Death. Our own death. Our own imminent death. Our own imminent death lacking fulfillment (in life).
While it is possible, for example, to gain a ken of schooling while alive and thus able to mentally appraise things, and it is possible likewise to fathom prosperity while alive, we have no dependable means of quantifying the non-quantifiable – of clearly discerning the full significance of death. Alien of aliens, death is exceptional, resolved, unsubtle, peculiar. Paradoxically natural and preternatural, death is a thing out there, equally occult and obscene. Death, and especially our own death, is always extrinsic and direful, the ghoulish specter of unbidden dreams.
Death, or the dread of it at least, seems to afford our living greater significance. Yet, how can we grasp the seminal upshot – that religious-faith worthiness of life – when we do not properly and meticulously conceive its debasement, its forlorn, irremediable obliteration? We might as well ask if we can veraciously cerebrate and weigh the idea of the light without first gaining cognizance of the darkness, for one task seems as farfetched as the other. No one, not even the dead themselves, knows death. We guess at it. And we label the product of our self-assured guesswork “understanding”. But we don’t understand, and our unknowing plagues us as it always has. Death participates in truth, but it is in a practical sense an impossible truth.
In the 2002 motion picture Catch Me If You Can, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio plays a youth, Frank Abagnale, who in the 1960s deceived and defrauded, often improvisationally, on a fantastical scale. It is an entertaining tale. Perhaps the film’s most fascinating aspect is that it is basically true – “impossible”, but true.
What is the truth of death? How can we reliably evaluate anything so contradistinctive? We require time – the time of experience, the time of mental fathoming or attempting to – in order to assay anything, yet the dead have been somehow metaphysically removed from it. And recall that we are warned to be cautious not to even judge differences of culture among living humans. How very much more worthy of pensive cerebration then is the condition of decease!
Did you know that we humans have the ability to believe something true when it is quite false, and the ability to believe something false when it is true? This is because the intensity of want can serve to persuade and ‘inform’. We want our way into belief all the time. Sometimes we disbelieve not because the concept is nonsensical or fictive or irrational but because it does not comport with what we deeply desire to have true. Ofttimes the thing encountered is so foreign to what we want to believe that we do not travel that road at all: disquiet left inclines us rightward and distressing contrariety right makes more appealing the left. Our ideas must find a comfortable home, and cognitive dissonance is the most unwelcoming of guesthouses.
And when we recoil, we to some extent presume that we understand that thing abhorred by virtue of the very fact of our turning away. (We recoiled for a reason, didn’t we? And do we really need that reason explained to us?) Often the reverse is true: we reject the thing, but it has so frequently been misjudged and stigmatized, etc. that we contrive a whole fanciful set of notions about the thing (or person or idea). But we do not know death. And we don’t know it because, although singularly stark and unambiguous, death is not one thing. Aristotle once expounded on the several senses – vision, hearing, etc. – and surmised that the sense of touch must be more than one sense, as its delights and affects were copious. He speculated that the single sense of touch was actually multiple senses. Death too is multitudinous: freedom surpassing, natural amalgamation, thing-ness, union with infinity, aloneness, unfeeling, nonexistence, timelessness, the absence of worry and ambition, existential acquittal, transcendence, profoundest inanimation, coda, oblivion.
We seem to fear death, never fully realizing that fear too often arrives among many other feelings and mental experiences.
It is late summer, 1818. You are repairing on horseback along a chestnut-colored country road on an oppressive Mississippi late afternoon. You’re two hours into your journey with one more ahead, when you stop a moment to dry your forehead. Pulling the handkerchief from your eyes, you descry something curious in the distance. It is hazy, but… but in only a few seconds your brow has gone from suffused with sweat to pristine dryness to furrowed with revulsion. There, atop an improvised stump, a hideous sight: a decaying human head.
The head had recently belonged to a runaway slave. His capturers decided to make an example of him. With no supportive scientific research backing them, the murderous capturers were nonetheless firm believers in deterrence. Stark power inequalities advise staunchly, you see, and every brute and party coming into its compass is a poltroon beholden to its monstrous counsel. Humans have always acted as they have following more a rough calculation that they’d get away with the deed than from anything approximating scruple. Hence, those murderous slave catchers were no different than the canine carnivore that sniffs at the carcass before him. And, far more than any of us feel comfortable admitting, ours is a species of sniffers.
Forward two hundred years – it is 2018, and less than two hundred minutes have elapsed! In 2018, ask any ordinary white Mississippian or any white American bereft of scientific or research understanding – an easy undertaking, to be sure – if he or she believes in deterrence and you’ll likely elicit the most sanguine, cocksure approbation.
Fear is an ungainly, piteous constituent of justice anywhere, and especially in anything that might be alleged a “civilization”. Fear, as an instrument of justice, is unreliable because feelings are not linear, and they are not exclusive; they are complex and imaginative, fluctuating and chimerical. When we fear, ours may be odium, determination, religious fervency, uncertainty, violent outrage, dejection, eagerness, seriousness, spontaneity, worry, panic, nausea, tearfulness, confusion, detestation, indignation, disgust, anger, disorientation, paralysis, distrust, exigent want, and/or hope too. If only we were as dopey as a rodent or reptile, perhaps we would not feel all these additional things. But we’re human! Orthodox religions, as well as legal codes have relied heavily on fear as far back as anyone can remember because fear is a handy manipulator. However, when power resorts to the imposition of fear it follows the blueprint of tyranny because the reliance on fear is inversely proportional to veracious justice. And people are always tremendously tempted to alloy their justice with fear. There’s no immediately apparent drawback to doing so. Torture someone publicly as an example to others (and use fear this way), and you have no obvious detriments to endure: everybody seems to get the message wonderfully. We are taught to say that “justice has been served,” when it has not been served at all, but usurped and enslaved. And a barbarous display tells only that barbarism has been served.
When we are worried that we cannot control (others), and we increase in fear (i.e. fearing the loss of power or status, etc.) as a consequence of this awareness, the imposition of fear (upon others) comes to us like the readiest of hirelings. Fear does work; it accomplishes. But, for that matter, in all honesty and forthrightness, mass murder works too – and perhaps mass murder the better. And sometimes mass murder and fear have been wrapped up together in one convenient bundle, such as in the thirteenth century horrors of the Mongol Horde, the shameful Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms in the nineteenth century, the thousands of terrorist lynchings of African-Americans by fiendish white Americans in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the Nazi Holocaust, and the tactics of twenty-first century Islamic terrorism, to reference here but a scant few.
