Mankind is a Virus
This is the gist of one of my most favourite movie quotes of all time. It's from the first MATRIX movie, and it's from a soliloquy by Agent Smith.
"I'd like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realised that humans are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern... a virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet, you are a plague, and we... are the cure." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TboJUxTIaC4)
I don't agree with the last bit about machines being the cure, but the overall wholly negative mindset of this commentary appeals to my bitter realism. And I'm not the only one with this mindset. Google "mankind virus" and plenty of like-minded fodder appears. Proof of this parallel can be found beyond environmental concerns, to how we indiscriminately reproduce. How we hubristically treat other species, how we callously tread on each other.
But. I recently discovered that I'm (shockingly, even disgustingly) a pretty big fan of humanity. Or rather, I approve of the urges that make us tortured animals who reason. (Animals don't reason; presumably only humans do.) I just can't help but celebrate the things that make us human, that make us tragic, that make us unique. Wrap up some unsanitized humanity in the struggle to be better than the sum of our parts, and I'm riveted.
Certainly human urges can be nefarious and violent. Previous musings speak to my personal experience with those sharp, lethal expressions. Those baser urges are not appealing. It's the primal but seasoned urges that flash and flicker in my consciousness; the stuff that tortures us but also makes us stronger (to loosely paraphrase Nietzsche.) Any one of us can speak to why we struggle to be more than our natures: faith, previous experience, observations of other failed attempts to fight against the darkness inside. It doesn't matter to me WHY we fight it; it only matters that we embrace the reality of our flawed, difficult nature and fight to improve upon it.
The song "She Will Be Loved" has a lyric: "It's compromise that moves us along." I can't think of a more succinct and positive definition of the oh-so-human condition. I don't see my dogs compromising. I don't see birds or bees compromising. I see HUMANS compromising. And that is so, so, so beautiful to me. It takes such strength and compassion and positive intention to (truly) compromise. It takes such ... humanity ... to compromise.
This is a fundamental shift for me. Previously I've been mortified to be a member of this species. I have hated myself just for being human. Now, I suspect I'm standing at the edge of a chasm in my thinking, right at the edge looking down into something so deep I cannot hear the rock I drop into it hit bottom. It seems thrilling and dangerous and profoundly disturbing to stand here. To be human and long to be more than the sum of my parts.
But I'm ready to own this. If mankind is a virus? Then I'm a virus lover.