forests

First the forests describes human development and illustrates our complex relationship with the trees and fascination with the sky through Vico's giants.

The giants are primate like humans that live in dense forest they have conscience

 Or consciousness, the dense canopy above them inhibits them from seeing the sky. However they are frightened when lightning strikes and they take it as assign from the skies to have morals and religion as well as science and rationality. I think this primal forest dwelling race represents the id of human psyche. The part of us driven by desire and survival our human instincts. But when lightning strikes we develop our super ego our society groomed side that keeps the id in check. Although the giants are primitive at the forest stage they aren’t necessarily portrayed as violent or unhappy just ignorant mostly. So we must ask are violence and emotional conflicts part of human nature or are these traits that we developed as we saw the sky? Was corruption from the same cradle as morality and rationality?

Additionally the breaking from the forest could possibly be compared to growing up. You begin ignorant survival and desire oriented sheltered from the world in the arms of your parents, (forest). But as you grow eventually you will be struck by real world (lightning) leading to confusion and eventually you will learn of the world beyond child’s play and begin to break from your parents, you will start to cut down trees until eventually you leave home in search of your own life, you build a civilization. However even though you left the forest you start your civilization near a forest kind of like how in your adult life you want to have a relationship with your parents but you dont want to be clinging to your mother's apron strings.  

There is also a distinct correlation between the life cycle and the cycle of civilization. You start small and weak you progress and you decline until you are old and weak and die. The same applies to civilization. So when will the society’s of today go back to the forest? Will they go back for the same reason they left, fear?

INDIVIDUALS

Mario llosa believes that Peru has not yet come to that place where the individual can set himself apart from his society. he believes that a nation that gets to that point will conquer all. “the first to break up the masses into individual beings who with time gained the right to think and act for them selves would become thanks to that unknown exercise freedom, the most powerful civilization in the world.” However the author of freedom and democracy argues that this will never be possible even with freedom because humans arent able to shape their identities themselves so they conform. “the modern man is under the illusion that he knows what he wants but he wants what hes supposed to want.”Even though the state or church isnt controling our thoughts our desires our directions society still does. We may have the ability to act on what we want but the root all of our desire is conformity.