“Religious” terrorists, although remarkably ignorant, are aware that they cannot possibly compete with their massively better equipped enemies on a regular battlefield. (I will not tell here the specifics of why it is a truism that Islamic radicalism is ignorant because, importantly, if that information were to ever reach their zombie eyes and ears, the knowledge might empower their nefariousness. I am too smart to make that mistake. Thus, I let them remain precisely as ignorant as they are.) The terrorists’ battle is in the realm of emotion. They seek to change the way those of us who, unlike them, fit in somewhere, the ones who appear to belong or to have something to feel good about – the relatively esteemed of the moneyed world perhaps, or the accomplished “First World”. They use violence. And their target is chosen based on its being exposed and vulnerable, not on it being especially guilty. Fear justice does not care deeply about exactness with respect to actual guilt. This is because fear, by its very nature, is inexact, spewed upon everyone. The runaway slave who is decapitated is not killed because he is so very guilty, but because he is so useful in the fear agenda of his capturers. (Couldn’t the murderers just kill any dark skinned human, and place the lifeless head on a post and inculcate fear “justice” identically?) It is always this way with fear justice. But why should the world’s most abandoned creatures follow the very same fear justice we follow, and vice versa? We in the United States like to fancy that we are so variant and incomparable from the terrorists. But different how? People are only truly different in a differentness of beliefs. And the greater difference still is in the severer disparity of belief, and in the observable behavior that confirms greater confidence in that belief – acting on one’s belief. Impartial truth testifies thusly: we are, in an instrumental civilizational sense, only as different as our fundamental civilized values are different. And those values are most irrefutably evident in law, actual social justice actions and criminal justice-affirming actions.
Again, different how? They use fear. We use fear. They abuse, we abuse.
Americans are content to exploit the myth-based fear of death as a central feature of criminal justice. But we are only more organized and consistency-oriented in our employments of the fear tactics so familiar to ordinary abusers, wayward criminals, slave captors, despicable communists, militants, dictators and tyrants and their ilk. American criminal justice degrades, dehumanizes, destroys, abuses, saddens, tramples and maltreats with an aim to do so with utter impartiality. If it is impartial, is it not also “fair”? And isn’t the fair also the just? In this casuistic way, abuses made (putatively) impartial masquerade as justice.
Some people, their arguments following the prompt of oppression advocacy and trying to reason it out and defend it, will assert that this widespread reliance on fear is evidence of its no-brainer excellence, that its salience and ubiquity are the hallmarks of unarguable utility and perennial viability.
Let us examine in finer detail this supposition of a (human) fear of death. Firstly, let us remark on the cliché elephant: it is unarguable that people all over the world avoid their own death with painstaking regularity. This is a real feature of humans. But we use such tendentious estimations as too reliable supports of our vengeance and punishment agendas; we rationalize what we emotionally want. We will, for example, “reason” that the temperamental child “ought” to be “disciplined”, while we have no scientific or philosophical support of that conjectured “ought”. It comes as the recommendation of power, and we approve a style of torture in answer to that noncooperation not because the “discipline” so proposed is so finely meritorious, moral and necessary, but because we stand in the insensate shoes of the Gestapo before ghostly, emaciated, shivering quarry. Domineering power inequalities predict the sanction more presciently than anything else – more even than does the offense! We abuse and we kill – no, not out of necessity, not, as we’d like to believe, from the righteous pull of impartial and pristine judicature and constitutionality, but because we can get away with it – not because it is moral or truly necessary, but because we can.
Can is an unprincipled, depraved corruptor of justice!
Fear is a common manipulator; it is so common and so available that most countries around the world still employ some elements in their legal codes that obviously oblige the ancient pseudo-philosophy (that fear of death and gross abuse are the most necessary and useful of tools of social order, or simply to assist repression). Fear and oppression go hand in hand. Whether or not fear and oppression are useful to justice is secondary (at best); their impetus lies in whether or not they are reliable manipulators in the hands of power.
Death (i.e. the threat of death), specifically, is the everlasting servant of tyranny. And death-tyranny, frankly, is often woven into the very seminal fabric of criminal justice (in most U.S. states). States and nation-states threaten their constituent peoples with death-tyranny every day of their existence. But it is virtually never because death itself is so wonderfully necessary or justified. Killing codes arrive to modern history as a legacy of an ignorant culture of abuse, and because death retains a mythical status in virtually all cultures. Let’s examine more closely now the supposed fear of death.
There were more than twice as many suicides as homicides in the United States in recent years. One recent year (2013 to 2016) revealed only about 18,000 homicides in the United States as compared with over 44,000 suicides in the same year (in 2016: 44,965 suicides (1) and 17,250 “murders”). These statistics hint that we humans are actually more averse to living than to murdering – something we’ve surely not allowed ourselves to think deeply about or speak about, for to speak about it or deliberate upon it is to countenance the heavy substance of what we are determined not to believe! Fear of death is part of our fear justice, so we cannot discount it without tainting fear generally, and this leads to all sorts of headaches. So, we immediately ignore such statistics as these. We are not intellectuals!
In the mid-1990s, it was reported in the American news media that the new Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had received many letters from prison inmates who wanted to be killed (by the death penalty, as their prior death sentence had been commuted). Russia had abolished its death penalty – part of what was taken as normal and natural when a state suddenly becomes a democracy – in the early 1990s. But prison conditions were beyond awful. The prisons were poorly heated and unsanitary, and physical abuse was common. But here we see something strikingly different than what our myth-based fear-of-death guesstimations conceive: we see again (like the suicide statistic above) that people (Russian prisoners serving life sentences) want to die.
Faith in fear, tyranny, killing and oppression are humankind’s most enduring and wholehearted rubrics; these constitute a lasting underside quasi-religion of humankind. The spiritual is the felt. Therefore, if people feel safer with a death penalty (and they often do) it might perversely be deemed “spiritual”. But is this not like the rape described as “romantic”?
Statistics sometimes suggest we’re more averse to living than to homicide, and that is something we do not usually think about. We don’t think about it not because it is useless or irrelevant but because it is unsupportive of our (societal) interest in abuse as part of our justice scheme. We want to abuse because we are uneasy and unsettled about violent crime and our own personal vulnerability. We act out by supporting oppressive sanctions, such as the death penalty, and this as a direct result of this feeling of vulnerability. But we don’t want our advocacy to be watered down, weakened, diminished or impugned. And that’s what the suicide statistic mentioned above (the 44,000-plus suicides) does, of course; it makes us realize that people aren’t so extremely afraid of being painlessly euthanized (by lethal injection) as we believed. We would experience cognitive dissonance, and as a consequence we’d feel relatively uneasier in the very instant of enlightenment.
