© 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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It's easy enough to say that civilization hems in the natural expression of the human spirit by forcing it into narrow categories, but that isn't true. People who take this view confuse civilization with culture. Culture creates norms, set rules, and barriers to expression. Culture is static. Civilization is kinetic, a great journey of possibilities and ideas. Culture leads to inflexible thinking and the creation of vested interests, and then often to intolerance, prejudice and war. Civilization is a force that promotes and thrives on peace, understanding, communications and tolerance.

Yes, civilization connotes that we get along with other people, but not because we are forced to. Many humans have decided that it is worthwhile for people to live in harmony with one another. Despite wars and crises that continually fatten our newspapers, billions of people do get along and always have gotten along.

So civilization is actually pretty neat! Not only that, by its nature, civilization is not exclusive. It wants to take you on as an active partner.

Contrast civilization with our more limiting impulses. We were once animals out in the wild. We craved survival and needed protection. Our main concern was not to create anything, but to arrive at a state where all our needs were met and our lives were crisis free. We would provide ourselves and our young ones with food. We would seek or create shelter. We would often engage in elaborate rituals to find a mating partner, and then one or both parents would see to the birth and rearing of the young. We would ward off danger. When night came we might sleep, and when winter came we might huddle somewhere for warmth and eat stored food. Then when the spring came the cycle would begin all over again. Did we ever feel joy? Probably not, before civilization. What would we have felt that could be called fulfilling? Even during the prehistoric era some humans must have felt a sense of equilibrium, balance and satisfaction, when we had full bellies, warm fires, contented and protected children. Comfort and security. Stasis.

Humans have no particular monopoly on comfort, equilibrium and security. Animals perhaps prize these states even more than we humans do. When is the last time you saw or heard of an animal voluntarily leaving a state of comfort and security because it felt a gnawing discontent or an abiding need for greater personal space? I don’t suggest bringing up these issues with your cat. The animal instinct is not to stir until disturbed by some kind of environmental unpleasantness like danger or hunger, or else by an instinct to provide for the future.

Billions of human beings behave in the same way. All they seek is stasis, a state of no worry, no want and no fear. They're not out there looking for joy. If they ever feel a stirring of restlessness or creative discontent, they probably do not recognize it.

In “free” societies, millions of people choose not to exercise their freedom. hey take a job if somebody else creates one for them and complain if a job is not provided. They eat and sleep on cue, make love on cue, laugh at television sitcoms on cue. Their political and social beliefs, if they have them, are a matter of labels and slogans.

In un-free societies, as was the case in many of the former Communist countries, whole nations exist on the basis of extremely limited options for human action. Humans attempt to organize, plan and quantify everything. They succeed in some and fail in others, but they never instill joy in the human soul by putting it into a box.

What happens in these societies? In un-free societies, the repression of the human potential is so extreme that sooner or later the regime falls by its own weight. Of course, that doesn't automatically make the people any freer.

In free societies, unfortunately, the lower or animal need for stasis, certainty, comfort, predictability and equilibrium can have some dangerous side effects. In the real world, the way thing really happen, security and comfort are never permanent. The only true security lies in rolling with the punches. Vast groups of people who lack imagination and are out of touch with their human hearts reproduce limiting cultures that deny any kind of personal responsibility for a person's life and fate. These people in their millions often support or make necessary institutions that themselves create vested interests, with thousands of cubbyholes in which to file both people and ideas. And many of these people are also easy prey for pundits and populists who exploit their very low level discontent. And their discontent is directed toward stasis rather than kinetic expansion of the human horizon.

This needn't be so and isn't so everywhere. Many civilizing situations exist at all social levels. Even in the grimmest ghettos in the US, some tightly-knit communities and active families work together to make their lives better. Some don't. While millions remain slaves to the dictates of their televisions, millions of others look for fulfillment in hundreds of uplifting ways. Some turn to art, some religion, some community activity. Between the meanest, crudest sort of human and the visionary genius, there exist thousands of types of human striving, and millions of human achievers.

Let's take a few examples and try to find the fulfilling human activity as opposed to the limiting, classifying animal one. The activity will be the same for each member of the pair, but the attitude will be different.

• John and Jason are both on the high school swim team. John's motivation is mainly to accrue another extracurricular activity to benefit his college admission process, while Jason really likes competitive swimming.

• Sandra and Emil are both competing for the same promotion. Sandra's main motivation is to make more money so she can buy a more expensive house, while Emil wants the promotion because he's bored in his present position and wants more challenge.

• My Aunt Harriet is at it again, shopping till she drops to get that one bargain she can brag about to her friends. My Aunt Sally, on the other hand, is off to the mall hoping to find something she needs on sale so she can better balance the monthly budget.

• Politician “A” is running for Congress because he wants power to prove to his (long dead) father that he fits into the man's image of his son. Politician “B” is deeply concerned with the state of the world around her and wants a forum in which to prove her innovative ideas.

Try this exercise to get to the heart of your own notion of civilized behavior. Keep a notebook for a week or so analyzing how you interact with other people. Your interactions with family, friends and co-workers are important, but also pay attention to how you interact with retail sales clerks, other drivers on the road, even beggars. When you have time, write down the gist of some of these interactions and try to express the ways in which you acted in a civilized manner. A few examples:

• You gave the right of way to another driver.

• You thanked and smiled at a supermarket clerk or packer.

• You listened to the problems of a stranger.

• You picked up someone else's litter.

• You defined plans for starting a business.

• You discussed social and political issues with someone.

• You gave direction and guidance to a child.