Ouch
Humans are a cooperative species. That is the very essence and basis of society.
We’re not unique in this. In fact we’re not even the most extreme example. Take bees for instance; you never see a bee strike out on it’s own, off to live a solitary existence free to wander from flower to flower and never you mind about going back to the hive. But you do see people that live alone, interacting with society only enough to meet their physical needs. Sometimes people manage to do this even while living within a city.
According to God, one of the prime contributors to society is empathy. We have an inborn habit of imagining each other’s feelings, be it happiness or pain. We get a “contact high” from being around someone exuberant. We cry at sad movies.
I say ouch on behalf of inanimate objects.
It’s an involuntary thing. I’ll see a minor accident, or even just a particularly nastily crumbled fender and wince. I’ll be putting on an old shirt and the seam of the armpit will tear, and I’ll say ouch. It’s a little thing but it’s part of the glue that holds us together. It’s part of why we enjoy cartoons where “things” come alive, we already imagine them alive, so there’s a sort of “I knew it” aspect to watching these shows. So empathy is the basis of anthropomorphication. We even carry this up to the grandest of scales, we empathize with the entire universe and call that God, and instead of saying “ouch” we say that we sin.
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