This post has been a long time coming.
Many people in my world are fundamentally reptilian.
This largely accounts for their social marginalization.
The question is how to, for want of a better word, humanize them.
ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.
Indicators
Language. Their lives revolve around their privates, as is indicated by the language they use: forms of the words “piss,” “shit” and “fuck” dominate their expressions.
Note that “fuck” has two meanings.
Sexuality is about fucking, period. Love plays no role. Two individuals meet, mate and separate. There is no bonding. They may never care to meet again, unless the pussy (or dick) is really good.
If another male is in the picture, the first male may have to fuck him up before he can fuck the female. As someone told me on the street not long ago, “A good dick’ll get you kilt.”
There is no bonding with offspring, either.
Parenting. Mammals and birds care for their young. Reptiles don’t.
Mama sea turtle crawls up on the beach, digs a hole in the sand, deposits 100 eggs, covers them up and leaves forever. At the right time, the eggs all hatch, and the hatchlings’ first task is a mad scramble to get into the water without becoming seagulls’ snacks.
They have to fend for themselves.
Joshua T. Dickerson’s poem, “‘Cause I ain’t got a pencil,” gives voice to a child of reptilian parents.
Sanitation. Reptiles leave their wastes anywhere; bodily or otherwise. These are the homes where there’s dog poop on the carpet. These are the ‘hoods full of trash. A much-loved church member never fails to leave a brown streak on the back of the toilet seat.
They treat their material assets as wastes also, in part because emotional excrement — hostility — is flung willy-nilly, including at one’s assets. Someone left a sweatshirt in the Dunkin’ Donuts restroom. The house may be boarded up because they’ve broken out all the windows and don’t care to replace them. Damage of any nature to the car goes unrepaired.
The social order. Reptile society is divided between predators and prey.
Prey live in fear. Predators create it. Yet somehow it is the predators, those who do others bodily harm, who are socially exalted; as Jay-Z said in “30 Something:”
U respect the one who got shot I respect the shooter.
These folk are takers, not makers. They take pride not in anything they make (handcrafts, garden plants, earned income), but in what they take away from others.
Prey take pride in what others give them for free. I have been astonished at how men at the shelter brag, at length and in detail, about food they have received for free; and urge me to go here or there, wherever someone may be giving out free food; whereas this shelter feeds us very, very well, and I have neither need nor desire for any more than that.
Predators take pride in what they take from others by force.
Causes
Maybe God just made them that way.
Maybe karma has thrust them into circumstances where it’s extremely difficult to develop the emotional maturity typical of mammals.
Related: About organized religion Related: Chaos overwhelms the poor Related: Poor children have smaller brains
Solution
I have thought about this long and hard.
Every time, I seem powerless but to come to the same conclusion.
I recently said elsewhere, “Love is the ordering principle of the universe.” And in the linked-to “Chaos overwhelms the poor” and elsewhere, I have said that love must begin with self-love; as one must love oneself before one can love anyone else.
I have portrayed self-love as the necessary fuel for development of emotional maturity, for evolution from infantilism into adulthood in any given life, and implicitly also for soul evolution across innumerable lives.
Self-love is the only answer for the human reptile, to cure her or his social marginalization, to amend his or her behavior patterns to be less irritable to the mainstream. To allow one to begin using one’s resources to move toward prosperity.
Love can be hard to come by in a reptile.
As their language suggests, the life force normally expresses itself through the lowest three chakras; expression through the four higher chakras is minimal or rudimentary. The noblest affect one commonly feels is spite, in the case of a predator, or fear, in the case of prey. Love comes through the fourth, the green, the heart chakra.
Exhortation is futile. These folk have no use for abstractions, and folk who see life as a never-ending struggle to survive have no use at all for morality. It is in the fifth, the blue, the throat chakra, that morality and responsibility — and hope — are understood. Love must come first.
Folk must be shown in concrete terms the practical advantages of choosing the best for oneself.
And so become a self-loving reptile.
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