Feeding
Fighting
Fleeing
Fucking
These are the four basic drives for all animals. I bring this point up to say that fear, hunger, lust and anger are not just inborn, not just unavoidable, but necessary for the survival of any animal. These four feelings are the basic virtues of animal life. If you aren't willing to fight, flee, eat and reproduce then you are an evolutionary zero, no one will even find your bones.
The problem with these drives in us is that we have changed our environment such that our drives our out of synch with our surroundings. Our needs are so easily met, and the risk to our lives are so vanishingly small (for those of us lucky enough to avoid the underbelly of our great country) that fear and hunger are powerful all out of proportion to what it takes to keep safe and fed. And so we end up anxious and overweight, not because we are bad, but because we are, in some sense, animals in captivity.
Animals taken outside of their natural habitat need special treatment in order to stay healthy. You cant just put a tiger in a cage and expect it to be OK. (Well you can and we have but its obviously a bad plan at this point). I think that this basic idea of tigers and cages applies to homo sapiens and office buildings. We have taken ourselves out of our native environment and allowed ourselves to build up a new environment without taking a long distance view of what we have done.
We have built our own zoo, which sadly is too much like the inmates building their own asylum.
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