A World too certain to be Human

Guest Blogger - Ravi Varmann

Have you noticed how much we try to control life these days? From planning every detail of a wedding to predicting the gender of a baby before birth, we seem obsessed with certainty. We track, test, forecast, and optimize everything, as if life were a spreadsheet waiting to be perfected. We want guarantees, about careers, relationships, children, success, and even happiness. But when everything becomes predictable, when uncertainty is treated as a flaw rather than a feature, do we lose the magic of living itself?

https://underthetree63.blogspot.com/2026/01/a-world-too-certain-to-be-human.html

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In search of the Garden of Eden...

Eden (2024)
Director: Ron Howard

https://www.imdb.com/it/title/tt23149780/

This is another philosophical film. This time, it explores the formula for living life. Is it through inquiry, probing, and teasing out the best way to live based on collective thoughts, or by accepting that life is hard and meeting the challenges it throws at us? Or do we simply not care, embracing hedonism, indulging the senses, and enjoying as if there is no tomorrow? We have the choice of living like Plato, Sisyphus, or letting Dionysus be our guiding light.

While watching, I drew a parallel to 1966 Kollywood's 'Saraswathi Sabatham,' where the celestial troublemaker Narada incited the three goddesses of the Hindu pantheon—Parvathi, Lakshmi, and Saraswati—to quarrel among themselves. These three goddesses are said to govern courage, wealth, and knowledge, respectively. A turmoil ensued, with each goddess conferring her virtues onto subjects on Earth and testing them. Ultimately, it was concluded that no one virtue is more important than the others; man needs knowledge, wealth, and courage in equal measure to succeed.

Set between the two World Wars, the story begins with a disillusioned German civil servant, Heinz Wittmer, who arrives at the Galapagos Islands to start anew with his docile wife and their sickly son. Dr Frederick Ritter, another disillusioned soul dissatisfied with worldly pursuits, had previously settled there. He was a well-known figure in Germany through his writings and life experiences. Having abandoned his practice and modernity, he lives with his wife on the island, surviving through planting and hunting, with few necessities. Ritter and his wife are not pleased with the new arrival, fearing that soon the island will mirror the modern world they had left behind. They even suggested the most inhospitable place for them, hoping they would simply give up and return whence they came. Surprisingly, they persevere and survive through sheer hard work. 

Meanwhile, the island receives another unwanted guest. Baroness, a suspicious character with two lovers and a questionable past, arrives. She aims to construct a luxury hotel. She brings trouble along with her.

All three teams end up attempting to sabotage each other's efforts to reach their respective goals. Each believed their intentions were noble and justified, confident they would attain their ideal society. Yet, they failed to see the evil lurking within every individual. Ultimately, ego, greed, hubris, and the desire for power undermine their purported utopia. 

The Wittmer family of Floreana
https://happygringo.com/blog/the-galapagos-affair/

The question now to be answered is this: are humans so feeble-minded and weak that they need an objective code on how to live, or can they, through repeated trials and errors, find a common way to share their space here on Earth? Can utopia ever become reality? Will they ever find their Garden of Eden, or will they mess that up, too? Every utopian project carries the recurring risk of doom due to human frailties, stemming from the dormant reptilian mind that is waiting to be triggered by our primitive needs. 

No one mantra works all the time. One has to take a step back, reassess their progress and make amends. Sometimes these corrections may question the foundation of one's belief. For example, when his crops are invaded by wild boar and he is hungry, Dr Ritter, a self-proclaimed lifelong vegetarian, decides to barbecue a bull's head. 

(P.S. This is based on the real-life experiences of the Wittmer family, one of the pioneer white settlers of Floreana Island of Galapagos.)

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The Green Party?

“For a vegetarian, you seem to have a lot of demands,” I told myself. 

