Kam Zarrabi
February 2023

Sitting in my living room the other day, I was watching through the glass sliding door a pair of doves, a quail family herding a number of newly hatched chicks, several curved-bill thrashers and a few spotted towhee, playfully picking through the gravel-covered backyard for the birdseed I scatter there every morning. Even though there was plenty of birdseed to go around, I got a kick out of observing the sometimes fierce competition among the birds to reach every tiny morsel.

Then I saw our neighbor's white cat suddenly appear out of nowhere, grab one of the baby quail, and disappear behind some bushes. Minutes later, the hunter reappeared, licking her chops, and finished her breakfast by drinking from the birdbath in the yard.

The cat then lay calmly down on the warm gravel and began to groom itself as cats often do after a good meal. There was no sign of concern or remorse in the cat's face for having taken the life of a harmless, defenseless little bird. No apology was needed; the cat was simply doing its natural thing, the same kind of behavior characteristic of all life forms on earth from life's very beginnings; eat or be eaten! The "Golden Rule" for survival was very simple: Do unto others before they do unto you.

Then humans, Homo sapiens species, showed up on the scene. We don't refer to our species as sapient for nothing; we have a peculiarly heightened level of intellect that has generated our ability for deeper thought, self-awareness and, yes, the sense of conscience. Of course, some other species of life have evolved other special attributes, such as the sea turtles and the salmon that somehow navigate back to where they were born, years after roaming the oceans; but we regard our gift of intellect as far superior, simply because we are doing the judging!

Well, this great attribute, our human intellect that has generated our sense of conscience, didn't come cheap or with no strings attached; a major dilemma had to be overcome. Like other species of life on earth, we also need to struggle to survive and procreate in order for our species to continue onto the future, or this whole subject would be pointless.

So, quite naturally, we humans are also programmed to do everything that we perceive as advantageous to us as individuals or as groups, tribes or nations, just as that white cat mentioned above does, or as the lions, hyenas and chimps do in the wild, except that in our case that "conscience" gets in the way! The cat that ate the baby quail had no problem; it wasn't hampered by any "conscience"; but we do have that problem. That is, quite clearly, a nasty handicap that had to be somehow overcome; and overcome, we have!

The same intellect that gave us that troublesome sense of conscience has, fortunately for us, a hidden most powerful accessory toolbox where our antidotes to real-life's dilemmas are stored. This toolbox contains our illusory mental constructs that act as the safety valves whenever the pressure on our conscience that creates that bothersome sense of guilt becomes too much to bear. The most powerful, as well as the most often used, of these tools is what I'd call our illusion of self-righteousness.

I recall a lecture I gave some years back at one of my adult education courses I used to conduct in San Diego, California. The lecture was about the concept of self-righteousness. I started by asking if there were people among the audience who regarded themselves as immoral, unethical, dishonest, or plain evil, to raise their hand. I didn't see a single raised hand. I then asked that all those who knew people who were evil and dishonest to raise their hand. There were many raised hands this time. Then came my final question: Suppose, I said, we could round up all those whom the audience regarded as dishonest, unethical and evil and asked them the same series of questions; what would this group's responses be like? The somewhat surprised reaction of the audience was an indication that we seldom ever think about this natural human trait: Self-righteous we all stand!

The fact is, even those who have admitted to, and have been legally convicted of, committing a crime, create some rationale or creative justification for their wrongdoing to dampen the corrosive sense of guilt, which would do more damage to one's psyche than the pain of the coming punishment for their action.

Now, what would it have been like if our intellectually elevated ancestors, endowed with the gift of abstract thought, self-awareness, and the resulting sense of conscience, lacked the ability to take advantage of the illusory tool of self-righteousness?

Long before our metaphysical, philosophical and, yes, our religious mental constructs kicked in to better rationalize our instinctive impulses in a more civilized sounding language, our distant ancestors had little problem appealing to their bare-naked sense of self-righteousness while competing against the beasts, as well as many alien human tribes, in their struggle for control over the needed resources, food, shelter, etc. Those competing alien adversaries had to be regarded as evil beings standing against the forces of good, and had to be confronted and subdued. Not much has changed to this day, has it?

If we ever reach a philosophical degree of maturation to appreciate the fallacy of our own self-serving sense of self-righteousness, and put our feet in those others' shoes, we would be putting ourselves in a disastrous disadvantage as, then, those others would do to us what has been done to them. Do we really want that? I don't think so: I know I wouldn't. The wonderful sounding Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you'd want done to you," doesn't really work, does it?

With such puzzling, even somewhat disturbing thoughts, I find my escape from reality in watching the reruns of the old TV Western, Gunsmoke, where you know for sure the good Marshall in Dodge City, Kansas, will beat the bad guy to the draw, always in a fair, honest gunfight!

Don't you wish life was really that simple?

After a long career as a scientist in exploration geology and geophysics in the petroleum and mining fields, I began to pursue my true calling; doing research, teaching, lecturing and writing on various areas in humanities, which could be summarized collectively as evolutionary psychology, or cultural evolution of our species, the Homo sapiens. My most recent book, available on Amazon, is "Necessary Illusions", with the subtitle, "Coping with the Dilemma of Intellect."

My intention is to write similar pieces as the one submitted here, on a monthly basis; all dealing with various aspects of our daily lives from a novel perspective. The hope is to stimulate the readers' appetite and sense of curiosity by opening fresh windows to new vistas.