Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—12
I have only heard the story—and some years ago—about the behavior of crabs in a bucket. I have no idea if it’s true. It never even came close to occurring to me to test it. Really I can’t say it has more credibility than your average urban myth. But it’s a good enough story it doesn’t matter.
Put the crabs you catch in a deep bucket, the story goes, and they will clatter around on the bottom until one tries to make an escape up the side of the bucket. Upon which desperate act all the other crabs will reach up and grab him and pull him back down. As I said, it doesn’t matter if it’s true—it’s true.
You could see it as a rescue: “Don’t go over the edge! You don’t know what’s out there! It could be Rod Serling and a wharf cluttered with corpses!” An act of mercy: “It’s a dangerous world out there! What will you eat? Where will you sleep at night?” An expression of love: “Don’t leave us! We can’t live without you!”
Right.
Don’t try to deny it—when we hear that story we instantly think not of crabs, but of people. And we all know we aren’t thinking any of the above things. We’re thinking: “You ain’t getting ahead of me, pal. Who do you think you are? Getting above your raising. If I’ve got to be stuck here, you’re damn sure going to be stuck here too.”
Right?
You think of most utopian visions, paradisiacal dreams, social theories and the hopeless bureaucracies created to implement them, all the abstractions we concoct to imagine Homo sapiens living peacefully together on a large scale—and it’s astonishing how they fail to take one factor—the only one that matters—into account.
Human nature.
Our behavior, our way of processing and responding to reality, our visions of what we are and what our brief presence in this colossal saga means, are the result of our evolutionary history—encoded in our genes. The countless decisions of our ancestors, the resulting success or failure of the survival of their DNA, from the earliest hominids up until this very moment, have created the way we think and made us what we are.
And it is either our great folly, or our saving grace, that we don’t like it. We seem programmed to dream up alternate visions of what we are, or could be, instead. Keeping in mind, of course, that dreaming up alternate visions of what we are is also what we are.
Is longing to be something more than a doomed organism only wishful thinking, or a step forward in the evolution of the human spirit? Or maybe both in the same bucket—the former doing everything it can to pull down the latter?
It’s only human nature to think you know what human nature is.
And you don’t have to be smart to know that nature doesn’t lie. Why? Because there’s no puppeteer. It just unfolds with a deeper, more unfathomable purpose that is not leading, but creating as it goes.
Whatever it is, I love it far more than I could love any imagined puppeteer.
There’s something more admirable about someone taking a stand for what they believe is right only because they themselves insist on it. Not following orders, not trying to live up to some moral code. But because they have an intuitive personal conviction. Morals are the more profound because they are the ultimate assertion of humanity and come not from above but from within ourselves.
There are hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, maybe infinite galaxies out there, and it’s hard to believe no kind of life appeared on any of the countless planets in them. But what if we are that one in a sextillion freak chance? What would that mean?
A serious promotion of the question “What’s the point?”?
A loneliness beyond understanding?
Or an infinitely more touching profundity to our existence?
He who attempts to escape the bucket is a fool. He who doesn’t attempt to escape the bucket is a fool.
July 1, 2022