I am obviously out of sync with what being vegetarian means these days. At an age when everyone demands rights, I guess it is the same for vegetarians (and vegans, too). Rightly so too. Everyone deserves their place in the sun or rather on Earth, the rich, the economically challenged, the disabled bodies and pretty much everyone else. 

From the things that I understood in my impressionable age, by sticking around erudite adults, I assumed that one needs to control his primal desires to be a better soul. By suppressing innate desires to attack, devour and consume fellow members of the animal kingdom, it is believed people would pick up more brownie karmic points in the repeating cycles of rebirth. Hurting the sentiments of their own kind with their uppity attitude does not count. 

Of course, some have turned green for health reasons. Perhaps they had a pressing need to care for the environment or just ethical judgment of killing a fellow being with no religious undertones. 

My impression of how a vegetarian conducts himself is perhaps moulded by looking at a vegetarian friend, GR, a Brahmin and a vegetarian from birth. Whilst caught in the annual floods in Kelantan on our tour duty, we were left with just rice to eat. There were no vegetables to harvest, no dry land for hens to lay eggs and, of course, no fishing due to the monsoon. Chickens were off the menu. They had probably drowned or could not be transported from the barns. 

So my Brahmin friend ended up sustaining life with just rice and soya sauce. It went on for one week till normalcy prevailed. The rest of us had sardines, anchovies or fermented shrimp paste (belacan).

After laying down the ground rules of who can consume what and the differentiation between vegans, ovo-vegans and lacto-vegetarians, the fight is not quite over. You forgot Jains, who avoid tubers and roots. Then you have the nuevo-riche with gluten-free, lactose-free, sugar-free necessity. Eggs of free-ranging chicken are a no-no for some ovo-vegetarians, as their eggs could have been fertilized; hence, they are technically live animals. 

Vegans have claimed that a plant-only diet offers a multitude of health benefits, is better for the environment, and is the only ethical choice. While some of them respect the dietary choices of others, some of them proselytize with religious-like fervor and are working to get their diet adopted by all of humanity.

What started as a personal wish to control animalistic behaviours in us as we are what we eat and a wish to protect the environment has morphed into something laughable sometimes. It has become a fashion statement, an elitist snobbish gesture. Bending backwards to be nice to animals, they have no qualms about abusing fellow human to meet their dietary need. They also selectively choose to close an eye upon the cruelty done to dairy cows and the indiscriminate culling of male calves. 

At the end of the day, it is economics, stupid!

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Doggone Man!

Chief, Doggy extraordinaire
Credit: IMDB

I watched an episode of the documentary 'Forensic Files' where a dog, when it failed to protects its masters, still managed to bring justice to the masters via its DNA to expose the identity of their murderers. 

A group of gangsters had entered a couple's home mistakenly thinking that the stash cocaine that they were looking for was there. Chief, a pit bull-Labrador mix pet of the household, pounced at the intruders only to be subdued by a gunshot on its shoulder. The gangsters continued their harassment by shooting the wife dead and giving non-fatal shots at the husband. Despite his near-fatal wound, Chief pounced back on the shooter as he was aiming at his master's chest. The shooter turned and shot Chief right between the eyes. The couple and their pet succumbed to the injuries eventually. Despite all the extensive police investigations, the perpetrators could not be pinpointed. Finally, Chief's DNA and furs were instrumental in bringing a guilty verdict to the gangsters. Poetically, even after its death, a dog did his duty to bring justice to his Masters by bringing to light their killers. I am pretty sure that is what his owner would have wanted. 

That episode left a sour aftertaste after learning what a domestic animal could do for his master; serve even after his death. I could help but compare to the news that had been hitting the headlines recently. 

The Human Resources Minister recently made a spot check into some foreign workers' living conditions in a particular small glove-making factory and was shocked to discover that their hostels were comparable to cowsheds.

It is besides the point whether his officers were ignorant to all these and that the minister was living under a rock, this is how human beings treat their kind. The bosses depend on their workers' loyalty and toiling under extreme conditions to fatten the company coffers, and this is what they get in return - living conditions fit for cattle. 

