What is Man?

There is the stubborn question passed from generation to generation since antiquity: what is man? Every few decades, a sharp mind attempts to crack this code from a unique vantage point, without forgetting all the bright minds before it that made their attempt. Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Pascal—the list is endless. We have made so much progress in many avenues of our existence, yet, we can't seem to make a simple step in this one. We should rejoice in this fact, because it feeds our grandiosity; what better way to confirm your own depth than failing to understand yourself?

What is man? I don't want to go into the details of what has or hadn't been determined; I’ll spare you the intellectual masturbation. What I want to do, gladly, is to wallow in the mystery, to show you (and myself in the process) how there is no such thing as uniformity in human behavior.

Human behavior is not Spinoza’s Ethics, where the propositions are guided by axioms; it is complex, a labyrinth of compromises and impulses. Thomas Hobbes said that human behavior is mainly driven by fear and self-preservation, a view later echoed by figures such as Napoleon and even Nietzsche . Simple enough, deep enough. If you do a quick introspection on all your actions, you'll find that this claim is true to some extent. Take an action as simple as tossing a coin into a street beggar’s cup. If you're a Christian, you may do so because of the fear of God, since the Bible requires that you help the needy, and failure to do so when you have the means is a sin. You also do so because of self-preservation; it doesn't hurt to be in God’s good graces, and there's that warm-glow effect you experience when you help others. However, this line of thought isn't limited to believers; even non-believers find themselves helping the needy for reasons such as approbativeness and that same warm-glow effect.

But this “man,” do you think he's that simple, that homogeneous, that his entire behavior is dictated by fear and self-preservation? It will take us more than an eternity of logic and rationalism trying to find the reasons behind human behavior, and we will find none. Man doesn't fully commit; sometimes he is rational and logical, sometimes he is irrational and illogical. He does things for this reason and that, and every person is unique in behavior.

Take addiction, for instance; where does it fall? Fear or self-preservation? Some would argue that it's due to the fear of reality that people escape to the comfort of drugs. Another would say that through that escape, the addicted are pursuing some high, a state of good feeling, thus self-preservation. But addiction is another thing altogether. It is akin to autopilot, whereby a person has very little control over himself. For that reason, it's not fair to judge human behavior using something as unstable as addiction; we'd do well to ask ourselves what happens before addiction. Why would a person choose to experiment with cocaine, weed, or alcohol? Some do it because their friends tell them to, others because they’re already under the influence of another substance, and some for no reason at all. At this juncture, fear and self-preservation become insufficient to blanket the fecundity and range of reasons behind human behavior.

Sometimes we act out of impulse; sometimes we plan in advance. On some occasions we seek revenge; on others, we forgive and forget. Sometimes we save lives, and sometimes we kill for no reason at all. A man will love his step-children yet hate his own. The reasons are fuzzy, and even if people tell us their reasons, there is no model to confirm they’re telling the truth, because most of the time, even they have no idea what's going on.

Human action is not a systematic endeavor. It doesn't look like this: thought, then action, then more thought, and repeat. Sometimes it's action, then more action, and many other variations of that model. Psychologists, and even we ourselves, want nothing more than uniformity in human behavior. We want a blueprint for dealing with people and solving conflicts, and the easiest way to do that is by being able to predict what a person will do next based on our little handbook of human behavior. Person A was abandoned by his parents as a child and bounced from one foster home to another. So how does this person interact with others in adulthood? He avoids them because he's afraid of getting close. Yet there are many people raised with maximum love by both parents who grow up into avoidants. Why? Like Peaky Blinders’ Tommy Shelby says, “Because we fucking can, and if we can, we do it!” Man does anything because he can; that's why he has no problem getting into crime, doing the devil’s bidding. He's exercising his privilege of  free will

So what is man? There are no definitive answers; we can only postulate that man is a complex animal. And human behavior? The day we find a definitive answer for man is the day human behavior achieves some uniformity, because the latter would be guided strictly by the former. As long as man remains a mystery, so too will human behavior. Our failure to answer that question only deepens the mystery of humanity. And perhaps that’s why we keep asking it; we want to restate that there is no certainty of what man is, thereby feeding our delusions of grandeur.