We are not like them

"We are not like them", she said. "Well I'm not like you either" I thought to myself.

It is human nature to want to aggregate in groups that have something in common, and that usually revolve around common roots and beliefs. But as we can usually observe, while some groups form, others separate, and new ones are born all the time depending on external conditions.

WHY.

We humans have this basic, instinctive need to travel in packs, a characteristic that we share with many other animals. While this - now futile - instinct has persisted for favoring survival in the past, we still haven't gotten over it and nor will we anytime soon. Elliot Aronson was the first to refer to the human being in his famous work as "The Social Animal". That is after all what distinguishes us from any other animal; and although we might lack the organization that other animals have, we sure focus a lot of our time and energy to stay integrated in a social organization we don't really need; and although it is this organization that made humanity the supreme species it is today, we can clearly see that this particular social arrangement is trivial and futile.

When I say all that, I'm not talking about human relations and their need for contact with other humans in small circles, but about the whole multidimensional, gridded, and varying hierarchy of society.

It starts out from the youngest age and goes on to adulthood. Though we might find some schools that escape this hierarchic madness, we still can't but find kids who get together and think of themselves as superior to others, and exclude other kids on the sole condition of them being different. This might not be representative of our adult society but it gives us an idea about the inborn instinct that accompanies the man since its birth.

In adult life, the criteria differ, but we still have that same exclusion/inclusion. Money adds itself as a condition to enter a social group, and we still find the same old fear of the Other and the comfort when being surrounded by people who are like us. And what makes it even more ironic is the fact that the more exclusive the group, the less humanity governs the relations between its members.

But we can affirm that after all, it's not a matter of hierarchy as much as a matter of belonging. Of course there is always the ineluctable feeling of superiority of the group one as an individual belongs to, but this only goes back to the natural born vanity of human beings.

At it all goes back to the jungle law and the protected feeling we get when in a mass.

We are all a bunch of civilized sheep.