The Human Animal (Animals)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, June 16, 2010, 03:06 (5061 days ago) @ dhw

dhw,-I think we have very divergent approaches to this: where you draw distinctions, I draw none. -A human being who kills someone else, does so because he or she--even if for a moment of "insanity," draws distinctions that allows them to carry out the act. The ability to make these distinctions is part and parcel of the human condition. I agree that each of us has a combination of social + antisocial tendencies. -Human beings are intrinsically social; we agree here. A key difference to why I consider all evil being social in cause--if there was no other people, there is no one to do evil to. You can't be antisocial without a society to be "anti" towards. Going back to one of my old Nietzsche threads, morality means nothing to the man who is wholly separated from society. Good and evil are only concepts that exist when more than one human must coexist. -Having established a concrete link between man's social nature and the existence of Good and Evil; the rest of my argument should be--I hope--transparent. -I find no difference in being antisocial within your society, and being antisocial towards other societies. The only difference is that society decides whether or not your actions are acceptable or not. -Like it or not, we reward fighter pilots medals for destroying the most enemy combatants. Soldiers who single-handedly kill more of "the enemy" than their peers are awarded Medals of Honor. Our nature that allows us to organize into polite social clusters also enables us to destroy each other at will; again--the cause is social. -You argue (strongly) that Bush/Blair were the instigators of evil: but you have fallen for a critical (and extremely powerful) fallacy. The cause of the war in Iraq is ultimately in the combat between extremist Islam and Western Secularism. Iraq would NEVER have happened had Bin Laden not founded his (social) group of Al-Qaeda (at American expense--but that's a different topic). If you're a student of Sun Tse's "The Art of War," the strategy in Iraq was quite simple. By putting American soldiers into harm's way, we give angry Islamists easier access to kill Americans in their "Jihad" without needing to find a way to get to American soil. I completely disagree with the public pretenses of the Iraq war, I fully agree with it's military consequences in the broader ideological war against theocracy. I stopped being Buddhist when I realized that the only way all people could live in peace and harmony was if all people adopted the same Meme. And this is contrary to human nature. Our social natures are what provide the impetus to fight against each other. (Look at kids who form social groups around music groups.) -There's no way to tie Al Qaeda to only one man; the movement Al Qaeda represents is much larger than even Bin Laden. The same way, ultimately neither Bush nor Blair would have signed the attack orders if a true majority of Yanks (can't speak for you Brits) were against the war. I remember 2003, and there was very little resistance to going to Iraq at first, so much so that it took a year of the media asking "where the war protesters were" before they actually materialized. Social impetus provides the source AND the means to carry out goals--however we want to flavor them as good or bad.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"