Organization: is there anyone out there who can even begin to envision a world without it? When you really think it through, entropy is such a dynamic paradox. While the universe naturally disorders over time, fragments of that disordered mess resist. They frantically attempt to re-organize the jumbled mess, only to find that entropy doesn't play by the book.
Whether you're religious, spiritual, an atheist, or someone who just kind of "chills," we can all agree that the world we live in is articulated with such genuine care and exquisite engineered structure that we as residents have created cultural norms influenced by the same principles we observe in nature. The result? A breed of consciously, intellectual human beings who actively evaluate and interpret their world via their ability to organize, categorize, stereotype, and archive.
Where are we today?
Though we've definitely advanced in terms of technology, our human spirit, and animal instinct have not changed all that much. Even today we depend on our ability to organize our frantic mind's and the content we're exposed to. It's how we interpret life.
Think about the first time you ever saw a bird. You quickly realized it was different from yourself, given your ability to analyze in an orderly fashion. You picked up on anatomical differences, and archived the visual memory. Later, someone may have helped you further by telling you "Oh, that's a bird! Buh-er-duh; bird" and oua la, a labeled, accessible file of that information was stored. Hypothetically speaking, a few days later you stumble across a blue bird. After analyzing it's general anatomy; wings, feathers, a beak, and referencing the files in your archive, you understand that what you're looking at is a bird; a different color, but it is in fact, a bird.
Like this the human brain analyzes information and creates archetypes as it goes along. You'd think for a moment, "Wow. We beat entropy!" Here's the thing: entropy always wins.
Entropy swung back at us with outbursts of racism, hate, scapegoating, and hypocrisy. It used our tactics against us. How ironic is it that the very skill-set used to bring order into our world has always come in the way of doing just that.
Our planet is organized into various continents, countries, cultures, races, orientations, styles, economic systems, do I dare even continue? With all this disorder it is impossible and even ignorant to expect the human brain to abandon that which it thrives on.
It's beautiful to think of a world "without the labels," but it's those labels that saved our ancestors from poisonous snakes, and sketchy berries.
Racism is bred by the labels. We create these negative archetypes of folk who are different than us and immediately categorize these people under a demeaning label. "Everyone under this label does such, and such." This is where we stereotype and assume everyone under this "label" is a threat to our survival. Hate is accumulated and racism, sexism; all the ism's and phobia's you can think of, are born.
Does this mean we're pre-programmed to be "horrible people," I say no.
We may be pre-programmed to categorize, judge, assume, and stereotype, but the result of this process doesn't have to be negative.
If we want to fight hate, our target is ignorance.
Envision that first bird you ever saw again. Needless to say that first experience may have been a little alarming. After all you didn't know what a bird was, what they ate, or anything about their lifestyle. Once the existence of birds had been fully registered into your archive, had you not taken the time to inform yourself on, well, birds, you may have associated negative feelings with all things, 'bird'. "All birds wanna do is shit on our car widows!" "I swear these stupid birds wake up at four in the morning just to piss us off." Wheres an informed person would understand that birds fly, and go when they go, wherever that may be. Their circadian rhythms may differ from yours and thus their lifestyles are bound to differ.
Note: Inform yourself before giving into evolution. Your cerebral cortex did not evolve for you to sit there giving into evolutionary instinct without utilizing abstract thought.
If a bird is just a bird despite it's external or internal orientation...doesn't that just make us all, well, human?