Then there was a woman whom I met in the course of my daytime work who just enough to sneak herself into the country to work clandestinely in a small factory but not intelligent enough to care for her biological organs. When the employer, the biological seed contributor, after discovering her parturient state, hurried off and claimed ignorance. That is how much loyalty is reserved for a fellow human being. 

For a piece of discarded bone, a pat on its head and a walk with his leash, I guess a dog would serve its master with its life. That is much more what a thinking Homosapien would do for another.

P.S. The word 'Doggone' is a euphemism for 'Goddamn it."

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Laugh at others' miseries?

Flowers (BBC4; 2016)

Everyone starts life with so much of vigour and hope. They have certain expectations in life. They may have many aspirations and dreams that they may want of their family, their love ones and their offsprings. The dreams may just be sandcastles in the air, wishful thinking or a desire to satisfy their own unfilled dreams.

The problem is everyone has their own ideas how these ambitions should be attained. And they make their wishes known. They also want others to follow the path that they feel is a sure way to success. The problem is there are many ways to Rome, and everyone has their pace at taking the journey, Some rush from point A to point B with blinkers; other smell the fresh air and enjoy the bloom! Herein arise the problem. The inability to keep us with each others' expectations draw parties farther and farther apart. To somehow maintain the divine sanctity of the family unit, people go to great lengths to prevent it from crumbling even at the expense of losing their own sanity!

Only the British have the wit to make a joke of something as dark as a dysfunctional family. This dark comedy tells the tale of a famous children story writer who is feeling suicidal. In fact, his attempt at the noose proved unsuccessful when the rope snapped. Unfortunately, his demented mother witnessed the event from her window and tried the stunt herself. Clumsy as she was, it did not succeed as planned but she succumbed to her injuries later. To complicate matters, his music teacher wife's young student may be accusing him of what appeared like an inappropriate behaviour. His twin kids are at loggerheads all the time. The son despises his father and his sister whom he thinks are weird. This is compounded when the sister is caught by him to be intimate with another girl. The son himself is a social awkward. The wife is putting up a happy face trying to cover up all the unhappiness around the family. To add chaos to the mayhem is the writer's helper, his illustrator, a quirky Japanese character who himself is carrying an enormous baggage over his shoulder. Then there is an eccentric neighbour, a plastic surgeon, who has the hots for the writer's wife. So, is the builder. The plastic surgeon's 'daughter' is close to the daughter. In the midst of all these confusions, the screenwriter still manages to create humour! Marvelous.

Don't blame me, I am just following orders!

Experimenter (2015)

Now, how often have we seen seemingly good people doing incomprehensibly evil deeds which are atypical of their general behaviour and predisposition? Too many times, middle management officers had been cruel beyond comprehension just because they were given the authority to do so. Even though, these junior officials know it is wrong to do certain things, they still do it as long as somebody else is taking charge. This phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was a favourite subject of Dr Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist whose relatives perished in Hitler's concentration camps.

The question of the Holocaust and the justification for the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg trial must have been close to his heart.

Around the time of Eichmann trial, in 1962, in Yale, Milgram performed an ingenious social experiment (see Youtube clip below) which was later condemned as unethical, for invoking emotional stress is some participants, to show that most people would perform immoral things if ordered to do so by an authoritative figure. Not many would stand up against the majority to fight for what he feels is just. He went on to show this in other planned experiments. We are followers and can be easily triggered to go into an agentic state where we behave like an agent of the people in authority without taking any responsibility for the consequence of our actions. We blindly follow the order of someone in authority.

Many of his social experiments made it to the telly as seen in 'Candid Camera' series. The movie ends by saying that we are just puppets but with perception and awareness. Perhaps we can achieve liberation if we are aware of the strings that tie us down!

