BEYOND THE SHELL

CHAPTER ONE: SUPERIORITY OF HUMANITY

People will disagree on almost every topic that arises; from the food one should eat to amount of physical exercise one should perform to whether the government is doing a good job or not. Not a single moment passes when people are not disagreeing about something. That said, there is one thing that people generally agree on, that humanity is the superior most and the most important species in the world. On this point the religious people, the scientists the philosophers and the politicians agree.

The superiority of humankind is attributed to man's ability to think, commonly known as logic. It has been repeatedly said that without logic man would fall back to the level of animals. Among the most prominent fears of humanity is losing one's ability to think logically. It is for this reason that people of unsound mind are highly pitied as they are considered to have lost the essence of being human.

It is unwise to accept any idea as the truth without subjecting it to test. Is humanity the most important part of the world? If so, is it thinking ability that makes human beings of greater value than the rest of the creation?

A story is told of a mental patient who was asked by his therapist to multiply five by four and he instantly gave the correct answer twenty. Amazed at the answer, the therapist asked the patient how he had arrived at the answer and the patient with a big smile on his face, replied that he had seen number twenty hiding under the bed earlier that morning. Could humanity likewise be right about their superiority but mistaken when it comes to the consideration they use to reach that conclusion?

To determine the value of a component in a system it works in, remove it and then watch what happens to the system. If after doing away with the component the system stops working, then the removed component was important; if the system continues to work as before, then the component was useless and if the system ends up working better than before then the removed component was not only useless but also of negative value. Put simply, removing a good thing from a system will lead to negative results while removing a bad thing will lead to improvement in the working of the system. For instance if you remove air conditioning equipment from a room the room will become uncomfortable to be in, which proves that the equipment was important.

Using the above formula, let us determine the value of logic-led-man. Supposing that human life was taken out of the world, what kind of changes would be realised? It is obvious deforestation, pollution and poaching would cease. With time global warming and desertification would be reversed. In the end the earth would become greener, the air fresher and the waters cleaner; the world would become a better place indeed.

Apart from ruining the beautiful earth, man is also an enemy to himself. It is hard to think of any evil threatening the existence of man or his well-being that is not a creature of his own logic. Destruction of nature, use of weapons of mass destruction, oppression and corruption are all things that would not have been in the world if man could not think. It is true that people do all things trying to secure their best-interest, but despite the ruthless effort humanity continues to live in misery and suffering. It is fair to conclude that logic neither benefits the world nor humanity. From the look of things, humans suffer more stress and desperation than animals despite having their adored thinking ability.

Without doubt, the human mind has come up with great works but the world would still survive without these brilliant inventions and innovations. As a matter of fact, the bad that logic has brought into the world outweighs the good. It would be right, therefore to conclude that if the importance and superiority of man was anchored in his ability to think then he would be of negative value. In the ladder of hierarchy he would fall on the same level as pests, and that is an understatement since I am not aware of a pest that threatens even its own existence. Maybe, the closest thing that reflects the current state of humanity is cancer. Cancer threatens the life of its host and when the host dies the cancerous cells too have to die for they cannot live on their own. Similarly humans are destroying the earth for minute benefits not knowing that the trend may lead to the extinction of the human race.