Survival - It Does A Body Good

For the longest time mankind has been fighting a battle against odds insurmountable.

It is the battle for survival.

Every time you eat a meal, every time you choose to fly overseas instead of swimming it, every time you copulate with a drunken skank you picked up in a bar instead of blowing your brains out, you are making a voluntary effort to ensure the continuation of the second most precious asset you have. Life.

But life is not one big, happy game of Smell The Cheese. Sometimes in order to win someone has got to lose.

If you've ever littered a highway before, you know how hard it was to make that choice. It was the choice between leaving your car untidy and crawling with germs that might lead to cancer or, nearly as tragic, your children's cancer; or dumping it out a convenient window and thus effecting a minor act of genocide against the indigenous-American crybabies who refuse to get with the times. You embraced the comforting notion that, to ensure your own continued existance, someone else must live in squalor, contract dysentery and die. The equations balance. The world maintains its equilibrium.

Axiom of Survival #1: Whatever doesn't kill you, though it might make someone else weaker, still makes you stronger.

In researching human survival, psychologists wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to dream up the assumption that our fear instincts came to us via evolutionary processes. This occurred long before we we got tired of our poo flinging shennanigans, and is thought to have developed as a mechanism for protecting most of our species from becoming Darwin Award nominees. Now, instead of grinning like an idiot when some dickweed lobs a rock or tactical nuke in your direction, you instinctively know to duck and cover. Your survival instinct then kicks into high gear, calling on every violent movie you've ever seen to lull you into a raging psychotic state. It does this by dumping lethal quantities of adrenalin and oxyacetaline into your blood stream, prompting you to retaliate before anyone has a chance to call you a "pussy".

More recently, librarians and really old people who still read books came to realize that both fear and survival instincts are central to the greatest tales mankind has ever told, and even some he hasn't! These concepts, whilst thought of as fundamental to dramatic storytelling, are unfairly considered dangerous "extremists" in the eyes of the illiterate Western capitalist invaders.

Axiom of Survival #2: Blowing yourself up does NOT make you stronger.

For those of you still unclear on what this post is about I offer the following graphic depiction of the human struggle. Scholars think it to be the greatest our civilization has to offer: