Long Since Lost

Heyo everyone, this weeks blog is going to be about the forever changing elements of life.

So far, 30-1 social studies is a lot of philosophy. One of the things we’ve discussed is human nature, and several different views of human nature from several different philosophers. One of them that stood out to me was the view of Thomas Hobbes, which was very similar to that of William Golding. In both of their books, respectively Leviathan and Lord of the Flies, they illustrate how the human nature is one that, if left ungoverned and unattended, will proceed in a direction of violence, a desire for power, and never having enough; always wanting more. I thought about this for a long time. If you took an environment like the Kwoon and removed all senses of government and consequence, I believe it would prosper opposed to falling apart, out of pre-existing bonds of respect and discipline. If you took a random group of people off the street, the tension may be a bit more shaky but all the same, I don’t think everything would collapse because we have millennia of behavioural traits programmed into us. It is nearly impossible to find someone who is 100% base human. They would lack communication, manners, charisma, even the standard level of intelligence today. Even if you isolated a child from the moment it was born, it would still turn out better then it would at the start of time. That’s the result of ages of human programming.

When I took this idea of a base human nature being forever lost and tried applying the concept to my Kung Fu and looking for links between the two, two big things stood out. The concept of studying a martial art that’s thousands of years old, and the concept of all knowledge dying with its bearer. These three concepts go hand in hand. Over the thousands of years, knowledge has been passed through thousands of people. Every time someone died, they took so much knowledge with them. To compensate, people would have to begin to create their own techniques and forms to fill in the gaps. Over the generations, what we have now is so different from what original Kung Fu would look like we can’t even imagine it. Just as how true, 100% base human is lost forever, so is the original versions of Kung Fu.

However, this isn’t a bad thing. Evolution exists for a reason. There’s a reason we no longer use sticks and stones for weapons or tools. We evolved passed that, because not evolving wasn’t really an option. As time proceeds so does technology and ideology, slowly improving, with an occasional hiccup here or there. But overall, as everything moves forward, it’s easy to leave the old behind. It’s best to remember as much as you can, and pass on as much as you can, in an attempt to preserve both the old whilst fostering the new.