Has sentience ruined us? (this has just become the opening line for my nanowrimo entry, by the way)

I was thinking today that sentience seems to have ruined us. Becoming self aware has caused us to realize on some level that we are alone. Being an individual is a lonely place. We are alone in our heads with our thoughts, even if we share them.

I think that because we're sentient, we're more alone. If we weren't, we wouldn't know we weren't, we would be all about survival and community and being that we're apes, we would group together and rely on each other more. Apes are social animals.

It's made us destroy our planet, destroy each other on a grand massive scale, it's made us destructors rather than creators.

All the other creatures on this planet, the non-sentient ones, have to live in some semblance of harmony with their surroundings. They all contribute something to their environments. If they didn't, nature would rule them out. They would not survive.

We on the other hand don't live that way. We don't live in harmony with anything, not even ourselves. If we were still apes, if we didn't know who we were and had all these deeper meaningful thoughts, all that would matter to us is survival. And in order to do that we would have to be in togetherness with the rest of our animal friends.

SO. Has sentience ruined us? In a way. You could say this idea I'm promoting here is akin to being blissfully ignorant. But then there would have been no wars, no raping of the earth, no obsessive compulsive disorder, no depression, no hatred, no narcissm, gratuitous violence, phsychotics etc.

All these mental illnesses seem to happen only to Humans or animals that spend a lot of time with humans, like dogs and cats. Mostly dogs. They get anxious when separated, but again you could attribute that to wild instinct. Being with the pack means survival, being without your pack means you could die, and that's enough to make anyone anxious.

Anyway. I guess sometimes I wish that we were just apes and that we just did our thing, hung out in the woods and were done with it. All this complexity in human nature is not fun.

I saw a disturbing film last night called "Equilibrium". Matrix meets 1984. Really upset me. Watch it.