© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete text of Human Action, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's philosophy of human achievement.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Human Action Table of Contents
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• How to get in touch with the human forces inside you and make the most of them.

• Why some human activities are fulfilling and others are not.

• Why sometimes we do things for the “right” reason and sometimes we follow the “wrong” reason.

• How to expand your mind and scope every day by connecting with the greatness of others.

• How innovation, truth and morality affect your everyday life.

when you look for a miracle you've got to scatter your blood to the eight points of the wind; because the miracle is nowhere but circulating in the veins of man. (George Seferis, 1939)

What does that mean to you and me here and now? It means we are part of a dynamic process. It means we can increase our stake in the process. It means that, at the same time, we can become better dreamers and better doers.

How did we get here? Well this writer does not believe in divine creation. But, guess what, evolution doesn't thrill me either. It seems so simple, so pat, so mechanical, and we are none of those things. The true we, the broadest kind of we, can never be explained by any mechanistic form of evolution. Something, somewhere, gave us more than we would have been given from such a system.

If you're tempted to call that something God, go ahead. The term might be useful to you. But be aware that by calling it anything as weighty as that, you risk putting it into a box. It doesn't want to be put into a box. I call it the Trans-Biological-Imperative for convenience, and while Trans-Biological Imperative is a fixed term, since it’s my own coinage it doesn't carry the historical and cultural baggage of a word such as God. I could change the word to the “great gloop,” or the “psychic summons,” or some such other term, and then we would have a term and could get on with this. But I'll stick with Trans-Biological Imperative since it doesn’t have baggage—yet.

Sigmund Freud, who no one, starting with himself, has ever been able to truly understand, was wrenched into a life of probing action at a very young age by a dichotomy he saw between static and kinetic worlds. Freud's father Jakob Freud encouraged his intellectually precocious son and passed on to him a tradition of skeptical and independent thinking that was strongly associated with the secular Jewish world of the day. And yet despite the deep pride of this tradition, Jakob Freud bore frequent anti-Semitic insults on the streets of Vienna without protest, something that caused a deep rift between him and his son. Here in Jakob Freud was a man preaching a searching, rigorous human intelligence and yet accepting the smallest, meanest box humanity can devise: prejudice. The inconsistency burned itself into the young Freud's mind, leading to a lifelong conflict in that mind between father and son. In turn, this lit the fire in Freud for a lifetime of innovative work on the human mind.

At the other end of his life, six decades after the conflict began, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) became one of Freud's most mature testaments. Freud's views are interesting, although I believe he's looking at human civilization from the wrong angle. His theory is this: human society, culture and civilization are a result of the channeling of erotic and aggressive urges into paths that society considers “useful.” These basic erotic and aggressive urges exist in a constant state of tension and sublimation, and this leads to trouble in the form of antisocial or nonsocial behavior.

We can make a lot of progress as humans if we share Freud's concerns with these important issues but disagree with many of his assumptions and findings. We might as well join everyone and simplify what Freud was getting at: we have animal urges; they become inconvenient and so must be controlled; we are unhappy as a result.

Can you win with this view? Of course not. Under it, all human striving is neurotic, a pained attempt to let the animal in us express itself somehow without burning down our cities.

Trans-Biological Kinesis suggests a view that is far more liberating, far more optimistic. It is not civilization that limits the uncontrollable animal in us, but the ordered, calculating animal in us that limits the uncontrollable human in us. Isn't this a more encouraging explanation of human greatness than a channeling of the supposed animal need to kill, steal, burn and rape? And if you look at the wonderful things so many human beings have accomplished instead of focusing on the mess other human beings have made (your choice of focus), isn't this a view more in line with actual factual observation?

Are great nations created, are great paintings painted, are great businesses founded, are timeless poems written, are human beings united in love by the millions, do humans feel and express joy in the billions, all as a result of animal urges that just happen to be turned into fortunate channels? Or is greatness accomplished rather as a result of the kinetic greatness, peculiar to the human species, that manages to break out of limiting channels? You decide. But don't look to anyone else or history for the beginning of your answer. Look to yourself.

Before we go on to the value of human civilization and show how it applies to your own success in life (hey, you're part of it!), let's do an exercise designed to cement in you these far reaching and empowering philosophies in your mind and heart.

Get out a pen and paper or turn on your computer and answer these questions.

• What have you accomplished so far? How have you accomplished it? Which of the two models above (Freud's idea or the Trans-Biological Kinesis view) do you think it more closely follows?

• For what you want to accomplish in the future, which of the two models above do you think will be more useful to you?

• Write down a few of the ways in which you feel, now or in the past, you do not exactly match the dictates of “society.” Think carefully on a case-by-case basis. Who do you think has been right or more reasonable, you or society?

• Carefully list five to ten events or happenings in your life you wished had gone a different way. Do you think these results were due to your expending too much animal energy without finding an acceptable channel for that energy? Or do you think they resulted from static limits you or the people around you placed on your thinking, planning and acting?

• You have more control over yourself than other people, so if you discovered you put unnecessary limits on yourself in the past, dig into yourself to determine why. Because of what other people would think? Because you were afraid other people would laugh at you if you failed, or shun you if you succeeded? Because other people put the notion into your head that it was impossible and you believed them? Because you couldn't take the risk? Get into this, and then get it out of your system.

If we are to consider ourselves different from either the animals we sprang from or the animals we may still be inside, we have to accept that we can always add to life, that we can always create, that we are supremely capable of adding something “new” to life. This is the concept of “Trope” and “Epic States” that we will cover later on. We are never stuck, never forced to live within the six walls of a box. We are free. We cannot choose not to be free.

We'll talk about crime and anti-social and non-social behavior in greater detail later on, but let's fit it into the concept right now for starters. We humans have been civilized for many thousands of years. Some of us kill, steal, burn and rape today, but not because of any long-gone animal instinct. Very few animals murder members of their own species. When an animal kills a human, the police might destroy the animal to protect the public, or perhaps fine the animal's owner, but we never drag the animal itself into court and accuse it of a crime. Humans commit inhuman acts not because their animal nature gets the better of them, but because their humanity becomes twisted, perverted or non-functional.

Humans in touch with their hearts by definition know and feel the full value of all human beings. Humans who kill with criminal culpability have lost touch with that central human core. And humans who kill under circumstances they consider justifiable, particularly in war, often have on-again, off-again connections with that core.