In order to get things running in an orderly fashion, the society needs to have appendages that ease administration. It cannot have all its officers having a mind of their own and doing things their way. Pandemonium would be the order of the day. Unfortunately, people is power may abuse this privilege to fulfil their own self-agendas. Herein lies the danger as seen around us. Charismatic sweet talking politicians and wayward theologian have a way to the heart of the followers to turn them into automatons to perform their dirty job. Philip Zimbardo's notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Study showed findings of the same effect. In that experiment, it was the situation rather than their individual personality that determines the participants' behaviour.

Good people do bad things through omission, coercion, with the desire to conform to society and not rock the boat!

All kiasu? Nobody wants to be the sucker!

The Golden Ball, a British game show is said to be able to show the conniving nature of humanity. In the last round of the show, the remaining two contestants face a face-off to win the jackpot money (lots of it). They are given two golden balls with either split or steal written on it. If both contestants choose split, the prize money would be split between them. If both choose steal, both go back with nothing. If one chose steal and the other chose split, the one who chose split will end up as the stupid fellow goes back empty-handed whilst the steal goes with the lion's share of the loot.
So the rush is for the contestant not to be the stupid fellow who is slouched in the chair disappointed! In the previous shows, even the girl-next-door goody two shoes looking blue eyed dumb looking blondes had taken their opponents for a ride and mean looking tattooed and moustachioed dudes had failed.
This guy, Nick had a final round face off with Ibrahim below. Nick's strategy was that he was adamant that he was to go for steal and see we played with emotions and managed to make everybody happy.

In the snippet, Ibrahim said that his father had told him not to trust anyone. The irony is that he grew up without a father. The money finally went for charity.

No hope for humanity

No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka (2013, Documentary)

Director: Callum Macrae

One of our lecturers (RS) back in university told us that the more we tried to hide something, the more people would want to see. And at that time, he was referring to the then sudden urge to preserve modesty or at least put a show of, by university students after 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. Once it is bare open, people would lose interest. Words of wisdom, come to think of it!

I decided to watch this award winning documentary which was aired last before the CHOGM meeting and Sri Lanka was to head the association that carries no real power but to remind (haunt) Britain of their glorious past! It only came to my attention after reading about its ban in Malaysia and the ongoing court case where the organiser of a public screening is charged. 

Just when you thought there was hope in humanity, comes this graphically disturbing images of people systematically eliminating a certain ethnic population of their own citizens. On one side there is a group demanding autonomy of the area they live and on the other, the people in power claim to hunt for perpetrators who take up arms for their course. The bottom line is that civilians are left dying left, right and centre.

The world is in a quandary. The Government denies any acts of wrongdoing contravening any international law. They claim that LTTE held their own people hostage and kill those who deflect. LTTE, who are guardians of the ethnic Tamil, and international UN workers categorically accuse the ruling government of drawing Tamils to areas deemed 'No Fire Zone' just to shell them to smithereens.

This rather graphically distressing film provide forensically certified photographic evidence of genocide in the land described by Arthur C. Clarke as the most beautiful land on earth. People are zeroed into safe zones and hospitals and are repeatedly bombed till there is no place to run.

 

Go ahead, watch it and spoil your whole day. It can happen anywhere. No race is immune from these. They say that the best of man comes in the worst of situations. I suppose a mob like situation, all humanity values go down the drain. The animalistic blood dirty preying fangs of survival which is deep seated in the DNA of us which survived through the prehistoric times comes into interplay!

Lena Hendry

You really think we learn from history?

