The Boxes We Are In

The human program is comprised of countless rules that we knowingly and unknowingly learned while we grew up and that we continue to learn as we live, behave, and have social contacts. Each rule can be visualized as a box we are in.

I spent years doing nothing but looking for boxes. There are simple to find boxes like the “Austrian food habit” box, which I sit in because I grew up in Austria. If I would have been moved to Japan early in life, I would have grown up with Japanese food and thus would sit in a “Japanese food habit” box. Another box I was in until my mid-twenties was the “always eat breakfast” box. I started each day with a breakfast without ever asking myself if indeed I was hungry. Then I read a book about how healthy fasting is. The book explained that the breakfast is but the breaking of the nightly fast and suggested that by skipping breakfast one extends the nightly fast by a few hours, which was argued to be healthy. This argument convinced me, so I left the “always eat breakfast” box – but adopted the “never eat breakfast” box instead. Over the years I also found countless boxes that told me how to behave in certain social situations.

During years of exploring my behavior and human behavior in general I found very many boxes that I am in and that everybody else is in as well.

These boxes develop while we grow up. A child simply copies the behavior of the people that it sees, just like the baby eagle in “The Other Story of the Eagle in the Chicken Coop” (Blog Post of 12/1/2019) copies the behavior of all the other birds. We inherit not just the genes. We inherit also the boxes. The genes come from our parents. The boxes come from everybody we perceive in real life, on TV or internet, they even come from fictitious people that we see in movies or computer games or that we read about in books. We cannot avoid inheriting these boxes. Our parents got their boxes from their parents and peers. And so on. Our boxes represent the behavior of thousands of generations more recently augmented by the fantasies of authors, filmmakers, computer game producers, etc.

These boxes constrict us. They make our human chicken program.

What does this do with us? Since biologically we are animals, our behavior is rooted in animal behavior. Therefore, we need to ask: How does an animal behave when it is constricted? It uses aggression to break free.

We naturally have a craving for the contentment with life that we experienced in early childhood. This craving lets us experience the boxes as constricting. Therefore, the boxes cause subliminal aggression. This aggression accumulates over time and, eventually, a small cause can be the straw the breaks the camel’s back.

The result can be an outburst anywhere between banging one’s fist on the table and running amok. The result can as well be an “inburst” anywhere between a flu and cancer.

Ultimately, there is only one solution: Get rid of the boxes.
 
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One may argue that without rules there would be chaos and people would start killing each other. But this is only partially true.

Consider a group of very small children. They just would have fun playing together. They would never start killing each other unless they would copy this behavior from seeing people killing each other.

According to human genealogy, we carry both a bonobo and a chimpanzee in us, which genetically are our two closest relatives. Chimps are aggressive and beat, rape, and kill each other. Bonobos are friendly and play together. The human program brings out the chimp. Without the human program we could live a bonobo style life. The transition can only happen if enough individuals have the courage to leave their human boxes behind.


First photo by Bernhard Kutzler.
Second photo by Andre Tan on www.unsplash.com.

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See related video on my YouTube Channel:

          "Familiarities Bring Forth Behavior"

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See related TEDx talk from Allison Paradise:

          "Our litte world"