A Brief, Inconvenient Meditation

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Children, Memory, Toilets, and the Lie of Individuality

Humanity likes to flatter itself. We call ourselves evolved, civilised, enlightened. We carve marble statues of naked thinkers and then panic when a child asks where babies come from. We pretend there is something intrinsic, sacred, pre-installed inside us called being human.

There isn’t.

There is breath. Reflex. A nervous system twitching like an antenna, desperately scanning the room for patterns it can steal.

A newborn is not a person in the philosophical sense. It is a receiver. A sponge with lungs. A small, screaming algorithm designed to copy whatever keeps it fed and alive. Language, posture, tone, fear, love, cruelty, silence. All of it is absorbed before consent is even a concept.

The myth of the “blank canvas” is only half wrong. The canvas comes pre-stretched, primed, and desperate for paint. What it doesn’t come with is the picture.

We love to pretend children are pure. Innocent. Untouched by the world. That fantasy collapses the moment you notice how accurately they mirror us. Not what we say. What we do. How we flinch. How we lie. How we withhold affection as punishment and call it discipline.

A child born in France rolls their R not because of some aristocratic throat mutation passed down from baguette to baguette. They roll it because the sound saturates the air. Because mouths around them move that way. Because imitation is survival’s first language.

Drop the same child elsewhere, and the R disappears like it was never meant to exist. Which, in that environment, it wasn’t.

So much for destiny.

Humanity Is Learned Behaviour

And learned behaviour is fragile.

Memory loss exposes this in a way that makes everyone uncomfortable. When memory fractures, people don’t just forget names and appointments. They forget manners. Rituals. The invisible choreography of social life.

They forget why you wait your turn.
Why you don’t scream your desires out loud.
Why you apologize for things that aren’t your fault.

We call this “losing humanity,” but that phrasing is lazy. What they lose is the internalised map. The accumulated agreement between self and society.

Strip memory away and watch the human animal underneath wriggle free. Not evil. Not stupid. Just unformatted.

This is where people panic and reach for morality, as if ethics were a bone that could snap. They’re not. Ethics are muscle memory. Rehearsed responses. Social reflexes burned in through repetition.

You don’t “know” how to be polite. You’ve practised it until it stopped feeling like effort.

Memory loss isn’t dehumanisation. It’s decontextualisation.

The body remains. The breath remains. Hunger, fear, pleasure, irritation. What dissolves is the narrative thread that says, this is who I am among others. Without that thread, behaviour defaults to immediacy. Needs first. Consequences later, if at all.

Which raises the unsettling question we usually avoid by inventing philosophy departments.

If humanity must be learned, what happens when it isn’t?

The Animal Question We’re Afraid to Answer

Yes. Without cultural evolution, we’d still be pooping wherever gravity felt persuasive.

Not because animals are inferior, but because they are honest.

Animals do not pretend their instincts are virtues. They do not build prisons to punish each other for acting like organisms. They do not write books about restraint and then monetise desire.

Humans do all of that because we had time. Time plus memory equals culture. Culture plus repetition equals norms. Norms plus enforcement equals civilisation.

Take away any one of those and the whole cathedral wobbles.

The mistake is thinking civilisation replaced animality. It didn’t. It sits on top of it like a nervous landlord. Under stress, under hunger, under fear, the animal pushes back through the floorboards.

This is why disasters are so revealing. Earthquakes, wars, famines. The polite mask slips. People don’t suddenly become monsters. They become efficient.

Food. Shelter. Safety. Tribe.

Morality follows later, if there’s room.

So no, humans didn’t evolve away from animals. We evolved with paperwork. We added layers. Laws. Memory. Shame. Shame is a big one. Animals don’t have it. We do. We weaponised it. We made it portable.

You don’t need a police officer in the room if you have a voice in your head whispering people are watching. That voice is culture. That voice is memory. That voice disappears first when memory goes.

The Individual Is a Late Arrival

Now for the question that refuses to die: who comes first, the individual or the environment?

People love to answer this as if it’s a duel. As if one must win. As if choosing “individual” makes you brave and choosing “environment” makes you deterministic and boring.

Here’s the unromantic truth.

The environment goes first. Always. It has to.

There is no individual floating in a vacuum, forming opinions in the dark. There is only a body, inside conditions. Temperature. Language. Power structures. Availability of food. Who gets listened to. Who gets ignored. Who survives mistakes.

The environment writes the first draft of every human being. It chooses the vocabulary. The acceptable emotions. The punishments. The rewards.

The individual emerges later, as an act of friction.

Agency is not something you’re born with. It’s something you negotiate. You test boundaries. You push. You get slapped back or encouraged forward. Slowly, you learn where resistance is allowed and where it’s dangerous.

Identity is not a seed. It’s a scar map.

This is why people raised in similar environments often share invisible traits. Humour cadence. Conflict style. What they fear. What they think love costs.

They didn’t choose those things. They absorbed them. Later, they might rework them. Or not. Many don’t. It’s easier to call it personality and move on.

Memory Is the Glue

Memory is what allows the individual to appear at all.

Without memory, there is no self across time. There is only a series of moments stitched together by habit. Memory lets you say “I” and mean more than this instant.

It’s also what allows rebellion.

You can’t resist an environment you can’t remember. You can’t critique a pattern you can’t hold in mind. You can’t say “this is wrong” without remembering “this was how it used to be.”

Memory is subversive. This is why oppressive systems try to rewrite it. Burn books. Revise history. Control narratives. If you control memory, you control what people think is possible.

A child learns humanity by remembering reactions. Smile equals safety. Silence equals danger. Crying equals attention or punishment, depending on the room.

By adulthood, most of this is invisible. It feels like “just how I am.” Which is convenient for everyone who benefited from shaping you that way.

Free Will, with Footnotes

Does this mean free will is an illusion?

No. It means it’s expensive.

Free will costs awareness. It costs discomfort. It costs stepping outside the story you were handed and admitting it was written by people just as confused as you.

Most people don’t do this. Not because they’re stupid, but because stability feels like truth when you’re tired.

The individual can push back against the environment, but only once the environment has finished building them. You can’t reject a language you don’t speak. You can’t critique a system you don’t understand.

This is why change often looks ugly. Why are people who question norms called broken, dramatic, or ungrateful? They’re not wrong. They’re just early.

So, What Are We, Really?

We are animals with long memories and social anxiety.

We are ecosystems pretending to be souls. (This is how a different POV can bring you a death penalty from the awakened)

We are stories walking around in meat, convinced the narrator lives inside us instead of between us.

Humanity is not guaranteed. It is maintained. Rehearsed. Re-taught every generation like a fragile spell.

When memory frays, it fades.
When the environment collapses, it reverts.
When both fail, instinct takes the wheel and doesn’t apologise.

This is not tragic. It’s honest.

The real danger isn’t that we’d become animals again. It’s that we already are, and we keep forgetting what taught us to pretend otherwise.

And forgetting, as we’ve established, is where everything starts to unravel.

There.
A chain of words on inconvenient anthropology and poetic irritation.
Humanity will survive this article. Probably.