On the Universal Understanding of the Original Human Malfunction

 In reading Epictetus, in reading Buddhist texts, and in reading the New Testament and Paul's letters in particular, the behaviors which human beings struggle with and which trip them up in everything all come back to the same three or four responses one way or the other. In nearly every case, and every system of thought, they come back to fear, anger/aggression, the craving for food, and the craving for sex or reproduction (both of which combined can be described singularly as "bodily cravings"). Where these responses present as arguing, depression, panic, murder, theft, greed, adultery, promiscuity, or elsewise it always comes down to these three or four basic human survival responses that we must mitigate and deal with being triggered, flight, fight, feeding, and sex in order to not cause harm to ourselves or others. Even pride is really a survival response rooted in fear, and in some ways can be considered the initial fear based survival response which produced the ego in the first place, and thereafter defends it.
     And all of these are produced, not by the soul or the spirit, but by the physical human brain, specifically these responses are controlled by the hypothalamus, the "gateway" to which is the amygdala. And it is the amygdala which has been demonstrated to "light up" when someone does something inconsistent with what they agree with, such as lying. It has also been demonstrated recently that the human amygdala is configured very differently from our primate genetic cousins, even if, in all other respects, our brains are more or less the same as theirs, proportionately speaking. Yes, our cerebral cortex is a bit larger, but that's about it all things considered.
      Something happened in our "evolutionary history" that caused a radical reconfiguring of the human amygdala from its primate origins. This reconfiguring caused our survival responses to react, not just to physical survival threats like they were supposed to, but also to perceived threats to one's ego, psychological threats, and even mere imagined threats that exist only within one's mind. It caused us to be in survival mode at nearly all times, reacting to everything as though it was a survival threat or survival need, which we would later term "good" (need) or "bad" (threat). Something caused the human amygdala, hypothalamus perhaps, and possibly the rest of our limbic system, to tweak just enough to where it believes it is still doing its original job of protecting us, but is instead malfunctioning and causing harm.
      And nearly every philosophical system in the ancient world recognized this even without understanding the underlying mechanics. Even today, we recognize that fear, anger, and bodily cravings must be kept in check if we are to have healthy, functional lives and societies. Why is this if the source of these responses is itself still healthy and functional, doing what it was designed to do?
      Our primate cousins do not suffer from this malfunction. They live pretty much as they always have, naked and without cognitive dissonance or guilt, reacting to actual threats as threats, and non-threats as non-threats. Were there to be no human beings on the planet, but just our primate cousins, there would be no pollution, no crime, no real wars, and there would be no climate change, no nuclear threat, and so on. There would be no scarcity of resources even. Nearly everyone acknowledges this fact, even if begrudgingly or unconsciously.
      We all know these things to be true from experience on some level, yet no one really wants to put it all together and acknowledge it. Either because it doesn't fit with their view of themselves, their religion, or because it is tied to the concept of "original or inherited sin", a concept which has been bastardized for far too long. We need to be honest with ourselves about this, and be honest that it is our own physical, neurologically based responses which are the problem.