I. The Basics ↑
2. We are complex beasts.
The second thing we must recognize, if we are to make any progress at all in understanding ourselves, is that we are not a simple, straightforward species.
If anything, quite the opposite.
We are complex and often conflicted, and it is frequently a very confusing affair to try to make any sense of us at all.
However I will contend that this aspect of humanity is not a bug, but a feature: that is, we have been so successful in so many ways precisely because our feelings, thoughts and actions are not mechanistic and hard-wired, but instead are flexible and adaptive and creative. And it is this ability to come up with novel responses to new circumstances that has allowed us to survive and thrive so well as a species.
So if you were hoping for a simple explanation of what makes us tick, I need to disappoint you right at the start.
But even though this journey of understanding may not be especially simple or straightforward, I do believe that it will be helpful and rewarding, if you stick with it, and approach it with an open mind.
Words from Others on this Topic
Oh, there’s a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Jimmy Buffett, 1993, from the song “Fruitcakes”
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves. This is a complicated biological fact about us.
Amélie Rorty, 1976, from the book The Identities of Persons
We are idealists and we are realists. We are dreamers and we are builders. We are experiencers and we are experimenters. We long for certainties, yet we ourselves are full of the ambiguities of the Mona Lisa and the I Ching. We ourselves are a part of the yin-yang of the world.
Alan Lightman, 2018, from the book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine
Life is not like formula fiction. The villain has a heart, and the hero has great flaws.
Anne Lamott, 1994, from the book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Human affairs were so messy. You could do your best to lead a quiet life, to keep out of unnecessary conflict, to put in your forty years or whatever it was of working to the best of your ability without creating too many ripples, but there were always difficult decisions needing to be made. And however hard you tried, there would be times when you could not avoid causing pain to others, because pain and disappointment seemed an inevitable concomitant of human life. The moment you accepted any promotion, any slight advantage over those below you in the pecking order, you had to accept that you might have to do things that others would prefer you not to do — make rulings that would dash the hopes of others, give one person advantage over another, make people do things they would rather not do. All this came with seniority; all this came with working in a hierarchical organization; all this came with simply being human.
Alexander McCall Smith, 2022, from the book The Man with the Silver Saab
For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.
Martin Scorsese, 04 Nov 2019, from the essay “Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.”
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out. But this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich – small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
Raymond Chandler, 1953, from the novel The Long Goodbye