The reader now reaches nervously for his cigarette.
Fear of death? Most of us think in childishly simplistic ways, and we just assume that people “fear death,” and that’s that. But what we are really averse to, what really takes place but for our minds to apprehend it, is that it is not life itself that is so precious to us but something invisible inhering in life, the loss of which we eschew: meaning. It is not so much death that we are trying to avoid, but something far more obscure that arrives at that very terminus: the end of accumulated meaning. We are “afraid of dying,” and also ignorant of the deeper truth behind that fear. We imagine that “people fear death,” that we, like so many others, are just naturally inclined against our own mortality. This is true, of course, but we fail to grasp the completest why in our (absent) analysis; we do not realize that we are really averse to bringing or accommodating an end to all achievements, large and small, unfavorable to closing off permanently any further accumulation of actualized impact, of acquired meaning. And it isn’t that this idea is so intellectual or obscure! We don’t recognize the primacy of meaning because it does not serve as an assist to what we want: to harm and to kill as a means of addressing our own fear, deeply woven into our feelings of vulnerability. We would like to actively create an environment in which we were safer. But we have no ready means to do this. It is fun out there. Our duties are out there. Ergo, we venture out there. But it is dangerous out there. The only thing we have as a means to treat our uneasiness (in general vulnerability) is to support a jurisprudence that bases itself on the quaint suppositions of imposed fear.
Assuredly, people are believed to fear death, and this prescribes and augurs for the death penalty too.
But is dying what we really fear? Or is it something else? – Is it something else more subtle? Is it just dying that we don’t want? Many are so very accustomed to thinking so that they will find the assertions in this essay strange and bewildering.
Often people who have many children and grandchildren remark that they are not afraid of dying in their old age. Such admissions are revealing. Their blood progeny have given their lives a substantial fulfillment of purpose, and at some point they become content that their own accumulated meaning must suffice. There is an artistically creative tune by U2 called Miracle Drug. The lyrics reference this concept of discharge from a measure of the urge to continue to accrue more and more meaning: “Freedom has a scent, like the top of a newborn baby’s head.” Bono smells his own child’s head, and the whiff marks a liberation, a “freedom”, a felt lessening of the want to so sedulously whittle more and more meaning out of life.
Henry David Thoreau wrote insightfully that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” What can he have meant with those words? He certainly alludes to that imponderable passion in the human personality which claws assiduously at the accrual of accomplishment, noteworthiness, and attainments. Nature does not tell us how to have children. It does not, in fact, instruct on how to have coitus. We discover how by a biochemistry-behavior-biochemistry loop. The entire scope of nature’s ‘not telling’ is extremely wide, and though we little apprehend it, our want of meaning is almost entirely a sublimated instinct to procreate. Yes, people build tall buildings and amass fortunes in the sublimated disfigurement of their procreative impulses.
A far closer scrutiny of the human “fear of death” reveals something considerably nuanced. There is the familiar figure of the soldier on the battlefield, the impassioned fireman who rushes into a burning building searching for persons overcome by the fumes, the lifeguard who swims far beyond the bounds of safety to rescue a stranger. There is, of course, the suicide, achieved by innumerable means. And lastly, there is what we might call the “clumsy suicide” – the terrorist dead-enders – and such terrorists can be counted among those who are not very afraid of death, we have to suppose.
Have you seen the 2007 motion picture “Rain Over Me?” Well into the movie (spoiler alert!), there is a scene where the main character is so overcome with grief after his wife and children were killed in the 911 attacks that he eventually engages in a gun standoff with police on the streets of Manhattan. He clearly wants to die. He wants the policeman to shoot him. He survives, but only luckily.
But that’s just a fictional Hollywood movie, you say.
But my life is no Hollywood movie! My life is and has always been real life! Let me tell you about my origins.
It was late 1959. I was about nine months old. I, my mother and father, as well as two older brothers, 2 and 4, respectively, lived in a small house in Long Beach California. One day my father had a terrible mental health bout and threatened to kill my mother and threatened to kill me (I was just then learning to walk). Late in the day, my mother managed to reach a neighbor’s house and get them to call the police.
When the police arrived, my mother and father happened to be in front of the house in the smallish yard. My mother rushed over to the patrol car and pleaded with the man in blue who had already stepped out of the patrol car and was on the sidewalk: “That’s him! That’s him! He’s threatened to kill me.” Then, in utmost nonchalance, my father said to the lawman, “I am happy to cooperate, officer.” The policeman then turned to address my mother, “See, lady, he’s a nice guy.”
Without hesitation, my father pulled out a handgun and moved its chilling barrel to the cop’s temple. Then, as my mother later related, the man’s face blanched ashen with fear.
Well, long story short, the mentally ill man wielding the gun pulled the trigger.
The gun did not fire. It was loaded, but set so that a lock or safety had been actuated, so it would not shoot.
When my brothers and I heard this story as young teens, my mother added that she believed, after having years to mentally analyze that incident, that he, my father, was trying to get himself killed. He figured, she speculated, that the cop on the far side of the patrol car would immediately shoot him in that instant that he threatened to kill the other, proximate cop with a gun. (My biological father served several years in a California state prison for that.)
When I was sixteen I met this man who was my biological father. (I did not like him.) In conversation with him at his home, without ever knowing what my mother had told me and my brothers, my father recounted that fateful incident that got him incarcerated. He told it in such a way as one carefully prepares a punch line, as if he were revealing something totally new, something I did not know and would not have guessed. He said he expected the policeman on the other side of the patrol car to shoot him when he held the gun to the nearer cop’s head.
Fear of death?
Still, like so many duty-obliged fascists, we try to obtain peace and justice with threats of death as part of our criminal justice constructs, as an element of our obeisance to fear, to trite, fanciful deterrence.
