their own survival conflicts with the laws of the
community. I think it is easy to
say that you would steal a friend's candy bar if you were starving. However,
the real question is, would you fight against your friend if there was one
candy bar left in the world and the consumption of that food was a matter of
life and death for both of you?
Do the
benefits of belonging to a community always outweigh the contradicting human
instinct to drive to attempt new things?
Do our communities rules and expectations hold us back from what we want
to pursue in life? These are
questions that I believe are not often discussed, because there not many people
want to question the feeling of safety in a community. Yet, once in a while
there may be an independent-minded individual who will question whether being
in a community is always the right decision.
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