“Relax, it’s ok to want to kill most people; it’s just not ok to actually do it”…

… Famous last words, spoken in a semi sober condition at one of the many evenings of forced merriment, combined with confessional displays of moral reckoning that the beginning of each and every new year occasions.

She happened to be addressing a friend who had fallen off the wagon of his frightfully exacting resolutions just four days into 2023, and insisted on making a histrionic exhibition of self-castigation by way of compensation for having sinned; his principal double-barrel pledge to himself had been to stop harboring ill will towards people and gossiping about them indiscriminately, something of a tall order when not only are a vast number of people essentially unlikable, but one of the only redeeming features of the unfailingly tedious social gatherings that take place in New Delhi is the relatively harmless game of ’Chinese Whispers’ that ensues.

Listening to him torture himself, for which even the bottle and a half of champagne that she had greedily imbibed did not provide sufficient anesthetic effects, she realized how intrinsically flawed we are as human beings, the traits of kindness and empathy altogether in opposition to our primal instincts, even if we are invariably led to believe otherwise via that somewhat deceptive process of sublimation – i.e. the suppression of those very same instincts in order to conform to society and ‘civilized behavior’ – to which we are unwittingly subjected from the day we are born.

Well at least It’s not our fault, she thought to herself, but rather the inescapable reality of the human condition, about which we are neither told the truth during our formative years, nor taught how to navigate the complexities and defects of our inner mechanics, which very few, without escape to monastic life, are ultimately able to bypass. Instead, we are rigorously schooled in acquiring all types of knowledge and information that do little to foster the quality of humaneness, and thereby our evolution as human beings.

Having struggled with and condemned herself for a large part of her life, it was at the somewhat advanced age of 46 that she at last, not only began to apprehend the real challenges of being a human being but also the reasons and purpose of a lifetime, when faced with what was the first of the greatest losses that she would endure, the death of her father, whom she watched confront and determine his own gut-wrenching end with both a poetic sense of destiny and remarkable karmic accountability, but without either self-flagellation or apology in a last ditch attempt for salvation, for he had given it his best in his lifelong tussle with himself.

While ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that human beings are born amoral, 19th century neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud preferred to call it a morally blank state, in both cases the implication being that right from our inception we are sentenced to an eternal conflict between our biological impulses and learned social behaviors, the former relentlessly in search of both expression and freedom from the shackles imposed by the commandments of collective living, aka society.

According to Freud, two of the primary impulses of the human being are the need for love and avoidance of pain, both of which we are not only unfairly, but also much to our detriment taught to tame, the former by virtue of morality and etiquette, the latter consequence of a widely championed but altogether artificial stoicism that is erected on the rubble of quashed sentiment; the human being is thus left with an overwhelming sense of frustration and feels subconsciously compelled to ‘do unto others what has been done to himself’.

Today the need for love has been even further trampled upon by the scramble for relevance and popularity, and the avoidance of pain irreversibly compromised by the involuntary renunciation of personal privacy.

It is ultimately only by liberating ourselves from the repressive moral and ethical standards set by man himself, and not only observing but also experiencing, early enough in life, the flaws of our inner engineering that we can hope to truly transform, and not by embarking on a cycle of ‘relapse, regret, reform, recovery’ each time we betray an incarcerating ‘rule of civility.’

After all, as 18th century English poet, Alexander Pope once wrote in his essay on criticism …

“… to err is human, to forgive divine.”