Death and killing values come to all cultures around the whole world, to widely varying degrees. This happens for many reasons, but also because of the opportunities and usurpations that attend stark power inequalities. When we see the enemy soldier drop his weapon and hold his empty hands high over his head in surrender and we quickly shoot him directly between the eyes, we blather out some excuse for our actions, but final, irreducible truth attests that we killed him because there was no price for us to pay in doing so. The armed soldier killed the surrendering enemy soldier not because the surrenderer was dangerous, but because the trigger puller had an afflicted nervous system – and the exterminated surrendering soldier was proxy and scapegoat in that inner war. We kill not because we need to but because we want to, and we oblige the want because we can. Our supposed commitment to “life” embraces the ugliest and most ironical of cohorts. Most of us are impersonators of living humanity, confederates waiting like so many stealthy snakes for opportunities to betray any biped with them-hued skin, anyone with them-arrayed features, anyone who has dropped his weapon, or anyone available in our (very inner, very secret) vulnerability-treating agenda.
The fear-of-death-myth is untiring religion. Have you read about the medieval European “auto da fe?” Those three mischievous words literally translate, “act of faith.” This term was used for the act of burning accused “witches” at the stake, sometimes three or more at a time. They called it “faith” without ever being aware of what they really had faith in. It wasn’t religion! They had faith in the barbarous ordeal torture-killing of “witches” as a means of treating their own uneasiness in living a life of unending, otherwise untreatable vulnerability. And they wanted so much to believe that their barbarism was right and justified that they adorned it with the august stole of religion: “faith”.
We still do this today. Every prison has a chaplain. And part of the chaplain’s duties are to attend to the spiritual needs of the condemned. With the priest present throughout the execution protocols, orthodox religion gives a sort of sanction to the killing, and that is precisely what the state wants and needs.
Decades ago, I had a brief conversation with a Delawarean who was, along with me and many others, protesting the death penalty at a Delaware prison. He told me of a conversation he had with a minister who believed in the death penalty. He said to the priest that he didn’t understand how that man – the minister – could approve something so utterly non-religious as the death penalty. The minister told him that it was his job only to help people find God while they’re alive, not to judge and condemn. And separate from judging and condemning, the man believed he was not really part of the system and thus not blamable. Then the abolitionist telling this story to me related what he replied to the minister. He said, “What if the state kills somebody and he is killed before you can bring him to God, before you can save his soul? That’s your only job!” He related that the minister was then grim, speechless.
The ordinary American of the twenty-first century is little different than the medieval brute. Americans assent to the myth-dependent pyre. Yet, when the foundations of justice rely utterly on the crude, superficial, carnivore-animal-set-upon-animal notion that everyone is terrifically and reliably afraid of death, and acting to answer that devil faith, we betake a weapon fundamentally antithetical to civilizational probity. And this relationship to civilizational objectives the assenter cannot know, because he and she did not gain the prior understanding that it is accumulated meaning that everyone treasures utmost – that it is not life for itself we value, separate from meaning values. If, for each of us very personally, our need of meaning were fully satisfied, and death were to come without pain or ordeal of any sort, all of us would agree to it. But this idea, with all its ultimate unarguable truth, is strange to common minds. Most people would put forth counterarguments that allege so and so, but upon creditable, discerning, penetrating analysis, we see that the counterargument is based on an unsatisfied want of meaning, telling that the speaker-alleger does not understand his/her own elemental meaning want. People cannot fathom the unequivocal satisfaction (thus extermination) of meaning, as the drive remains within them interminably. Remarkably, humans desperately live without ever understanding why they desire to.
In the year 2000, I had a brief correspondence with a New Jersey state assemblyman who supported the death penalty. He wrote in his letter that there was “no doubting” that whether the death penalty deterred others or not, the person killed by the death penalty was “definitely deterred.” As you might expect, being somebody who was not a mere dabbler in human rights but a serious reader on the subject, I took his letter as an ideal opportunity to educate him on what the word “deter” means. I told him that the word utterly depends on the concept of fear or apprehension. Somebody is supposed to be “deterred” when he or she is made to alter his or her behavior based on some perceived danger. But how, exactly, does a dead person – a person who’s been executed, for example – experience fear? How do the dead apprehend danger? Continuing to educate the valiant politician, I informed him that persons who have been executed have not been deterred but incapacitated.
Incapacitation may seem inarguable. It is what it is! We have to believe that we’ve got lots of Gestapo believers in oppression in our midst, and the wide-eyed disciple of a closed-eyed socio-culture of malevolent vengeance will allege that incapacitation is realizable only one way: you have to kill the person to accomplish it.
Not so. Many hundreds of thousands of persons convicted of violent crimes are incapacitated (without weapons to kill anyone) in America’s many prisons as I type these words.
But oppression will not relent; ideas are not thrown overboard into unwholesome waters just because a smug, smartass blogger makes a compelling counterargument. Predictably then, oppression rejoins, “But it isn’t real incapacitation! Sometimes they escape!”
And what is my response? “You yourself admit that the criminal justice system is so stupid, so inept and incapable as to be unable to keep people securely within the walls of the maximum security prison, and you want to give that very same stupid ineptitude the power to kill people?” (But I speak and write not with a faith that people are educated by my contentions; I speak and write because they seem responsible things to do.)
It is important to remember that none of this has any effect on the believers in oppression. It cannot. These sorts of words fall on deaf ears; they will never educate oppression advocacy. And this is because oppression advocacy is argued by pseudo-rationales; they’re disingenuous. People imagine that their beliefs about justice and punishment are consequent to an informed, intelligent weighing of needs and responsibilities, of sane, virtuous values ponderously sought. They fancy their ideas are thoughtful and even brimming with wisdom. Many are convinced (precisely to the same degree and to the same intensity that the suicidal terrorist is convinced, by the way) that their opinions and values are beyond reproach. Such a magnificent temple as theirs cannot be undone by the cleverness of liberal verbiage. Still, though he or she is not wont to admit it, oppression faith originates in and continues in emotional want. We make arguments, but how does one make a persuasive logical argument to the smitten fifteen year-old girl? Her feeling functions as highest truth. Her beliefs were not based on anything carefully reasoned to begin with, and thus logical arguments are useless against them. You can’t undo deeply-emotion-based want with reason. Protesters and counter-protesters always talk past each other, and what each apprehends from his own side of the barricade only serves as a proof, an irrefutable validation that he himself was right all along.
We all sincerely want to live in a world of tidy, vulnerability-exterminating effectuation. Still, we breathe every breath and traipse every step in utmost, utterly unsettling, nervous system plaguing, unsafe susceptibility. In candor, any of us can at any time fall victim to any of the millions of gun toters and dastards in our midst. Our meanness and vengeance advocacy make us no safer, but only make us feel safer. We believe and act not based on careful intellectual and philosophical principle and with a full sagacious awareness and acumen of behavior research and criminal justice studies, but because we want to feel a certain way. And we very often actively avoid learning, because the truth is so unsettling; learning commonly functions (would function) as an impediment to what we emotionally want.
