Redefining Identity

In The Croods (DeMicco & Sanders, 2013), Grug, the head of a prehistoric family of the same name, says, as part of his strategy for their survival “like mice” in their cave behind rocks against the dangers of a harsh and hostile world they are in, that fear keeps them alive and advises that anything new should be avoided because “anything new is bad” and dangerous. Every night, before they go to sleep, he tells a bedtime story of the same kind in which a young, little character lived happily with its family (because they lived their lives in routine and darkness and terror) until one day, filled with “curiosity,” a “serious problem,” the young little character went out and saw something new and died. The Croods are terrified and Thunk, the son, says that he will never do anything new or different. In the Croods family, whenever one mentions “new,” they instinctively shrink in fear. Eep—Grug’s young, curious, and recalcitrant daughter—who feels suffocated by this lifestyle summarizes her father’s (i.e., her family’s) survival rules painted on the cave walls:

Anything new is bad, curiosity is bad,
going out at night is bad. Basically,
anything fun is bad (DeMicco & Sanders, 2013).

All their worst fears confirmed, the Croods snuggle into one big heap, warm and comfy, and fall asleep.

This social scenario may be a bit exaggerated for dramatic effect in the animated 3D movie and no society we know and can remember is so closed and neophobic as the Croods or any social group in the prehistoric existential condition this film constructs, but most societies still have the traces of their prehistoric fear for the strange and the new largely determining the outlook of their individual members and the collective community. In the prehistoric scenario, exposed to a plethora of dangers they cannot understand and out of their control, the people, as humans early or modern are always, are concerned about their safety, and they feel surely safe about the few familiar things that make up their small routine world, and it gives them peace to remain within this safety bubble. From their long experience, they know in their immediate environment what are safe and useful, what are useless but innocuous, and what are dangerous and to be avoided. With this knowledge, they are able to select useful and innocuous things and aspects of their behavior to build their familiar environment, their safe little routine world, and exclude whatever is clearly known to be dangerous and the potential dangers of whatever unfamiliar and new, because they do not usually want to venture their safety bubble on anything new that may turn out dangerous. The mode of their long relationship with the included and the excluded condenses into long established patterns of behavior, which we call culture, authoritatively imposing an ethical list of dos and don’ts on its members, determining whether any behavioral traits evolving or appearing newly in the social make-up are either acceptable or unacceptable. Humans have this mind set passed down to them through millennia and every modern society exhibits behavior informed by it in varying degrees without exaggeration.

Human fears are not absolute. When humans have lived far long past the moment when they were able to at least remotely empathize with the physical conditions in which their forefathers lived in immediate proximity to their fears their strategy for protection against which had reactively shaped their culture, this primitive fear producing this reactive force has lingered in their collective psyche in changed and diversified forms. In fact, with the changes in the natural physical environment humans share with other creatures and things and the expansion of the dimensions of their social affairs, their individual and collective fears have also greatly changed and multiplied. Many that once posed a danger or threat are extinct or have ceased to be so now; many things new or unfamiliar or they did not know at all turned out life-enhancing, while many such turned out dangerous and many such others innocuous; and many they had once included as safe and useful underwent change and diversification, and these plethora of strands mutated with mixed results. Thus, humans are in constant fear of the possibility of anything harmful jumping out from anywhere. So, in the same way as in primitive times, humans feel safe in their little, familiar, routine world, and are suspicious of anything new or foreign.

This fear has interpreted the long established habits—culture and tradition—as the only safe, and hence meaningful, way of living and survival, and, by extension, the only path to happiness. This gross belief, now favored and endorsed by emotion born of long association, translates anything old as gold and valuable, which condenses age into the supreme measure of value: the older the truer and better, and thus truth is nothing but culture/tradition.