of double lives

Julio Cortazar wrote a story a while ago called "Axolotl," playing off of tropes of metamorphosis and colonization and the experience of being a foreigner in a city you don't know, using a remarkable animal to do it.
Axolotls, for those who've never heard of them, are peculiar in that they exhibit a trait called neoteny: effectively, they remain in their juvenile form for their entire lives, as an adaptation to their environment, and in certain conditions not present in their natural habitat they change form, losing their larval gills and becoming full-blown salamanders and true amphibians. It's sort of a neat trick.

It has been suggested in some circles that human beings, too, are neotenous, like infant apes our whole lives, even as we grow larger. In most circles, that theory has been knocked over, but I think, on some level, it has merit.
Though physically, of course, it only works on a limited basis, I think people are spiritually neotenous.

There's something larval about the way many of us conduct ourselves, moving and eating and just waiting for something to change as we paddle through the muck. We stare out with our beady little eyes and keep expecting, sitting where we are, to become something else, something new, something brave and whole. We keep expecting to breathe air, but we won't give up the gills to do it. Our society supports this, and encourages it--that we remain morally and emotionally juvenile despite our adult viability and growth, that we continue to be spiritual children even as we age and increase. We grow up, but we don't mature.
It's all about us. Our selfishness, our fatigue, our greed, our fear. It's dark down there, but we never let our eyes mature to see it. Still, if you put people in the right context, the right conditions, something marvelous happens.

We turn into something human beings never have to become, but that every one of us can. We can live our whole lives without it, but the potential is there, written into the insides of every single one of us, and all it takes is the right stimulus, the right place to go, and we suddenly--astonishingly--become unfamiliar creatures, creatures you might expect by logical progression but might never have seen before. We mature.

This culture, this society, and this era's norms keep us juvenile--self-absorbed, addicted, cruel--but those are not the only things natural in human nature. Competition is not the only hardwired mode we have, nor is narcissism. We have within us the potential to overcome this stunted neoteny and turn into adults.

It is human nature to cooperate. It is human nature to give of ourselves for others, to stand with those who cannot defend themselves, and to sacrifice for the greater good. It is human nature to love, and compassion is as natural an inclination as the desire to eat. When someone pushes someone else out of the way of a bus, are they in that moment acting out of a desire for social approval or a fear of punishment? Are they being forced to do it? They're acting on instinct and without any guarantee of reward or censure. They're not risking their lives for "fear of Hell or desire of Paradise," as Rabi'a al-Basri put it. They're doing what in that split-second they're inclined to do without thinking: risk themselves for the welfare of another. And it's not like we practice shoving people out of the way of buses until it's a trained reaction.
Soldiers emerging from the trenches at night to play ball with the people they'll shoot at come morning? Food banks? Voluntary organ donors? We aren't in this because we've got guns to our heads, no matter how many people do what's right because they're coerced. We're doing it because it's human to do, at least as human as avarice and cruelty are.

Justice is our birthright, just as exploitation is. And we can choose it: we can build a world full of the prevailing conditions to metamorphose our fellows, to give them the chance to choose, too, to become fully human. We are trained by our environs and the people around us to ignore our wholly natural compassion and our basic hunger for fairness. We can un-train it. We can get past our larval status quo and aspire to be what is locked within us. We just need the right conditions, the right chances, and the courage to go forward.