Many of our distant ancestors were hunters. But they were also, in a very substantial sense, themselves hunted – by disease, accident, predation, and environmental disaster. Evolutionary biologists will tell you that there were several behavioral/psychological predispositions that aided those homo sapiens of distant prehistory in their effort to somehow survive. Nature does not favor pure, unadulterated murderousness, for if it did a woman might well murder all those around her that might have afforded her a better chance of survival. (Prehistoric humans survived best in tribes.) Or, she might make them violent in response to her dangerous murderousness, thus inelegantly bringing about her own death. Or, she might have killed off her own children with her murderousness, which would mean (of supreme importance) that we moderns do not descend from her.
But this does not mean that nature is somehow neutral in matters of lethality; nature surely gave people the ability to get mad and to experience the benefits of adrenaline sometimes. To make the organism – humans, in the present case – better able to survive in the most general sense, nature afforded a kind of “flexibility” with regard to violence and lethal violence. In general, when something was considered definitely very dangerous, anger and adrenaline would run high. This would improve the chances of that human surviving, of course, and then equally it would increase the likelihood that those physiological and psychological adrenaline impulses would be passed on to succeeding generations – and this because the experiencer lived on to procreate after the scary adrenaline incident.
What is the exact nature of this biochemistry? (This is not an article on the science of neurobiology.) What I mean is, how does the woman or man… well, let’s take a male example in this instance – how does a man respond when a lion attacks? His adrenaline is up, he takes a large stick and strikes the animal strongly in the head and it falls limply to the ground. What does the internal chemistry of that homo sapien then endorse as he looks upon the unmoving varmint at his feet? Answer: Smash it’s head again! Anger and adrenaline do not automatically and instantaneously disappear just because the immediate threat has been (apparently) addressed. No. Nature has no need to have the system too quickly turn off. What if there are other lions? What if the lion at your feet is not dead at all but just knocked senseless for a fleeting instant? The adrenaline and the anger remain for many seconds, quite long enough to deal more blows upon that mortal skull. That is surely what again and again transpired.
So, we aren’t biologically programmed for murder exactly, but programmed for “flexibility”; we need to be able to dispatch that creature quickly while we have the chance. And nature intends only that this anger and adrenaline come when we sense that we are in especial danger.
Sometime during what evolutionary biologists call “the cognitive revolution” – maybe 50,000 to 70,000 years ago – humans developed an impressive ability to communicate by spoken language. And anthropologists speculate (because none of us were there to see it, and there are no writings to verify it) that over thousands of years people became revered in the tribe for their story-telling capabilities. This ability was roughly related to their ability to see (or imagine) into the future, and this served as a kind of accident of natural selection. By welcoming the telling of stories the tribe members were just valuing entertainment. However, they were also valuing the ability to superiorly imagine things that were not immediately apparent… which is a kind of imagining, of course. Thinking clearly and perspicuously about future threats and dangers aided the tribe and also the language gene (so to speak) carried in the blood-related tribal members.
Now to modern times. Nature still does not and cannot know what we’ll encounter. Therefore, it still gives us only anger and adrenaline to help ‘sort out’ the stickiest of situations. We encounter, for example, a news story about a grisly murder. Though adrenaline is low, we still cogitate in a defensive way, as if the lion were there at our feet, unmoving, but still a potential threat. This is the effect when we read about or hear a story about terrible victimization: just like the human creature long ago who stood over the felled lion, we cannot be sure how safe we are. We imagine. Nature is not totally neutral on what to do. If it is considered especially dangerous (i.e. the animal just lunged at you a few seconds ago with giant claws and fangs, or the story in the newspaper was very graphic, and apparently the humanoid assailant still lives, and is maybe also “at large”) nature enables the imagination, and then advises further action. In the case of the lion, the task is easy, because the lion is so very accessible. But in the case of the read-about murderer or the crime referenced on TV, effective action is not so easy. What does one do?
The answer is that we do all that is available to us. We read about a terrible mass murder two days ago. Then yesterday we saw on television that a certain politician wants to get “tougher on crime.” Today we head to the polls and give him our vote.
A few weeks ago, around April 24th 2018, I saw on television a news story about a horrific crime. The murderer drove a van onto crowded sidewalks in Toronto, running down civilian people he did not know. Over a dozen people were killed, and many more were badly injured. The news clips of the incident showed something remarkable. After the van was stopped, the mass murderer was seen standing next to the vehicle, clearly holding up what looked to be a handgun and pointing it directly at a policeman. The policeman yells at the man to drop his weapon. The “suspect” does not cooperate. He is entirely visible to the Toronto cop, and the cop does not do anything but maintain a bead on the man and again insist that he drop the weapon.
No doing.
About a minute later, we see what happened. The officer took the man into custody without ever firing his weapon. I immediately apprehended that this incident was instructive, but that, in many ways, people refuse to learn anything from it. Our brains are primarily formed to be able to dispatch that lion on the long-ago savannah, not to enquire into and gain insights into sagacious sociological, criminological and civilizational policy.
The Toronto murderer was obviously, much like my biological father so many years ago, trying to get himself killed. It was still another example of a maladroit suicide attempt.
After seeing and reading about the Toronto mass murder, I recalled also a very recent (also April, 2018) incident in New York City where the police were called to deal with a mentally ill man on the sidewalk. The man was holding forth an object vaguely like a gun in his extended hand, very much the way the cops on TV hold the weapon at arm’s length when they have, or nearly have, their target in their sights. The man was shot and killed by police. In this instance, like so many others, he had no gun. The police showed, in their public relations defense, a photo of that mentally ill man holding forth “something” in his hand that “looked” weapon-like. How does a man in New York get killed in a hail of bullets when he is unarmed and hasn’t violently harmed anyone, and then a week or two later a man in Toronto Canada has just killed ten or twenty people by running them down with a van, emerge from the van and draw what more conspicuously looks like a weapon (and it seems contextually like a weapon too, as the man has just murdered a bunch of people! – Hello?!) and this second guy end up a minute later handcuffed and unscathed?
