From Barter to Slaughter

Charles Darwin said, "Evolution is the key to survival”. It definitely makes perfect sense in term of biology. We survived during droughts and floods because we learnt to hunt and eat animal meat, thus evolving our dietary routine. As a result, the appendix in humans is practically of no use. We survived the ice age because we learnt to make fire from rubbing stones. As a result, humans now take advantage of it and make their surroundings as comfortable as desired. We learnt to settle down in one place and grow crops, so that we wouldn't need to run around gathering food. As a result, civilisations came into existence. Therefore, there are a few things, which we’ve learnt over the last few millennia, and have evolved due to the requirements of survival, and those evolutions have been very advantageous to us in many ways.

However, think about the same thing with money in the picture, and you'll say otherwise. Early civilisations depended on necessities, so they settled down in areas where these were in abundance. However, as civilisations advanced through ages, we fulfilled our needs, and our desires changed. From 'needing' just land, crops and water, we moved to 'wanting' comfort. Whereas the earliest of civilisations simply exchanged goods using the barter system, the advancing civilisation increasingly felt the need for something that set the value of different things, differently. Money then came into picture. Many people say that although humans survive today, humanity began to vanish the moment money came into picture. We slaughter lives to earn money. We cheat hard-working people into buying our products just so that we can achieve our sales targets. We instil fear into the minds of people to be over-cautious and spend unnecessarily on safety. We make people sign up for jobs that need tonnes of effort, but end up paying them a fraction of what they deserve. It all becomes a vicious cycle really. We start running a race where, to stay in the race, we are continuously accelerating. We keep pushing things to their extreme limits, and then we push a bit more and a bit more.

I think it all starts in our head. Our brain craves for objects of desire, and upon feeding that thought, we are giving into the trick played by our brain. We run blindly without any sense of direction, without any knowledge of our actions and the effects of our actions on those around, and ourselves importantly.

I think humans are beautiful creatures. We need to embrace ourselves- our mistakes. Accept them, learn from them, stop running, deciding, thinking, and living by our hearts. We need to start running, deciding, thinking, and living by our mind. And when that happens, heaven will descend upon this world of ours.