A Kind of Savagery
(I)
By Francisco C. Castro
Let me begin with a description of a belief that has been having a strong
influence in our society. The influence is subtle; pointing it out may not come
easily. What is this belief?
Well, it is the belief in the primacy of the head…and just the head. It
tells us that the best way to live is to use our heads. That is all. There is
nothing else…nothing else aside from our heads. In other words, the “head
belief” tells us that the best way to live is to think well, be rational, be
lucid, know exactly what we are doing with ourselves. Know what we do with our
money, for example. The assumption here is that whenever we, as purchasers,
spend our money we know what we are doing. Then, of course, the assumption also
is that the person selling to us also knows what he or she is doing. We both know
what we are doing, we buyers and sellers. We deal with each other lucidly.
Now, our daily life does not necessarily reflect the dominance of this “head-belief”.
We do not have access to everything that is in the minds of others. We do not
know all their motivations when we relate with them. They too do not know all
our motivations towards them. Is it not true that at times we discover that in
the sandwich that we order in a restaurant there are ingredients that harm us?
We are not informed. We might be having fun eating that chunk of meat. Meanwhile,
someone in the food business is in the practice of adding that delicious but
toxic substance to our meat sandwich. But is it necessary inform us? As we chew
and enjoy the sandwich we really do not fully know what we are doing to our
bodies. Enjoy and do not investigate.
Take another example. Do we not, at times, experience being short-changed
in a grocery or a mall store? … or in a public ride? Oh, so we are told that it
is only a few centavos. Yet we simply do not realize what is being done to us. It
can also happen that a customer does not pay full amount to the store. Things
like these happen and they illustrate that not all transactions are based on “rational
behaviour”.
The “head-belief” tells us that a certain amount of ignorance is
acceptable and we need not worry too much. Why? Well, we need not worry too
much because there are other people, experts in our ignorance, who will lucidly
take good care of our lack of information. Believe that they know what they are
doing and we can simply trust them. By trusting them we eventually know what we
too are doing. Our trust is a kind of lucid behaviour attuned to the “head-belief”.
Furthermore, what we feel and desire do not matter as much as what our
heads say. The head is superior to the heart. Most important of all is the head.
It is curious, but if we look closely we can note that we operate in
daily life using more than our heads; yet we are made to accept the fact that
it is only our heads that matter most. The things we do involve more than our
lucid and rational thinking. We also feel with emotions that we cannot quite
identify. We also get angry and for very obscure reasons. We are pleased at times
and we do not know why; we simply feel ok, period. At times we follow our
hunches and make decisions based on those very non-lucid hunches. We do not
always have a rationally articulated view of what we do. Take the example of
our eyes. Our eyes see more…they see beyond just the focus of our present
attention.
But then somewhere along the way we are told that the unclarified and
obscure corners of our lives can be corrected
by the head. What the eyes see as “more” are, very likely, to be treated as
unimportant and perhaps illusory. They have to be adjusted—corrected—so that we
look at the world in a specific way. Let me put it bluntly, the crucial
question is: “will our eyes make money for us?”
There is a danger in the “head-belief”. It makes us attempt to live for survival. Whereas daily life is
marked by the wealth of experiences unfolding without cease, the “head belief”
tells us to focus on just one important activity: to survive. Ok, fine, there are many other things—feelings,
hunches, desires, etc. But “will they make money”? If not, then get over it.
Use your head. Life is a matter of surviving. It is all about using the head…and
consequently “simply surviving”. In a society where everybody is “simply
surviving”, we see a form of relationship which is savage. It is savagery in a rather
sophisticated form. The lioness digging her teeth into the flesh of a Wildebeest
may look “savage”. But of course she is not savage, she is just being what she
is. But the society marked by the “head-belief” can indeed be savage. This
society allows for cheating, withholding information, duplicity, corruption,
ecological ransacking, violation of rights and war. Such are signs of savagery
in which people strive to survive. We note the partnership between savagery and
survival. Now, I am beginning to sound very strange, admittedly. So, allow me
to elaborate. I hope that in my next essays I can be clearer though not
necessarily that lucid because the
bigger parts of my reflections are hunches.