The answers to the foregoing question are accessible. It is stupidly boilerplate to say that the murderer in Canada was white and the mentally ill guy in New York was black. Racism may very well play a significant part in police brutality, wrongful arrest, wrongful killing and general profiling, but to pretend that race was a credible factor in comparing these two cases is absurd. The intelligent mind apprehends immediately that the restraint of the Toronto officer, and the contrast of that conduct with what happened in New York City, had everything to do with the training and nervous system of the Toronto officer. The Canadian was not within a fear-based, gun toting culture. Though Canada and the United States share a substantial border, they are quite different countries. In 2015, Legatum Institute, a London-based think tank, sought to determine what country in the world might be considered “the freest.” The conclusion: Canada was “the freest” of all the 142 countries analyzed in the study. (Canada has since fallen to fourth place, largely due to ongoing “ethnic native” problems in its murder- and suicide-ridden northernmost province, Nunavut.)
How did this Canadian freeness come about? Although the full answering of this question is beyond the scope of the present writing, we must understand Canada’s nineteenth century history. Canada was a British commonwealth, and Canadians were never fond of slavery. By the early 1830s, slavery was totally banned in all the British Commonwealth. Thousands of runaway slaves from the American South escaped to Canada to get beyond the reach of the slavers’ recapture agents. Canada grew defensive and adamant in its resentment over wicked Americans crossing its borders to conduct kidnappings. Canadian resentments of slavery contributed substantially to a growing culture of freedom and rights. In the 1970s, the Canadian people elected a liberal intellectual named Pierre Trudeau (father of the current Canadian president). Pierre Trudeau got his nation to enact strict gun control, approve a national healthcare system, and abolish the Canadian death penalty. All of these civilizational achievements continue in the Canada of the present – still among the freest in the world.
That Toronto cop that took down the mass murderer without ever pulling the trigger on his gun comes from a culture, and that culture was different from the culture of the United States. While we are taught here in our U.S. gun-toting culture that when somebody pulls “something” out that “looks like a gun” and points it at you, it is a no-brainer that he should be shot and killed, others do not see it the same way. Without abounding guns in their immediate environs, Canadians have different nervous systems; Canadians generally, even Canadian cops, do not fret much that somebody will shoot and kill them. The dissimilarity between Ontario and Quebec, the two proximal Canadian provinces, and New York, with respect to murder rates, is shocking. The murder rate in New York State is often twice or three times as high as it is in those bordering provinces. (Keep in mind that the word “twice” here would mean that for every 1,000,000 persons in the pertinent population, if 100 are killed by homicide in the lower in the comparison, that would mean at least 200 are killed by homicide in the higher. You might picture two hundred dead bodies piled one atop the other, if that helps your understanding.)
Mostly, Americans do not care much about what happens in Canada. And it is predictable that Americans don’t. Americans want their values to agree, and Canadian experiences are useless in that effort. Americans are in very large numbers arrogant people who imagine they’ve nothing to learn from other nations or peoples, and if more of us die… well, that’s just the price that manly determination and creativity pays for being the “most successful” country in the world. Sometimes where piles of bodies do not impress, piles of cash do. But we oblige the old brain of that old savannah, not a newer requisite to do what wisdom and prudence and reputable civilization advise.
This story of how one poor unfortunate escapee from the psychiatric ward dies with an “aimed” pipe in his hands and another person, a certifiable villain who has murdered many, is merely cuffed and taken into custody is in need of context. We smarty moderns think and behave as if it is good and proper and logical that we use killing as a method of “deterring” the very worst sorts of crimes, such as murder and treason. We daily, hourly, and by the minute and second deceive ourselves into thinking that we’ve come to our killing advocacy out of an intelligent, well-considered evaluation of risks and consequences. It is a lie! Even for the very wealthy, life is constant vulnerability. We cannot escape it. How is one to act to somehow ensure a better prospect of not being victimized, of not being assaulted, of not being killed? We inhabit a social and cultural space where the instrumentalities of jurisprudence are very separate, legalistic, cordoned off, unfeeling, regimented, formalized, and routinized. We mostly feel separate from it. Do we not exist? Given a preference, we’d like to “inform” that system, to tell it what our views are, to share our take on what to do with the hardest, meanest, most dastardly and unrepentant of criminal convicts. Without our “input”, we surmise, the system may tend relatively more to function as an ignorant abettor; it may fail to grasp the threat the awful murderer poses to us, the harmless and vulnerable.
In March 2018, in Tempe Arizona, a woman was struck by a driverless car (the car did have someone in the driver’s seat, but the car was in ‘auto’ mode) and killed. The accident occurred at night. The next day, the female chief of police said before news cameras that the lady who was killed was “jaywalking”. The police chief’s statement strongly insinuated that the person who died was at fault for her own death. Wow! How does a person actually claim arbitrarily that the penalty for jaywalking is rightly death? The answer is that a punishment culture is insensitive to justice and decency and inclines rather to retribution, vengeance, and arbitrary comeuppance. The police chief’s words reflect a culture that intends not that people are made safer by suffering some logical penalty for jaywalking, such as community service or paying a small fine, but people are made safer by the continuing threat of abuse, mishap, ordeal and death. They don’t want people to jaywalk, for jaywalkers are scofflaws who flout their social responsibilities and stultify law enforcement; they want jaywalkers to “get what they deserve” – and what they “deserve”, as a consequence of embarrassing the police, is death. The lady killed by the driverless car was condemned by a representative of the culture, a culture of punitive, violence acquitting, driverless justice.
People believe in killing. Its mythology is deep, and lives on through centuries of “Christianizing” and “progress”. Killing is like magic. It does not have to be proved in any way. We delight in the work of the magician, and we care not how the trick was done nor whether we are genuinely safer for the fact of killing. The magic is self-affirming. The spectator at the magic show is content to be entertained, and the proponent of premeditated killing is content to continually go on believing the falsehood (that it lowers murder rates, that it deters, that it makes people “safer” relative to other available criminal sanctions), as it excellently and obviously addresses his own want of reduced vulnerability. Poof.
Still, especial societal safety in death justice – and also fear justice – is infernal myth.
Interestingly, even after emperors, czars, pharaohs, kings and dictators and the like were removed from large parts of the earth and replaced with elected officials – maybe 1800 to 1945, for example – a majority of the population supported continuation of the death penalty. This seems, at first glance, odd. Wouldn’t they want to deny the new government the instruments of abuse that so discredited that opprobrious former government? Well, it is not easy for a polity to rid itself of an ingrained cultural relic. We are both taught by a cultural tradition that vengeance is normal and proper and inclined by our personal psychological sense of vulnerability and anger to believe with all supportive intensity; we all appreciate that slight movement of the lion at our feet!
