Bear with me…I am using a metaphor of humans being born into the world but as plants to convey a concept of environmental conditioning that happens to all of us humans and the effects it has on our individual development and our culture overall.
Imagine a human is like a plant that gets put into a greenhouse where there’s a master gardener who knows everything that the plant needs. They give it all the right nutrients, right amount of light, the right placement with other beneficial symbiotic plants…basically everything it needs so it can grow perfectly.
This human moves beyond survival and can thrive. This is what I mean when I say a greenhouse human.
Imagine now a human is that same plant but tossed into some kind of different environment like on the side of a mountain where there’s not much dirt it’s very windy and it has to grow out of a rock…you’ve probably seen something like that. That plant grows but it’s bent and faced some hardships.
Imagine now another human as a plant but is placed in a garbage dump with toxicity and a real lack of nutrients. There are even things that stunt its growth or pervert it.
The human plant outside of the greenhouse is what I mean when I say a wild human.
The human that gets dropped on a rock at least is in a natural environment and has nutrients and can sort of work through the elements and become strong, right? The human that gets dropped in the garbage dump has a much harder time growing into something to be successful.
It’s very clear to me that a greenhouse human will do a lot better than a wild human or at least it looks like it at the outset. It’s much harder for a wild human to succeed and thrive and grow and benefit others. Often, they are fighting just to survive.
I think it’s absolutely critical that we realize that most all of us (with average brains and limbs to think and locomote) come into the world as good seeds, but we get put in different environments.
I think the purpose of life is to better oneself, so that others can be helped so that the world can be helped. That’s my take. So, humans, especially the greenhouse humans, should (I don’t mean to shame…I’m saying if they manage to climb the ladder of Maslow’s needs-ish and see the greater good) be able to reach over and lend a hand (carefully so it’s used well because people in pain make survival decisions) to those dropped in the other harder places so that they can grow and become resilient, and grow to their full potential and bear the most fruit. And when I talk about fruit, I mean development of the self completely so that overall humanity’s better. I’m not talking about squeezing out their juice. We need good people reaching their potential.
Wouldn’t it be great if we set up a system where no matter where the seeds come in, all the seeds landed in a greenhouse and not in a dump? Because we didn’t have any more dumps? We have enough people on the planet and all the tools and technology to do this. It’s all here now.
For a fun and silly but actually good story illustrating this, watch the movie Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. It’s illustrative. 🤓
Go to about 1 hour in. Watch it. At 1 hour and 2 minutes in, Arnold says to Danny, “I was taken to a beautiful island. I was loved. I was protected, educated. You had no body, Vincent. Nobody to love you, to trust you, to encourage you. All life taught you was that the only person you could count on was yourself.” There it is. He is the good one lifting up the one who was tossed out in the wild.
The fact that Arnold and Danny made this movie and told this story illustrates that they know this and in a side angle way were giving us a direct learning of this.
Life gives us clues everywhere, especially in Hollywood, where those who have self-actualized use stories to lift us up in the wild. Watch for the clues.