What Does It Mean To Be Human? (Part 1)
Being a young person with not-so-much experience in the "real world," I may not have the best answer for this and you may just want to click away right now. Go look at John Green’s or Bill Gates’ answers if you want answers that you can quote and not be asked "Who wrote this?" After all, those are people that are worth looking up to. Anyway, on to the answer.
What
does it mean to be human? It’s one of those questions where the teacher
would say: “There is no right or wrong answer.” It's one of those deep questions that would make me sit and stare at a wall for hours on end. The point is that it's not easily answered.I believe that what makes us human is our mistakes or rather our ability to make them. Nobody on this planet Earth has ever not made a mistake. It's the inevitability of making mistakes. We learn from our mistakes, and that’s also part of what makes us human. Now, I’m not saying that we were born to make mistakes, because we weren’t. The purpose of life I’ll save for another post. Mistakes are things that happen in our lives regardless of how "good" we act.
The particular example that comes to mind for people not being treated as if they were human was the pre-Civil War era of America.
We (Americans) treated slaves as if they weren't people. Their education was illegal, they couldn't leave the plantation, and they had no constitutional rights whatsoever. I understand that we, in 2015, have more knowledge than people did in 1848, however people then knew that slaves were homo sapiens, didn't they? The belief at the time was that because they were black, they were less human.
No. Even today people without empathy are taken care of. The selfish taught to love and be selfless. Now what does this say about us as a species?In this day and age, what would make a person less human?An absence of empathy? Selfishness?
Another example of the application of this question was explored through the American TV show, Battlestar Galactica.
Battlestar Galactica was a show about how humans created robots called the Cylons. The Cylons eventually became self aware which led to a devastating war. The Cylons and the Humans looked the same. That being said, it took a special detector to detect the Cylons among the Humans. I'm not going to reveal any more of the plot because I believe in people discovering TV shows, not on the internet, but from the TV shows. Anyway, back to the point.
There was not much that distinguished the Cylons from the Humans. The Cylons could feel. They had emotions. Just like the Humans. This caused the Humans to question whether killing the Cylons was ethically sound.
My point in posting this was to get some reflection out. I thought of posting this when I saw the Big History contest. Since I don't exactly live anywhere at this point in time (and when I do live somewhere, it won't be in the States or Australia), I decided to post it in a blog post form instead of a video. If you guys want a video version of this with more, please tell me in the comments. If you want to discuss what was said, please tell me in the comments!
This is part one. There will be more to come.
By the way, a vlog should come out today. I'm still editing.
Cheers, DFTBA, and Good Night.
My point in posting this was to get some reflection out. I thought of posting this when I saw the Big History contest. Since I don't exactly live anywhere at this point in time (and when I do live somewhere, it won't be in the States or Australia), I decided to post it in a blog post form instead of a video. If you guys want a video version of this with more, please tell me in the comments. If you want to discuss what was said, please tell me in the comments!
This is part one. There will be more to come.
By the way, a vlog should come out today. I'm still editing.
Cheers, DFTBA, and Good Night.