Europeans entered the postwar period with something new in their political philosophy: an intense awareness that oppression and death agendas are not the needed integrals of the civilization we aspire to create. During and immediately after World War Two, European and North American intellectuals became convinced that world peace would have to be achieved ultimately by an abandonment of vengeance and killing as components of criminal justice. Between 1945 and 2015 several dozen countries around the world abandoned the death penalty. More of these countries are located on the European continent than anywhere else. And this should not surprise; the witness of Nazi atrocities gave birth, quite logically, to its antithesis: peace and nonviolence via peace and nonviolence.
We still live in a caveman-ish world where we reflexively suppose that people are “deterred” by the threat of death. Nobody wants to die, we tell ourselves, so the continual threat of a death penalty can be logically expected to keep people in line, to keep them from committing terrible crimes. And, what we do not at all realize is that we do not really care whether statistics corroborate the belief or not; we are, finally, intent on satisfying that anger-adrenaline urge. It is impossible to override our biology! Most of us will support the death penalty just the same after we’ve been given huge piles of statistical information that it is not anywise superior to the sanctions of greater lenity.
England is not Somalia, and Sweden is not Chad. England and Sweden are parts of the developed world, also the democratic world. So why is it that European success with abolition of the death penalty is so disregarded in the United States? It is because we humans are predominantly interested in that which may support what we have already believed and claimed. If it is both true and contrary to what we have previously asserted, it is an inferior truth for the fact of suffering this compromised status. But we do not take only half of it or only partially consider it; truth is roundly dismissed if it does not comport with our want of self-aggrandizement. And a set of contrary statistics does this.
Back in 1988 there was a presidential election in the United States. And the two major party nominees, Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush, debated on television. A broadcast journalist who knew very well that Dukakis was opposed to the death penalty asked him what his opinion would be if it were his own wife that had been murdered. The premise of the question was stupid, but unfortunately Dukakis answered as if it were valid.
The journalist’s question was stupid because it presupposed that a person is superiorly acquainted with justice when one’s own spouse has been very recently brutally murdered. But our intelligence immediately apprehends that such a person is not superiorly thus acquainted with justice but with injustice. We are all learners and absorbers of what we see and experience, and it is all the profounder when the experience is aversive and damages the affectionate relationships we’ve nurtured over a span of many years. The journalist pretended that the spouse of the murder victim was a person more closely attuned to justice, when the absolute reverse was true. It was a stupid question. I can no more estimate what justice is when my spouse has been murdered than I can gain a closer understanding of kindness and patience after several horseplaying teens have spilled a quart of yogurt on my spanking new suede shoes that I saved for a year to afford. Puke yogurt all over one’s new shoes does not help in the appreciation of kindly consideration. Inconsideration begets inconsideration, crassness crassness, violence violence, justice justice, and injustice injustice.
I am glad the dude asking the question was only on the TV screen and not in front of me, because – offended – I felt the desire to offend; I wanted to punch him in the face for asking such a stupid question.
But for the majority of simple-minded Americans the question was totally fine. The question served to affirm what they wanted to believe. Indeed, Dukakis immediately confessed that he’d want to “tear [the wrongdoer] apart.” And the admission surely resulted in many viewers saying to themselves, in effect, “See! Your opposition to the death penalty is hypocritical! It is only your distance from the misfortune that makes you so disaffectedly self-righteous.” It may seem that justice and injustice are at extreme, irreconcilable poles and that they cannot be confused or ignored. But they can! Three quarters of those American presidential debate viewers did not at all apprehend the stupidity of the question they heard posed. They reflexively ignored the stupidity because so doing paved an ultra-smooth path to self-assuredness. The average viewer wanted to believe that the death penalty was good and true, and that is what he and she believed at the end of the debate, just as at the beginning. And it must be pointed out here that nothing Dukakis could have said would have exposed the lie to the viewer. They would only have become madder at him for “changing the subject” or “contriving an argument” or some other dismissive assertion. As was stated earlier, the believer in death and fear and punishment cannot and will not learn, and this is because these are not based on reason but on very subjective personal feeling, and feeling suffices as its own corroboration.
My wife is from South Korea. The Korean culture is different from that of the United States, of course. One of the most puzzling curiosities, one that I am still a bit baffled by, is the association of the heart (the pointing to one’s chest) with reference to the “mind”. I questioned her about this many years ago. At first, I was concerned that there was some misunderstanding of terms, as she was then still learning basic English. But she persisted: the “mind” was a feature of the heart. I told her that we in the Western cultures fully distinguished the functions and instrumentalities of mind from those (subjective, passionate, highly variable, emotive) manifestations of “heart”. But, alas, the mind is made subordinate sometimes, and the feeling of the heart, however nonsensical and stupid, finally dictates one’s accepted truth.
Organized, doctrinaire religion cannot resist control mechanisms, the ideas and rationales that cohere a complete and persuasive religious worldview. And organized religion must assert that God has ultimate authority over life, as so much depends on this as a central pillar of related belief systems; God must be understood as having supreme authority over one’s life! This means that suicide cannot be tolerated; it must be deemed a sin. And it is. But thence, as we are not the authority over our own lives, it is a trifling that the state should claim a right to kill us also; it has already been established that the authority over our lives lies without.
But just as there is a difference between justice and injustice – and the difference is notable! – there is a real difference between a state that asserts the right to kill and oppress and that state which asserts the right of everyone to live and to live free from overt oppressions. For a state to achieve fully estimable civilizational legitimacy it would have to not only renounce all aversive and oppressive sanctions, but to actively promote the general good with no favor given at all to lobbyists or special interests or corporate profit-making agendas. No such government presently exists on earth.
When humans long ago ventured out of the jungles and into what eventually became cities, it was a propitious development. But you can take the human creature out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the…. Humans arrived and sustained themselves in cities – with all their implied promise – without ever agreeing to a new ethic, a design to place the individual at the very center of social and cultural viability. The individual figuratively “center” was the autocratic ruler, and his was not any sort of altruism or philanthropy; the rulers were pragmatists who sought not justice but gain, selfish gain.
We’ve been a long time out of the jungle, and it is therefore remarkable that we still maintain jungle appetites. This appetite for killing, based as it is on an unsophisticated, hazarded at, estimation that people are supremely afraid of their own death, and thus manipulatable, has not been substantially abandoned. If, as a recent opinion study has revealed, 51% of England’s adult citizens believe in the death penalty, even after it is clear that the death penalty does not reduce murder nor help toward the realization of other civilizational goals, and even after England has enjoyed several decades of success without a death penalty, then something very worrisome must be admitted of humanity (as England is among the most developed political and economic entities in the world): humanity could not save itself.
