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By Root 5555 0

here is the crux of the matter. For on one level, and with what must, on the historical evidence of their survival alone, be regarded as the core of their identity, human beings attempt to adhere to their basic instinctive pattern as if no separation from nature had taken place. At this level human beings have always behaved just like any other animal, as if the supreme purpose of their existence is to carry on the chain of life. Their overriding instinct is to reproduce their species, to which end they form mutually supportive social communities, within which males and females of each new generation have the security to pair off to form new families, to mate and then to nurture their children, until they too grow up to the point where they are ready to reproduce in turn. All this is structured into the unconscious of human beings just as instinctively as it is programmed into any other animal.

But then there intrudes that other component in their psychic make-up which is continually urging them away from this unity of purpose. It is this which explains why, to a degree not remotely experienced by any other animals, we see how human beings, individually and collectively, fall prey to every kind of disintegrative impulse: greed, envy, lust, bad temper, hatred, cruelty, violence, the breaking up of families, loneliness, depression, insanity, crime, social injustice, political divisions, revolutions, wars; in short, all those peculiarly human problems which, as the Greek myth had it, were released into the world by the opening of Pandora's `box'. And all these in one way or another follow from the unique power of ego-consciousness to separate human beings from each other and from nature, and from the breaking down of that natural state of integration between their ego and their deeper unconscious.

Between these two conflicting forces in their psyche, human beings live their lives in a state of constant tension. At the deepest level there is nothing they want more than to re-establish the lost unity between the two parts of their psyche: to live at peace with each other, with nature and with themselves. But to do this they have to make a continual, conscious effort. To assist them in that effort they have evolved a whole array of devices, mechanisms and rituals: from laws and political institutions to codes of morality; from every kind of artistic expression to the framework of religion. What all these creations of human consciousness have in common is that they all originate in a desire to underpin or to re-establish that sense of unity which every animal enjoys without thinking all its life long.

Life and order

It is remarkable how many of the forms of behaviour which distinguish human beings from all other animals consist of creating a consciously-contrived framework for some activity which in the life of every other species is wholly instinctive.

An obvious example is the conscious effort human beings have to make to organise themselves into social groups. The way animals group together is governed entirely by instinct. Every baboon troop or ant colony is hierarchically structured according to the basic model of the species, with a dominant male or queen at its head. Each member of the group is instinctively aware of its role as an integral part of a collective organism much greater than itself, because it has not got the individual consciousness to imagine otherwise. And to a great extent the human counterpart to this is also instinctive. All human beings belong to families, communities, tribes or nations which provide them with a central part of their sense of identity. The structure of their social groups is naturally hierarchical, centred on a leader-figure cast more or less successfully in the archetypal role of `Father, `Mother' or `Son-Hero'. But beyond that instinctive core which Homo sapiens shares in common with other animals, each human grouping develops its own variations on the basic theme: its own individual forms of organisation, hierarchy and leadership. And to preserve the order of the group against