[A reply to a message sent in from a member of the audience.]
Well, I've got bad news for you: (1) you're insane and (2) you're probably always going to be insane.
There's absolutely no advice I can offer that would help you.
Human beings are "the creation of" evolution: you need to deal with the implications of evolution as a biological process over millions of years.
And you have to see the uncomfortable reality of human beings living in apartments and animals living in zoos within that million-year-spanning context.
Whatever you imagine ancient philosophers would say on the subject doesn't matter much at all, does it? That's just something you've made up in your own mind to suit your own interests --even if (paradoxically) it is merely in your interest to make yourself feel guilty about aspects of your own instincts that you cannot control.
The world's history begins again with you: every man's birth is the year zero --and there is nothing Anaximander or Aristotle could say that would help you with your struggles against human nature in any way whatsoever --not even if an archaeologist could now dig up a (heretofore unknown) text that answered precisely the question you've been asking me.
You can hate yourself for being an animal (for being a product of millions of years of evolution) or you can learn to make the most of it: you're an animal, but this doesn't mean you're limited to being an animal only. You can be far more than a mere animal, but the "more" that you accomplish (through self-discipline and the creative use of your imagination) doesn't make you any less of an animal than a marmoset or a mandrill.
You are not a fictional angel: you are not a fictional character from an ancient (and idiotic) text. You are not a soul trapped in a body made of flesh, nor are you a good person trapped inside a bad one. There is no rational core surrounded by irrational impulses: everything you despise as an instinct is who and what you really are.
You cannot become some philosopher's ideal of what human nature could be or should be: you will never be half-man and half-hallowed-abstraction --you will always be entirely a man and entirely an animal. Entirely: not half of one and half of the other. In your own experience, in one lifetime, you will exhaust the remit of human nature and exhaust the remit of animal nature as well, leaving nothing undone or unknown in the remainder.
In this sense, the world begins with you and ends with you as well.
The divine mystery is human laziness: where people stop thinking, stop living, stop learning --beyond that unmarked barrier is god --and his power consists entirely of your ignorance, your lack of curiosity. The more diffident you are the more sacred this world seems: your unthinking conformity to the accumulated idiocy of past generations is the consecration of that darkness --and my nihilism deconsecrates the world with an unwelcome dawn --a dazzling and discomforting light.
