Tunes in my head: Three Little Birds by Bob Marley
Books of a page: W.B. Yeats - Collected Poems
Atmosphere: Sleepy
I remember California, where people would happily tell the foreigner "well, how are ya, I'm from the area and I'll show you the Golden Gate Bridge and Arnie's office if you really want me to."
The scary thing is this is the exact same motivation that drives us to mercilessly slit our bretheren's throats on a mud-sodden battlefield.
How can we put our own stupid nationalistic drive at the forefront of our political aims and let it drive us to kill someone who theoretically be our blood, our brother.
What drives us to kill each other, in the name of God?
We are, as a human race, very similar to ants. We attack better under force, en masse, under the dominion of some leader, whether they're a queen bee, a hick who chokes on pretzel, someone who gets elected to the office by a watery tart throwing scimitars, or the very same spiritual being from above.
In brief, humans are truly pathetic creatures. We happily allow ourselves to be brainwashed into killing, into raping, into committing something that could only truly be considered an atrocity.
And how exactly do we justify that?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Love the MP reference, so true and yet cynical. Do you not see any redeeming factors?
I'm sorry, there's eighty billion MP's which I can think of, do you mean the In The Name Of God reference?
And...sometimes I do, most of the time, I don't.
You've already answered that question - for those who are actually aware of it, the 'brainwashing' exonerates them from the moral consequences of what they're doing. "Oh I only did X on the orders of Y, so it's not my fault"
Or they may truly believe in whatever message is being peddled to them (whether they've reached that conclusion themselves or whether it's forced on them is another matter). So these 'atrocities' might be considered worth it in service of the greater good. They might even go so far (most do, anyway) as to have these acts as being good. Apart from obvious example of religion, there is the military - murder a bunch of people, and you're a hero! (There is a problem with this and I'll come back to it later)
More dangerous than 'conventional' causes is religion. While one could conceivably escape the clutches of nationalism, or equivalent, religion pulls every trick in the book to keep a hold on people.
Most religious parents will raise their child, teaching them that God X exists, along with everything else they might learn in their early years (sky is blue, food is delicious, etc). I rarely consider this, but convincing such a person that [religion] is invalid would probably be equivalent to trying to tell them that the sky is in fact red.
[Of course I had to put a big rant on religion]
Of course, some lucky few escape (usually as a result of some extraordinary circumstance), and some unlucky few fall into the trap when they're older.
On the topic of atrocity and murder, you seem very absolute as to the morality of such things. If it were lying I could perhaps understand, but pretty much everything else is flexible. Plenty of situations justify extreme action.
Of course, saying that when I've just criticised people for allowing situation to negate their morality is interesting. I'd say that ultimately we're all 'brainwashed' and it's more a case of which causes we've happened to fall victim to, than whether we've fallen victim.
On the topic of the worth of humanity, you're right. I believe that ultimately the flaw is self-interest (and it's generally quite short-sighted self-interest). People should be acting towards the collective good (to a reasonable extent not just collective good of humans) but instead we find ourselves in a society which requires powerful self-interest to succeed, and to hell with the rest.
Another flaw is the seemingly universal desire to enforce division upon everyone. Whether it's encouraging people to identify with a particular nation, or people comparing skin colour, people seem to love finding ways in which they differ. Such things lead to conflict. Two solutions I see for this problem:
1. Remove differentiation. Roll dice to pick a set of charactistics and kill off everyone else. Abolish nations, states, religion, any point somebody could use to say "I am different to you" (and the implication is usually "and so I am better")
2. Somehow persuade everyone to stop caring so much about such things. This is just as impossible as the first one (and less fun) but I think it is better as it preserves diversity without the downsides (and there's no inherent problem with diversity, just with the way it's handled)
There is a language I learnt recently called Toki Pona. Works much like Newspeak from George Orwell's "1984" but with a more, ehh, benevolent goal. It has a vocabulary of only 120 words, so there is no room to include largely pointless terms of classification. An example being the word "akesi", which is used to refer to all reptiles. If you want to narrow it down, describe properties. For example, a snake might be "akesi linja" (linear reptile) or "akesi pi noka ala" (reptile with no legs). As roundabout as this can be, I agree with the idea - my interpretation perhaps summed up (in a relevant manner) as: We're all people, and everything else is minor details.
Post a Comment