"I believe that every human being is potentially capable, within his 'limits,' of fully 'realizing' his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can accuse itself… I know only that murder is being done against nearly every individual on the planet."

--James Agee

Why do humans submit, by the millions, to levels of domination and disparagement of which they are clearly innocent as the most advanced of all animals on the planet?

Perhaps because they are the most advanced of all creatures on the earth. So thought the brilliant mythologist Joseph Campbell. Said he: the first humanoids had special gifts but special burdens-—they were capable of using tools and had a brain of significantly greater usefulness than had been seen in any earlier creature. They were far from a routine incremental advance over earlier members of their species: while chimpanzees had 98% of the same chromosomes and genetic makeup as the human, their most cooperative act is to pick fleas off their littermates. This loutish behavior falls far short of humans who can not only write operas but can discuss the act of composing in self-devised languages so sophisticated as to enable them to discuss the emotional steps that accompany their composition.

Strangely it is the human brain that is at the core of the problem: it does make humans the brightest of all species but it is also the principle cause of limiting adaptive skills.

The first "able man" — so named by Dr. L.S.B. Leaky because he could fashion tools — arrived 40,000 years ago. These first "humans" did not arrive by slowly evolving from other humanoids. They arrived almost overnight, a sudden, inexplicable mutation late in the Neanderthal period. The primary jump was the appearance of a large, sophisticated brain — promising to make the human the most capable of all species. But the new human brain was not without problems which will make it almost as much a burden as the blessing. Paradoxically, it would make the human the most capable of all species and, in some ways, the most limited.

Because of the huge brain, humans are among the most frightened of all species. Campbell found fear to be the core emotion at the heart of all major myths and rituals. At a deep level, fear pervades all human thinking. The new brain caused the problem: it was so large that few infants or their mothers survived the passage of it, and its big skull, through the birth canal. The high mortality rate at birth for the first humans was to great to suggest that a new species had arrived and would prosper. Nevertheless, the few who did survive were so superior to early humanoids that nature fought to preserve the new mutants. It eventually did so by delaying the development of the brain until after birth. Humans are born with the merest beginning blob of the brain which will be their principal coping mechanism.

Thus, compared to other mammals, humans are born prematurely — not by a day or a week or a month but by ten to fifteen years. It’s that long before humans can begin to play a useful adult role in their society. Other mammals, imprinted at birth, can join their packs and begin to play useful apprenticeship roles within weeks of entering the world.

This long human infancy and childhood is emotionally crippling. All humans are inept, dependent, ungainly and incomplete while waiting more than a decade for their brains to develop. Thus, children in every culture become painfully aware of their shortcomings.

The child learns to become chronically dependent, looking always to his parents as his only key to avoid his repeated public humiliation. When he discovers, in early childhood, that his parents will probably die before he does, he instinctively seeks a more permanent guidance figure — the ongoing group. Children seek roles in religion, schools, scout troops or gangs where they can exchange individuality for conformity to group norms — in the hope of avoiding the humiliation that comes from inept, embarrassing, wrong-again, individuality.

Campbell found only other animal with a similar pattern. The kangaroo is born so unformed and blob-like that its mother must pick it up from the ground with her mouth and drop him into her pouch. This pouch, complete with nipple, serves as the "external womb" while the baby kangaroo matures — much as the home serves the child.

The search for a similar pouch never leaves the human. Never. Young or old, from saluting the flag to bending the knee in church, all humans are on an endless search for certainty. In sum, the inordinately-long childhood we each spend waiting for our brains — and our competence — to develop, leaves us emotionally crippled: even as adults we remain so "permanently embarrassed" that our remembered ineptitude leaves us little room for individual certainty. Instead we make ourselves meaningful by attaching ourselves to institutions. These not only serve as surrogate parents, they are pouches offering a place to hide our ineptitude.

In the end, we identify so strongly with our pouches that we become our pouches: we are our religion, our family, our profession, our corporation, our nation. Each of us has a plantation mentality: it may not be perfect, but our plantation — i.e. nation, school, family, profession, company — is the best there is, and its ours.

There are no long-term answers in pouches or on plantations. There is no real growth. The dilemma of seeking the warmth and stability of a permanent pouch is that it’s neither productive nor permanent.

Said Gautama Buddha: "all human suffering comes from a belief in permanence."

These few observations confirm Ralph Siu’s thoughts that any attempts to convert indications of individual human suffering into a meaningful chart or graph accurately documenting human suffering, might well be off the chart — or off the wall — by several magnitudes.

Indeed, as we begin our earliest attempts to quantify human and/or group suffering to measurable constants we find ourselves in the dilemma of the four blind men and the elephant — each of them seeking to convert unrelated evidence of the elephant’s dimensions to a meaning beyond any possibilities inherent in the evidence offered. Also at work is the human unwillingness to be bold (note earlier evidence of lingering childhood fears) when facing a mass of evidence beyond normal comprehension. In an almost child-like way, humans revert to a kind-of fourth grade thinking to allegedly "simpler", "more reasonable" and "more provable" attempts to reconstruct the evidence so that it is defensible because of its provable "fundamentalist nature". In this kind of reasoning lies the current human dilemma at all levels! For fear of being "stupid", adults retreat to childhood truths. They do not have the courage or the boldness to realize that intuition is a higher form of knowing than juvenile rationality.

This approach is not meant to be dismissive of other approaches but is, rather, an approach offering a chance for a new way of confronting the problem —- a new way so startlingly complete that the problem of human suffering might yield to a (still unearthed) single-shot, possibly-systemic answer to the question.

That this suggests that we might consider re-designing the human at a species level seems more of an appropriate challenge than it does an arrogant suggestion. Indeed, the current human is so advanced compared to the post-Neanderthal human as to make the idea overdue rather than daring.