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Show I Why We Behave j Like Human Beings By GEORGE DORSE Y, Ph.D., LL.D. Emergencies and How We Meet Them EVEUT living being has an In born emergency equipment. For countless beings the equipment Is Inadequate; tliey go down like Hies before new foes, new diseases, new situations. A large percentage of nil the human beings ever born died before maturity; the emergency emer-gency may have been a rusty Lull, it venturesome spirit, a backwurd disposition. Anything which threatens threat-ens life or disturbs its peace of mlud or upsets the system Is an emergency. Emergencies cannot be listed; they are too numerous. Nor can they be described In general terms; they are Individually discrete. Half a loaf Is always better than no bread, but there are times when a half-loaf is the dynamic equivalent of a human life, when half a minute min-ute spells victory or defeat, or life or death. There are few of us whose life at one time or another an-other has not hung by a thread. What do we do; what Is our response re-sponse to crises? Fight or flee? It depends. The cry of "Women first I" on the Titanic was enough to keep the men from fighting for the boats; life was not worth fighting for when the loser was a woman. Nor worth saving when a spar would only support one; a man let go of a spar that a woman might live! This Is human behavior at Us highest. Possible because our Inborn emergency equipment can be trained, conditioned, educated, made to obey the orders of our head. Cut it is so well organized and so powerful that few can turn its command over to the cortex, fewer still who can conquer It. Greater is he who conquereth self pUn he who takelh seven cities! Greater, because self-preservation is the first law of nature; and the higher we climb in nature's scale, the better organized life becomes for self-preservation. Man has more means at his command for self-preservation than any other animal, largely because he has more ways of destroying his enemies. en-emies. Cities and the "taking of cities" arose in response to man's desire to anticipate emergencies. The difference between self-prejervation self-prejervation and self-control Is the difference between all gorillas and some men. If man used only his inborn emergency equipment in a fight with a gorilla he would lose or die of fright before the gorilla goril-la could lay hands on him. Fighting Fight-ing instinct, yes ; and fleeing Instinct In-stinct also. But a worm will turn. A rat will run for its life; cornered, It will fight for its life. There is another kind of response, re-sponse, the kind we keep on making mak-ing during our unconquered-self lives. We are dressing, already late for dinner. We break a shoestring shoe-string r we cannot find a certain shirt stud ; and then that crowning Insult, we drop the collar button and It rolls under the bureau. Now we are mad. We roar like a caged lion ; we say words, stamp the floor, kick a chair, yank out the bureau. Battles have been lost on account of such trifles. What happened? Almost everything. every-thing. Upset literally. Lost his head ; that Is true also. Also lost his -appetite. The wife is so disgusted dis-gusted she loses her temper and calls him "brute." It is a brute reaction. It Is a biologic reaction; it requires neither neith-er learning nor headpiece. Out of our inborn emergency equipment we build up our attitudes, fight windmills nnd straw men, and rip and roar up and down the world, or tremble like a leaf at every breath. "Every little movement has a meaning of its own," as the old song declared; it is also true that every movement moves something. We are never more physiologically correct cor-rect than- wbrD - we say, "That moves me." Between birth and death many are "moved" enough to dig a Panama canal, yet they never move themselves up out of the cellar of life. The difference between being moved to disgust at the sight of a dead cat and moving to remove the cat Is one of life's little jokes that make human life so interesting. We are moved with unstriped or visceral muscle. We move with striped or skeletal muscles. To make a gesture Is to make an excuse ex-cuse for moving. We 'are moved with less effort than we move ; our unstriped muscles function without with-out the cortex. They run themselves, them-selves, and if we are not in charge they run us. In mobs and panics they run riot. Every emotion anger," an-ger," love, merriment, jealousy, grief, fear, remorse is an Implicit bodily movement. Emotions vary, In Individuals, communities, nations, races; are under different degrees of control ; are aroused by varying situations. Emotions are older than the human hu-man race; but outside the human race put to no such sublime or ridiculous ends. We do not begin life with specific loves, hates, and fears. Some can go through life without set hates and loves. They can look people and things over and decide whether they are worth loving or hating, and if they are, possess them or do their best to clear the earth of them. But as we are, not one in ten can love a Hindu or a Jap or the other political polit-ical party. And much of thinking and talking Is in terms of hates and fears and loves. We murder at least something, if not some-Dody, some-Dody, every day. And love there are quite as many things to be loved as people In fact, there Is nothing, it seems, that cannot come within range of our love, except our enemies. ( by George A. Dorsey.) |