Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [48]
All day long, every single day, you repress all kinds of thoughts and urges that appear in your mind. You have to—that’s part of being a functioning member of society. All of us have nasty antisocial tendencies. Every last one of us. It ain’t just the Nazis, al-Qaeda, and people on the registry of sex offenders—or whatever enemy-of-the-week the media is pushing. All those evil-doers are you. And me too. They’re every single human being in the world without exception. Maybe you don’t have whatever specific urges the media is telling you are the very worst (you tell yourself you don’t, anyway), but you have others and they’re just as nasty and disgusting. Every human being does. That’s part of the nature of being human.
Society conditions us to ignore certain aspects of universal human nature because these aspects go against the preservation of society. All human beings have unsavory desires—but you can’t have a functioning society if people are running around continually raping kittens, knifing retail clerks, and stealing old ladies’ underpants. And raping, killing, and stealing are just the tip of the iceberg. There are billions of lesser urges we all have which are equally if more subtly antisocial—and those need to be repressed too. Only we don’t call most of this stuff merely unacceptable or even merely antisocial. We have a much more powerful category for it. We call it “wrong” or “sinful” or “evil.” What’s anti-society is “wrong” and what’s pro-society is “right.” True right and wrong don’t necessarily overlap completely with society’s definitions of right and wrong—and different societies don’t even agree on those definitions in the first place!
A lot of religious teachings sprang from the genuine understanding of certain fundamental things that had to be done or to be avoided in order to preserve society. The Jewish prohibition against eating pork probably appeared after people had died from eating spoiled pig meat. In those days simply making the connection between such a death and the meat that was eaten was a significant leap of intelligence. But then people went on to unnecessarily conclude that this indicated that eating pork must therefore be a against God’s will.
All of our religious and social codes came down to us from human beings who made connections between certain actions and their results. Sometimes their deductions were correct and sometimes they were dead wrong. But correct or not, they were passed down from generation to generation, each time gathering more psychological and social weight. Thousands of years later, one man’s supposition about the connection between something he did last Thursday and some good luck he had the following weekend has become a Rule of God that none shall violate lest he be damned for eternity.
Whatever society you were born into has hundreds upon thousands upon millions of these rules, little and big. Some are so subtle you’d never even notice them. They’re assumptions built into the very fabric of our languages. It’s more acceptable to say “use the toilet” than “take a shit” because the former implies that you understand that good members of society take their shits in a special place called the toilet. Most words we consider obscene refer to things society wishes to ignore or at least keep very private. You go through your whole life automatically repressing those things society has taught you are “bad”—either deliberately or inadvertently. (Then of course, there are more subtle issues like the fact that most languages oblige you to reinforce the concept of self in every sentence: I am pissed. I like chocolate-covered slugs. I got enlightened.)
Most of this stuff is repressed so quickly and efficiently that it doesn’t even have time to enter into your conscious mind as a thought or idea.
You can’t poop on the floor. You can’t pick your nose in front of the babysitter. You can’t play with your wee-wee in front of anyone.