To be a homo sapiens

Imagine a magnificent city, a golden city full of life. Its music, art, amazing food, artisanship, rich architecture, long history and above all its warm and hospitable people are widely admired. People from all over the world come there and leave the richer. Every so often, human civilization has its peaks. This city is one of them. The only bad thing about it is that whenever you have something truly great, you’re bound to have people who are after it, who want to own it.

Now imagine a professor of the fine arts facing an opponent with an IQ of 20 and a loaded machine gun. Imagine this Neanderthal burning down a library of priceless knowledge, shouting out “This be jungle!”. And he goes on with destroying the great city for years, while most of the rest of the world watches it on CNN for entertainment.

What do you do if you’re this city’s people? How do you handle an opponent eons beneath you in all matters intellectual, cultural, artistic – you name it – who has but one single advantage: an enormous arsenal of weapons? How do you communicate with someone who has more bullets in one pocket than he has words in his entire vocabulary? Being way past the stage of violence-driven expansion, you have no weapons of your own. So what do you do? They still tell a story about the time this happened in another city, and the professor had absently replied “Don’t disturb my circles,” whereupon he was murdered. The morale? The farther ahead you are, the more people there are to stab you from behind, so you might want to keep an eye on them.

To exemplify, let’s take the case of us Bosnians. For at least a hundred years, our dear neighbours have been trying to convince us that we’re not really Bosnians and that such a nation has never in fact existed. They strongly believe that we’re actually either descendants of “neighbour no. 1” or “neighbour no. 2”, depending on whose preachers you talk to. The words “Illyrians” or “Bogomils” don’t exist in their vocabulary, which might explain why they don’t even hear them when we say them. I’ve tried this on many occasions – it’s as if an invisible mute-button activates every time I say these words. Only once did I get a reaction. When I said that I was a descendant of Illyrians, a “neighbour no. 1” informed me that Illyrians also originated from his people. In fact, he told me, in all of the Balkans, there had never existed any other people other than “neighbour no. 1”. No Celts, no Avars – nothing, ever.

In other words, “neighbour no. 1” (quite proudly) originates directly from apes.

This is when the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Not only does this idea offer a solution to the problem of “The Missing Link”, but it sheds new light on the dilemma described in the first paragraphs of this text. The problem is that the attacker simply lacks the ”sapiens”. Maybe that’s our solution, then. We need to educate the monkey in the tree. We need to educate it until it can leave the tree and doesn’t feel the need to turn golden cities into jungle anymore. So far so good – we’ve established what the problem is and suggested a solution for it. Now, how fast can we do what evolution needed millions of years to do?