The Living Dead (1995)
Written and Produced by Adam Curtis

#1. On the Desperate Edge of Now.
This episode takes through the victors attempt of suppressing history. The victorious Allied Forces successfully rewrote the history of the Germans. The Germans were portrayed as the pinnacle of all evil through the doctored Nazi propaganda films, conveniently blanking out their sufferings and deeds. Hermann Goering's testimony at the Nuremberg trial was sped through without listening to the justification of Nazi party's path of life. Goering's justification of why Germany took the path of Fascism over democracy to steamroll the country into modernity after WW1 when democracy had failed was just pushed aside. Instead, testimony from low ranking Nazi officers were given credence.
In a single trial, the Allied Forces justified to the world their march into an evil war to ward off an evil regime. The suffering Germans were too traumatized to fight the altered course of history but instead suppressed that time of their history. The US used that sanitized history to control the course of West Germany in effort to combat the growing prowess of the Communist Soviet in the Cold War era.
Even though the final account of the Second World War paints the Allied Forces as liberators of Europe, American veterans had recurrent nightmares of the brutality of their Army to young Germans and civilians.
They thought that part of German was long forgotten but it kept resurfacing like a blob of fetid air from the swamp. In 1968, their old wound was rekindled by the 1968 students' rebellion and Red Army uprising.
Just when the Europeans thought that they had left their savage past behind, the brutal events occurring around the Bosnian War in the 90s was evidence that their inner evil is very much still alive!

#2. You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough

It all started in 1938 when Dr Wilfred Penfield in Montreal, operating the brain for seizures, discovered various areas of the brain where information and memory could be stored. This discovery excited many psychologists, including Dr Ewen Cameron. After witnessing the terrible acts committed by man in WW2 during the proceedings of the Nuremberg trial, scientists were toying the idea of suppressing unpleasant memories. It further progressed to device ways to make a clean slate of the mind and implanting thoughts. With the Cold War looming, this process was used for 'brain washing' to spy into each other's territory with the American thinking that the Soviets were superior to them in mind manipulation. There were even theories which suggested that Lee Oswald was brainwashed by the Russians to assassinate JFK.
At the end of the day, all the presumed good work failed to suppress unpleasant thoughts. It only wrecked some lives. The dangerous  memories of man kept trapped deep in the crevices of the human mind.
Since mind manipulation was unsuccessful, scientists tried to develop artificial intelligence to do human's dirty work, especially in wars. A living example of this is the wide use of guided missile and intelligent bombs in the Iraq War.

#3. The Attic
This episode shows how Margaret Thatcher used the nostalgia of the glorious past of the British to boost the public morale to bring the country to greater heights. This similar technique was also used by Winston Churchill during the WW2 when he stood alone against the Nazi's advances.
Coldwitz Castle, a tight security prison in Germany was where Airey Neave proved to be a British hero in 1941. He managed to escape incarceration through a trap door that even the Germans did not know about. He later became an English MP.
In the 70s, Britain became chaotic with industrial strikes and the values held by Brits during the war slipping away. Its power was also slipping away.

10, Downing Street.

The same Neave was the play-maker, after being discontented with Labour Party policies, who introduced Thatcher as a possible PM candidate.
After winning the elections in 1975, Thatcher tried to instill patriotism and romanticism of their glorious past to boost economy. Even though this helped to boost the morale of the soldier during the Falklands War and gave them pride, the ghost of the past did come haunting them. The Irish, with their own side of history from their perspective were up in arms against them. Neave was killed in an IRA initiated car bomb.
In order to boost economy, the market was freed with minimal central interference. This was also their own undoing when panic selling crash the market on Black Monday in 1987 after a freak hurricane attack. She received the same fate as Churchill did. After being a key player in the course of WW2, reality hit Britain when the war was over. Reality hit them. The post war realized that they were literally bankrupt with only a past to boast about. Churchill lost the elections and was not even considered in the post war reconstruction of Europe.
(# In keeping with her obsession of remembering of the glorious past, Thatcher refurbished 10, Downing Street in the 18th century styled setting and she lived in the attic!)

Either way, the human species seem to be at the losing end. Forgetting old unpleasant history is sometimes necessary but not possible. It would still come and haunt you later in life. On the other end, we cannot go on living by basking in our laurels for long. Some old evil things in our past would catch up with us.
We have to look forward to move on....