Chickens, sparrows and eagles

“It is difficult to fly with eagles when you work with turkeys” (A. Bloch)

The ultimate goal of human life and existence has always been to have answers to its enormous and unresolved mysteries.

Since childhood we ask questions to people around us and in that very delicate period of our lives the only ones to ask them are relatives, first of all parents, brothers and sisters.

And here, if you go wrong, and you have a family faithful to traditions, religious or not, the best that can happen to you is that they do not answer and ignore you because they believe that your questions are stupid. Only in this way do you begin to understand right away that you have to look for the answers all by yourself and that from the outside you will only get ideas that are not yours that, in turn, are not even of those who want to propose them. If instead they are on you and follow you step by step trying to transfer at all costs their concepts of ideal life and justice, of what is right and wrong, of a certain god or even of a team to be supported, often without even waiting for you to ask any questions, then the situation becomes more complicated and your questions are destined to multiply with the passage of time without anyone can give you a valid answer that really suits you.

The truth is that the relationship between the possible questions and their answers is drastically disproportionate.

From the moment the human species, for some mysterious reason, separating itself from that animal, began to feel the need to ask itself a certain type of questions, the situation began to evolve in a way that, even today, we do not know how good it is for our species. A cat just lives, without wondering why it came into the world and what it came to do, it does not harm the planet and sometimes I think that it is so quiet because, unlike men, he already knows his role and does not care.

Nature makes its choices exclusively on an evolutionary basis. If one characteristic of the species proves more valid than another for the survival of that same species, then, with very long times, the best characteristic will start to make its way among the following generations.

I wonder how much our cerebral evolution, aimed at asking questions about the absolute, is an “evolutionary” characteristic of the species, since, to date, almost all the answers to our existential doubts are far from finding a satisfactory answer, so it must be deduced that, from a strictly evolutionary point of view, reason has been involutive.

And so a particular kind of restless people, who have reached a certain point in their lives, when they feel that vegetating between pre-packaged answers from others is no longer enough for them and they have too many questions in their notebook, then they desperately search for that something that can justify a fulfilment of the meaning of their ephemeral existence on this planet. And here I can think of a comparison with some species of birds that I think gives a good idea.

The first stage is that of the “chicken”, the classic bird that has wings and does not fly.

And here are the battery chickens, which are the majority, that lead a marked existence, they feed in industrial chains always the same, and, when their time comes, they die in an indecorous way even for their species. Then there are the chickens raised on the ground that differ only to have a space a little larger than those above but that lead an existence not too different and especially a similar end.

And, between these two species, we have described more than 70% of humanity today, pointing out that a chicken will never admit to being a chicken. And a chicken hardly ever asks questions.

The second stage is that of the “sparrow”, a nice bird with an anonymous brown feather livery that at least achieves the goal of rising from the ground even if not by much. It unfolds among the tops of the trees and has an apparently privileged view of the world, twittering and compacting the poor chickens that do not detach from the ground and are caged in marked paths that lead to lives and deaths meaningless.

The sparrow, with its anonymous brown plumage, meets, during its flights from branch to branch, other birds flying at the same height, but with colorful liveries, with a range of colors ranging from white to black to the mix of colorful colors to which the sparrows aspire. They are even enraptured by the peacocks who are almost always on the ground but who know how to fly very well and try to convince the millions of sparrows to strive to become like them, or goldfinches, canaries, hawks, swallows or any other bird race that are not them instead of explaining the advantages of being sparrows.

The latter desperately tries to find a way to become a hawk, a swallow or a canary, with the claws to steal, a fast flight to hurtle high in the sky or a melodious sound, but it fails because it is confused and can never succeed, with the result of having millions of sparrows that instead of being happy to fly and be sparrows, try to be hawks, swallows, gulls and canaries and for this are more depressed and unhappy than the unwitting chickens.

And we are at 29% of the sparrow humanity which, with 70% of the chickens, makes up 99% of the human race.

The remaining 1% belongs to the genus eagle.

Eagles, unlike hens and sparrows, are endangered animals.

The eagle flies higher than any other and from up there has a privileged view of the world. The chickens may not even be able to see them, but he knows they are there. The sparrows can see them and observe their frantic beating of wings from branch to branch in the hope of catching a fly or worm to feed themselves.

The eagle would not want to be any other bird than what it is.

It is at the top of the food chain and can hunt whatever it wants, but to do so it must go down. Its rapidity of choice and attack does not give way to its prey if it decides to catch them, but it does so only when it is necessary, it does not do so for the pure taste of hunting them. Reptiles, mammals, other birds like her…if it is necessary, she has the means to overcome them.

The eagle has been the symbol of peoples such as the Babylonians, the Egyptians for whom it was the soul-bird, the Greeks, the Romans with their empire on the coats of arms of the legions, is mentioned in the Bible, was the symbol of Napoleon and is currently the emblem of the United States.

It seems to be the only bird that can stare at the sun without causing damage to its sight. Native Americans aspired to make their headdresses out of their feathers, and it could go on forever.

But what do they say about an eagle, a chicken and a sparrow? The chicken doesn’t even know that there is such a species, the sparrow would say “come and listen to the peacock and the nightingale and you’ll see that new worlds will open up for you”.

The eagle smiles inside him and feels sorry for his “brothers” birds because a peacock ate him yesterday and the nightingale does not even serve him as an olive for the aperitif if he is hungry.

But the eagle is alone, because it flies too high and at those heights there is no air and up there nobody ventures. It does not have to flutter its wings frantically like a sparrow to move, because its wingspan allows it to glide at great heights without the slightest effort.

In short, the chickens don’t ask questions, the sparrows ask too many questions and go looking for the answers always in the wrong place, while the eagles have long searched for those answers and have come to the conclusion that, to most of them, there can be no answer to the current state, so they do not care about everything and choose to continue flying alone high in the sky where no one else can get.

At the Ark Lab, we are looking for eagles to share our project.

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