© 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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Strong biological needs drive us to identify with our geographical homes. And if we get excited about regions, how about nations? We dig deep to find national character, national values, a national culture. In a diverse country like the Unites States, that's not exactly easy to do. Often it doesn't exist.

Region and nation have value for us, to be sure, but they also have tragic consequences. That biological need to stake out turf and justify its value at all costs leads to the worst evil of all: war. War is a perversion of our humanity; we are never justified in killing our fellow humans. Some species on earth do kill their own for various reasons, but most of the millions do not. What happens is that we place our biological imperative ahead of our humanity. Civilizing Trans-Biological forces are pushed back and silenced. A twisted portion of our human core falls short of its potential to be kinetic. The vector fails and the kinetic energy rushes to negative outlets. There are two of these. The first is to obsess on security at all costs. The rest of the world doesn't matter compared to our little patch of ground. The second negative outlet involves violence for the sake of violence. That energy has to go somewhere. If human beings are blinded to their creative outlets they usually find destructive outlets. It's against human nature to do nothing.

No, we're not war mongers. Most people aren't. But it's important to understand the underside of territorialism in terms of the human heart. Civilization and civilized behavior has always been international in scope. They've always stressed what human beings have in common, not their differences. The larger world has ramifications for all of us.

Exercise: Regions

Take a look at yourself from a wider perspective and try to judge how well you do in expanding your world:

• Do you speak any foreign languages?

• Have you traveled to or lived in a foreign country or studied other cultures?

• Do you make an attempt to tolerate or welcome immigrants to your own country or region?

• If you live in a large country like the United States or Canada, do you make an attempt to understand people from other regions: the way they dress or talk, the food they eat or the music they listen to?