kelt9

Ah, well. I've been disillusioned with humanity for most of my life. I think what I hate most about them is the wasted potential. We as humans are able to achieve so much yet do so little. The next Da Vinci is probably wasting his life in front of the telly, watching the learning channel. The next potential Maslow is stuck watching Jerry Springer.

Americans are fat and lazy with convenience. We don't have to hunt, gather, fabricate, or learn. All is accessible to us in our modern cesspool of perceived tolerance. I say 'perceived' because all it takes is one true individual to throw off the day of thousands of supposed compatriots.

I'd better get busy before I become one of my own examples! I'm a damn good painter, martial artist, even musician. Looks like the future I want for myself hasn't materialized yet and I have ultimately myself to blame.

In answer to the question, I would only suppose that rats would refer to themselves as ratkind.

Here's a question back: Isn't being just like everyone else the same as being nobody at all?

I understand your frustration about the huge amount of wasted talent. Sadly I think this has always been the case. Perhaps as a consequence of my fondness for reading science fiction novels when I was in my teens, I used to think that one day we people wouldn't have to spend as much time working and they could spend the extra time studying, researching, writing or generally developing their talents and broadening their horizons. However, I was rather naive in my teens. If you give people more free time they generally tend to fritter it away in front of the TV watching soap operas or laughing while the obese rednecks fight on Jerry Springer. Nowadays I find that time just flies by really quickly and when I get home from work, it is really easy to just sit down 'for a few minutes' only to slip into a daydream and find that I have just lost an hour or so of my evening (although personally I think that an hour spend daydreaming is an hour better spent than one spent watching soap operas etc).
I think that the saddest thing is that people resist any attempt to broaden their horizons. One reason for sending children to school is to broaden their horizons and to make them aware of the fact that there is a whole glorious universe out there for them to learn about. In reality, getting good grades at school is not 'cool' and children who study hard tend to be looked down upon or bullied whereas children who mess around and skip lessons to go and smoke behind the bike sheds tend to be more readily accepted by their peers. This is tragic because it means that some part of our culture encourages children to trade their future for the transient adulation of the crowd. I think that this pattern has effects on a person's development that a lot of people never get over. Many adults are suspicious of teachers and intellectuals and far more trusting of people who act like they are 'down-to-earth' (note who is currently the president of the USA ... he certainly doesn't come across as an intelligent chap but he managed to get elected twice).

It makes me think of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" or a film I once saw called "Harrison Bergeron".

The problem is that you can't change the whole world. The world may be full of stupid people or narrow-minded people or people who could achieve so much more but who somehow end up doing an unchallenging job day-in, day-out. Its easy to fantasise about what the world would be like if such and such were to happen but at the end of the day, the sad fact is that humans are animals not angels. We still carry most of the same genes that we did when we first began to live in cities thousands of years ago (circa 4000 BC, I think). Just think, all of our civilisation, our science, art, religion, trade, laws - all of it has developed over about 6000 years. This may seem like a long time, but in evolutionary terms it is the blink of an eye and humans are basically the same creature that they were 6000 years ago. Our society may have changed a lot in that time, but we have not and so we still approach things with the same set of instincts that we always have. We want food, sex, shelter and pleasure.

A while back some scientists did some experiments to study the way that rats respond to pleasure (sorry if this offends you). The experiment involved putting each rat in a cage with a switch/lever in one part. If the rat pressed the lever down, it received stimulation to a particular part of its brain known as the pleasure centre. the scientists found that the rats kept pressing the lever to keep getting their pleasure centres stimulated and they kept pressing it and pressing it, not even bothering to eat or sleep. When I first read about this experiment, I was struck by the fact that human behaviour is driven by the need to stimulate the pleasure centre. Humans also will keep on doing whatever is necessary to stimulate their pleasure centres to the detriment of their own well-being. It seems to me that the human addiction to short-term pleasure at the expenses of long-term well-being is probably one of the underlying reasons for many of society's problems whether we are talking about obesity, violence (yes, I have met people who admit that they get into fights on a Friday night because they enjoy it), drug addiction or just plain old under achievement.

Anyway, I need to go to bed now as it is 1 am here in the UK and I have to be up at 6 am.