Friday 28 February 2014

Might is Right


What disturbed me about this video wasn't the bullying so much as the reaction to it. They really thought it was funny. Later they're going to take some candy off a baby because they can. Fist pumps all round.

Humans reflect the environment in which they were raised and in a world where children are betrayed by lies and violence when they're impressionable, this sort of thing has to be expected. It's funny how broken minds perceive Right and Wrong; parents will wring their hands over the Bullying Epidemic and in the next breath, ferociously assert the need for children to be made to respect their elders. Or else!

Or else the elders will bully them. But people don't see corporal punishment (or emotional manipulation, even traumatic shaming, coercion or fraud) as bullying. You can explain why it's bullying but they know what they've been told and they haven't been told it's bullying so...the Bullying Epidemic looks set to be around for awhile.

The vast majority of people cannot feel empathy as a result of OFC dysfunction (which I believe is the result of traumatic shaming of the sort that made us start wearing clothes, stunting the development of impressionable minds). They can watch cruelty and graphic violence without flinching, they themselves inflict suffering empathy would preempt; almost everyone has been disconnected from the main, clods washed out to sea on their own.  To regulate their behavior, laws and rules are required. Without empathy, humans cannot be humane. Incapable of feeling the pain they inflict, they perceive advantage in disadvantaging others and for the vast majority, their idea of fun is making other people suffer. Their behavior is loosely regulated by an ad hoc moral compass that, when the steam of rhetoric has evaporated, will always boil down to "Because I can". When the illusory restrictions of Law and Order are lifted, Nanking gets raped. That's the reality. Polite Society is the fantasy.

It doesn't help that most children are raised by authoritarian figures who are always right because they're holding the rod and they Know Best, an argument they will gladly emphasise with their rod of Authority.

It's a Toddler world.

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