RICKRUCKER.COM
Torture by Kings and Armies Reveals Sick Human Behavioral
Bug
Since I've been arguing
against moral delusions, it's interesting to look at actual
psychopaths like the Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan,
brother to the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates. The thing
about the Sheikh is he was "made a psychopath." But not in the Sunday
School psychoanalysis way. Lots of guys with effective absolute power
behave similarly.
Even after all that media
desensitizing and fetishization of gore, most of us are still big babies. I
couldn't even watch the torture tape. Finally it haunted me to such an
extent, I watched a few seconds of it when I was hammered.
We could watch a fake one
all day long, though, as fans of The Passion of
the Christ did. As the media's gotten bloodier, people learned
the difference between reality and fantasy. In effect, we've learned to play
with our savagery, in the same way the Sheik plays with his victims. How do we
get off on violence? Usually with the help of a morality play, with the bad guys
dehumanized and righteously made to suffer or die. Not that we necessarily need
the pretence. Although even the Sheikh used the pretence of being cheated on a
grain deal to justify his cruel instincts.
And how do we know the
savagery is innate? Because a suspiciously high percentage of men wielding
absolute power become functional psychopaths, and engage in wanton torture.
Probably about the same percentage of men who enjoy bloody media, but wouldn't
kick a stray cat for $500.
The breaking of the moral
instinct can't happen easy. It probably takes as long for them to go
psychopathic as it does for normal people to learn it can be fun to watch Jesus
getting tortured (a whole youth fulla violent-assed shit). But after a while,
the king's position of total unassailability and absolute power must wear away
his moral intuition entirely. As morality derives from social consciousness, we
must be looking at a behavioral bug.
Real world, natural
empathy derives from that social consciousness. Think about swear words:
they come from everyone agreeing they're swear words. Somehow it just happens,
in every last human culture, and "fuck" or "sheisse" shocks a tiny part of the
brain, physically, in everyone. Just because everybody acted like they were bad
words! That's how fighter-jet-sophisticated these moral modules are. They're as
high-tech as an eyeball. Imagine a computer constantly pinging something, like
they say hackers are constantly hitting the Pentagon: your moral module is
checking your status against your peers constantly. "Does he think the thing I
said makes me cool?" "Is she impressed by my yacht story?" "Did that thing I
said about her pants looking tight hurt her feelings?" All under the
hood. Aspects of this particular aspect of the
moral module are probably broken in me, which causes me
to get off on invective and other such fun stuff. Much of that "moral"
consciousness is hogwash, however, and frankly I'm glad it's broken in me, and I
hope I can help break it in you as well. But I don't know how much you'd have to
pay me to stab a little dog, even if the little dog that say, killed my cat.
Probably many thousands of dollars. That's the good part of the moral
instinct--the part you wanna retain, and frankly have to, just like you couldn't
forget "fuck" is a swear word. That morality's a lot harder to break
or undermine, as the proportional rarity of truly sick fucks attests
to. The only place you get big numbers on the truly sick fuck scale is
in absolute power people, with their perverse social
consciousness.
If you want to understand
what social consciousness is, from the evolutionary perspective, just spend some
time with an autistic person. They are mind-blind, don't understand what other
people are feeling, intuitively. They wouldn't understand what anybody'd
get outta torture to begin with. Meanwhile in normals, there's tons of
under-the-hood analysis constantly happening. People are attuned to the
slightest subtleties in body language and tone of voice. Humans feel offhandedly
snubbed, know their friend's beliefs and weaknesses, and cater to them,
intuitively. Somehow the combination of absolute power and human social
consciousness can cause the whole moral system to crash.
So pinging against other
minds, when you have absolute power and absolutely nothing to worry about,
status-wise, can apparently cause the whole moral module to pervert or break
entirely, Caligula-style.
Some people are more or
less born with psychopathy, like the cat torturers who become serial killers.
Others are broken into it, usually by sustained, absolute power, or sustained
conflict against a dehumanized enemy, which itself is based on social
consciousness: everyone on your side of the army has dehumanized the
enemy, and you organically dehumanize them--just like you accept "fuck" is a
swear word. It can't be de-swear-worded, except by community assent, and
gradually, apparently.
In a state of psychopathy, you can derive the same fetishistic pleasure out of pain infliction as a bishop does from The Passion of the Christ.
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