The Inhumanity in Humanity

THE INHUMANITY IN HUMANITY

by Antonio C. Antonio

July 21, 2014

The lady in the photo is Marina Abramovic, a Serbian based in New York, USA.  Abramovic is a performing artist who, one day in 2013, decided to come up with a trust exercise to test humanity… how people will react in a situation where someone submits him/herself to human whims, wants, idiosyncrasies and capriciousness.

Abramovic told a room-full of people that she will not move for six hours no matter what they did to her.  She placed 72 objects on a table that one could use in pleasing or destructive ways, ranging from flowers and a feather boa to a knife and a pistol and a bullet… and invited everybody to use them on her however they wanted.

It was noted that everyone present was initially timid and peaceful, but in no time did the situation quickly escalated to violent actions.  To mention a few… her clothes were cut until she was naked from the waist up, rose thorns were stuck in her stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. The fact that Marina did nothing to stop the physical abuse created a very wild and aggressive atmosphere as most everyone forgot that they were causing harm to a fellow human being.  For 6 long hours, Abramovic endured so much bodily abuse as she horrifically remained passive.

Exactly 6 hours later, feeling abjectly dehumanized and totally violated, Abramovic stood up and walked towards the crowd.  At this point, everyone ran and rushed out of the room for fear of retaliation.  This experiment revealed something terribly wrong about humanity… the lesson learned in this exercise is that if you leave the decision and fate in other people, chances are you will get killed.  This is not fiction, this incident really happened.  It will be interesting to know if the situation was tweaked to a condition where Marina had a gun in her hand and was also given the liberty to fight back.

This experiment showed how easy it is to dehumanize a person who doesn’t fight back.  This could likewise be said of nature and our environment.  Mother Earth has provided man with nothing less than goods and services to improve the quality of life for everyone.  But in spite of all this goodness, man has violated and abused her for oftentimes selfish reasons and intentions.

Like Marina Abramovic, Mother Earth has never meant harm to anyone.  Of course, there are those who would say that nature has begun to retaliate with global warming, climate change, desertification, degradation, etc.  But these are largely anthropogenic… therefore, caused by man onto himself.  It will again be quite interesting to know how man would be if nature also fought back with equal violence proportionate to the degree of abuse man has caused upon her.

The parallelism between Marina Abramovic and our environment comes with an accompanying profound lesson.  If reprisal for every wrong we do towards man and the environment is imminent and immediate, man will certainly reconsider the inhumanity in humanity.

Just my little thoughts…

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