We have built towers of glass and steel, draped ourselves in codes of conduct, etched laws in marble, and sung songs of progress. We proclaim ourselves civilized, enlightened creatures, far removed from the crude instincts of our forebears. But this, perhaps, is the greatest lie we tell, not to others, but to ourselves.
For man, at his core, is not noble. He is not evolved. He is not above.
He is animal; breathing, hungering, fearing, fighting, wrapped in a thin, cracking veneer called civilization.
A Fragile Mask Over Primal Flesh
Civilization is not in our bones. It does not stir in our blood. It is a costume, delicate, deliberate, and desperately maintained. Politeness is performance. Diplomacy is theatre. Morality is scaffolding built over a chasm of instinct.
We are not born with civility; we are conditioned into it. Taught to sit still when we want to run. Taught to smile when we want to snarl. Taught to share when our gut screams hoard. Yet when the lights go out, when systems fail, when fear returns, how quickly the mask slips.
The man in the suit becomes the man with the knife.
The Lie of Progress
We mark our progress in inventions and empires. But beneath the glitter of advancement, the same beast paces. The wars have not ceased, only changed costumes. The hunger has not vanished, only found new cravings. The blood still spills, only now in quieter, more calculated ways.
We congratulate ourselves on kindness, yet cruelty always lurks beneath. We speak of equality, yet power still devours the weak. These are not failures of the system. They are echoes of the truth.
The beast is not gone. The beast is the system.
Survival: The Prime Directive
Strip away the poetry, the philosophy, the prayer, and what remains? The pulse of survival. It beats in every decision, cloaked though it may be in reason or rhetoric. Why do we build? To shelter. Why do we conquer? To secure. Why do we love? To belong, to protect, to reproduce, to endure.
Even beauty serves survival. Even virtue serves survival.
Behind every golden ideal is a darker, older purpose.
We have dressed survival in silks and called it civilization, but it remains a fire in the belly, an ancient drumbeat beneath the skin.
Time Wears Away the Paint
Civilization is not a foundation. It is a layer. And time, with its storms and seasons, wears it away. Beneath the painted surface of every city, every law, every smile, lies the primal face of man, unreasoning, ravenous, real.
The courtroom becomes the battlefield. The leader becomes the predator. The crowd becomes the mob.
And so the illusion falters. The polish dulls. The walls crack. And we glimpse, if only for a moment, the truth we spend centuries hiding:
That we are not angels fallen from heaven.
We are beasts risen from the mud, still muddy, still snarling, still afraid.
If man is civilized, it is only in story, only in costume. The soul of the animal was never exorcised, only anesthetized, and poorly at that. In the end, the project of civilization may not be to elevate the human, but to suppress the inhuman within him. And even that, we do imperfectly.
We are not saints in waiting. We are predators on pause.
So let us not mistake the curtain for the stage, nor the mask for the face. For when the winds rise and the lights flicker, we return, not to greatness, not to divinity, but to the cold, clawed truth we never left:
Man is beast.
And civilization is the dream he clings to,
even as he wakes with blood on his hands.
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