One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Does human sense of fairness match to standards of Capuchin monkey?

It is believed that in humans, upon entering into puberty stage, they start questioning their childhood beliefs. Now, I am realizing that how shallow is that questioning?  Actually, the life of this questioning is very brief and is soon shut by dominating social values that make individuals who dare to differ either based on their conscience or misunderstandings look freaky and odd. 

 It is not just biologists who have struck by close relatedness of organisms to each other. I guess, every culture has noticed these relatedness and have their own explanations. What I want to point out is that, these explanations are constructed very well to fit perfectly to the dominating social values and norms. This is just a manifestation of human arrogance that they want to see the whole Universe revolve around them. What we usually know as Anthropocentric world view. A perspective or world view that is not anthropocentric hurts human ego and arrogance.

 It is not unusual to not get struck by very close similarities of apes to humans. When I was just a kid and was not exposed to evolutionary theory, the only prevailing explanation was that the apes are descendants of the "cursed ancient nations" that had disobeyed God. Now, I understand that how arrogant humans can be  that they even go to extent of demonizing innocent animals. Of course, if one is not exposed to biological perspective, these explanations make them to think of apes as something to hated or at least something not clean/disgusting. It is another way of intimidating people to not question the dominating social values. 

If one follows the same line of reasoning in observing human behavior regarding animals one can understand clearly that why despite of availability of information and the ability of humans to think rationally, they  demonize each other (Animals yet have still long way to wait). It  really makes sense when I see the intimidation of dominating social values. To me, it appears that  most of  humans do not have the courage to maintain the freedom of their minds. Now look at this. Morality is one of the three basic constituents of Philosophy and it stands at the core of Theology. Why the morality should be so specialized and complex when everyone needs to have it? The simple reason is that the individual's sense of justice and fairness is thoughts as something dangerous to society and making things complex is a way of blocking free thinking (Mankind are generally lazy in thinking) by intimidation of complexity (You are not qualified to have a conscience; You need to be logician or specialized in religious studies to have good judgments).... 

 Watch these two interesting videos of experiments and decide what kinds of teachings are responsible for the sens of fairness in these monkeys? Isn't it the absence of intimidation? (Complex cultural constructs)

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What is really noticeable are protests against discrimination and inequality. When I watched these two videos, I really felt that by accepting the discrimination and rationalizing injustices either by legal, cultural and religious constructs, the mankind have lowered their conscience or moral standards and let me dare to say that human standards are not even matched to the standard of these Capuchin monkeys (because either way we tolerate or even accept different levels of discrimination)

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