Human Subconcious

In the past two millenniums, humans' situation has evolved a lot. We have come a long way

since the Roman empire. Many new types of technologies have been discovered and

developed. Today, our knowledge and understanding of different types of phenomenons have

increased tremendously. Among other things, we have been able to understand how nature

works and how we have been created. We even considered the fact that we might not be the

only civilization in this immense universe. Yet, there is still one big gap to be filled; we still

don't understand how human nature works. Human nature is a very difficult concept to

understand. This is because each person has its own personality, behaviour, beliefs and values.

It should be in our best interest  to understand ourselves in order to prevent problems and

conflicts caused by disagreements between ourselves. Nowadays we live in difficult periods;

many conflicts, crimes and other problems occur very often. We don't really realize it but most

of these problems are due to our lack of understanding each other and even ourselves... In this

sense, we could say that humans are not aware of their own blindness. To prove this I'll be

analyzing two books we read (Sphere & The Left Hand of Darkness) and a movie we saw

(Enemy Mine) trying to see what kind of ideas each story shows about human nature.

In a first place, Sphere tries to emphasize the idea that most of us tend to ignore our

subconscious. We all had a fear, an idea or a dream that we don't want to talk about.

Sometimes it could be strange thoughts that we had or something similar. We don't want to

talk about them because they shock us and they make us feel uncomfortable. Often we don't

even realize when these thoughts happen because it all happens in our subconscious. The

subconscious is the part of our mind that holds the forbidden, the unknown of us, and all the

part of us that  we're afraid to show. Jung's theory of the subconscious calls this the Shadow.

In Sphere we have some examples of people who are not able to control their Shadow and who

suffer due to their wild imagination. Our subconscious also holds a lot of preconceptions and

misconceptions about a multitude of things. For example in Sphere, when the characters

explore the ship, they see many things similar to the ones they know exist on earth. This is

because their subconscious is creating all what they see. They have preconceptions about how

the inside of a space shuttle should look like, and this it's why all the things appear familiar to

them. In this sense, we could compare the attitude of the characters from Sphere with people

from our society who have preconceived ideas and misconceptions about a number of things.

For example, let's say someone invites you to eat at an Indian restaurant and, while you may

have never tried one, you already think that the food is disgusting. This is because we have a

preconceived idea of Indian food.

In a second place, in The Left Hand of Darkness we have an analyze of the behaviour of a man

who is put in a strange situation. His primary reaction about Ghetenians in the beginning of

the book  is a bit strange. He has a hard time understanding their behaviour. He has

preconceptions of what men and women are supposed to be, of how they have to act. Here we

can make a parallel with our behaviour related to guay, lesbians, etc.; we have preconceived

ideas about them and tend to avoid them or to ignore them. Unfortunately this isn't a solution

and by doing so we are just putting away something that we should resolve. Now getting back

to the book, when Mr. Ai says "It seems likely that they were an experiment" and "their

ambisexuality has little or no adaptive value" (p.89) we can say that he makes his opinion too

fast. He barely knows them. He is just trying to find reasons to justify their difference instead

of trying to understand and discover their way of acting and their values. This shows that

humans tend to misunderstand and to disregard different cultures and values than their own.

In this sense, we could say that these preconceived ideas bring up a lot conflicts and problems.

For example, we get religious wars like the one in the ex-Yugoslavia which lasts since  three

years. All this just because we are not able to understand ourselves and we don't agree on a

issue. Unfortunately yes. There are solutions however, as the book shows us, we have to learn

to understand a different culture, to respect it and to respect its values. The book shows us this

perspective on page 283 where we can see that Mr. Ai has become very attached with his

friend. This proves that we have the capacity and intelligence to understand another culture

what we're missing is the willingness.

Finally, Enemy Mine tries to show us the initial reaction that someone would have  when

invaded by aliens,  and how this reaction may change in time when we finally get to know and

understand the behaviour of an alien. As we've seen at the beginning, Davidge is very upset

when his friend is shut down by a Drak and he tries to do anything to kill him. He maintains

his attitude for a while until he realizes that Zamish is not that evil after all. After having spent

some time with Zamish, Davidge learns his language, his habits and he starts to read a Drak

religion book. This proves that we have a lot misconceptions and preconceptions about aliens

and  more generally about people; we tend to misunderstand people who are different from us,

who act differently, and who believe in other values than ours. This is the main message that

this movie is trying to give. Another important message that this movie brings up is that we

tend to have weird attitudes, to maltreat someone different, to profit of their kindness and

innocence. In many cases this could be considered as racism. In Enemy Mine we have an

example of this when a group of Draks is used as slaves for the exploitation of a mine. We

could compare this image to the black people who were used as slaves by the white people a

few decades ago. In this sense this is another point on which this movie tries to make us

reflect. Some of these messages make us ask some questions: why were white people so racist

before; why, some, are still racist today; why in some cases men are preferred to women for

certain jobs and why are they better paid than women? An answer to this questions could be

the fact that we don't understand what is different from us. We often consider that what is

different, what is alien is bad and that we don't have anything to learn from them. Another

explanation to this is that we are afraid of what is different.

In conclusion, I have to say that the works we sutdied this semester made us think about all

these ideas like friendship, intercultural relations, acceptance of otherness, absurdity of racism,

absurdity and harmful effects of war, inequality between  women and men, etc. This proves

that there is a serious lack of knowledge of self, of self-unconscious and of others in human

nature. But what is more dramatic about it is that we, Humans, are not aware of our blindness.