But this little ol’ nothing blogger asserts adamantly that it is not his fault that humankind is greasing the tracks to its own ruination. Obama was not perfect, but he was somewhat sane and responsible. Still, this level of “responsibility” will not save us, for Obama was a clever individual and he knew that the presidency was attainable only after he nailed down that right plank – by asserting that the death penalty was a worthy institution. Interestingly, although the death penalty seems like a petty, marginal political issue in presidential elections, there has always been, it appeared even palpably, a need for the successful aspirant to firmly articulate his willingness to support “the will of the people,” and we surely know what that little phrase means. Jimmy Carter – the “human rights president,” no less – arrived to the presidency only after, as governor, signing that initial death penalty bill back in Georgia in March 1973 – the one that resulted ultimately in the Supreme Court case that reinstated the death penalty as a legitimate sanction: Gregg vs. Georgia (1976). His successor, Ronald Reagan was a steadfast supporter of the death penalty who had reversed Californian abolition while he was governor of that state. Reagan’s successor as U.S. president, George H.W. Bush, was the guy who defeated Dukakis, and Bush was they guy who answered the stupid question to the satisfaction of the simple-minded TV audience. George H.W. Bush was followed by Bill Clinton, who was very intelligent and informed. But Clinton was even more crafty than he was intelligent. He knew he would greatly enhance his chances of becoming president if he only showed his willingness to oblige the punishment-killing impulse in American culture. In the very heart of the campaign in 1992, Clinton took time to go back to the state capital, Little Rock, to be closer to an impending execution. His nearness to the actual execution – and as governor he had the power to pardon or to stay an execution – meant that he would be more viable in the national election. He was. And Clinton’s successor as U.S. president? That was George W. Bush, a guy who had signed more death warrants – at least 153 – than anyone then alive in the whole United States! His well-demonstrated support of the death penalty was no political liability. Bush’s successor? That was Obama. Barrack Obama was a U.S. senator (from Illinois) for only a short few years. But in that short time, Obama had participated in a redrafting of the Illinois death penalty so as to comply with new concerns over innocents being convicted and (possibly) executed (no less than eleven had been recently released from Illinois’ death row subsequent to DNA evidence indicating their innocence). Obama showed, by his active participation in the killing agenda, that he was unequivocally supportive of the death penalty. And it was a deliberate strategy to work toward presidential viability.
And Obama’s successor? It was a radical misanthrope and political dilettante. The radical was a longtime supporter of the death penalty, asserting publicly around 2000, “Nobody supports the death penalty more than I do.” But, as if that weren’t enough, he openly, unambiguously supported premeditated torture during a presidential debate in January 2016. After the debate, apparently, one of his aides informed him that it was a clear violation of international law for any president to knowingly support torture. The next day the ignorant candidate backtracked, telling the press he’d “support the law” – which is the basic function of the president.
If Vlad Dracul were to attain to the presidency, what would that suggest? What would it portend? The real life Dracula lived in the mid-fifteenth century. It would mean that we have not progressed civilizationally in a half-millennia, as civilizational progress is measured by the ways that human beings are treated within the governing system. And no progress in almost five hundred years would mean that “civilization” had essentially not progressed or abandoned the philosophy of progress. Either way, the ability to kill and destroy would be far outpacing our ability to uphold orderly, disciplined, self-agreed values (You don’t kill, and we don’t kill! You don’t torture, and we don’t torture!).
I will vote in the 2018 and 2020 elections here in the United States. I recommend that you, reader, continue to support democracy and education and decency, and that you vote, and that you do so even if you agree with me philosophically that humankind has virtually no hope of saving itself. I vote because I have to be demonstrably on the right, proactively responsible side of history. And, as you can see, I write as if the reader can comprehend what I’ve written, even though I have very little faith in that. I am not a great writer, but the reason that the vast majority of persons reading this essay will not gain anything from it is that they have something in them resistant to learning. And this is not my fault. Whether we call this quality in them ego or not, their contrariness is not the result of my mediocrity in the employment of words. Nor is it a result of irrationality in my arguments. It is because belief is always, first and foremost, self-affirming. This goes a long way in explaining how an institution so terrible and backward as slavery was able to endure through centuries.
I have spent much of my adult life trying without much success to educate about the death penalty and about human rights more generally. (In America, the death penalty is the slavery of our time.) My efforts have brought me, as a Christian believer, to a greater and greater appreciation of what the prophet Jesus had to endure – trying through every audible exhalation to affirm high truth (a gospel of love) when he knew that people are ever averse to truth, interested only in gain and aggrandizement. He played the awful game to its bitter end. My end, unlike august prophets, is oblivion, utter anonymity. I cannot complain about this: I will not be cruelly nailed to rood wood, as Christ was, shot in the face as Dr. King was, nor thrown from a speeding van like a twenty-first century female Russian journalist was. I will continue to vacation in Vermont, enjoy very good health services, cachinnate at Colbert’s antics, eat every sort of delightful food, and die without drama, of old age decrepitude. And this will be my reward for being much less courageous and much less candid in my truth than that famous first century prophet – such is the perverse justice of this surreal, farcical, unknowing world of posturing moderns.
So many of us are players. We ‘play the game.’ We see the light of some sort of narrow “benefit”, some opportunity possible ahead. But we are little motivated by a far wider and more inclusive truth, an obeisance to that which remains untainted by hypocrisy, bigotry, ignorance, illiberalism, obscurantism, fatuous fame, and animal personal gain. And, in this, it were as if our olfactory sense were as valuable a lead and inspiration as our cogitative sense.
Just as some of us are a bit taller than others, some a bit richer than others, some prettier than others and some more youthful, some more talented than others, there are some of us that are, when all is fairly weighed and considered, less involved in the doltish machination and despoliation of human civilization. I declare flatly that I am uninvolved in that! I may have lived among humans, and I may have used the words of their language, but I was a forthright and conspicuous dissenter in their various cannibalisms. I have tried to educate as best I could, and I stand before God and eternity asserting my innocence in the demise of the human species. Though an unaccomplished nobody, I gave as loud and unambiguous and longwinded a warning as was possible.
This is not a boast. If I abide superiorly on the right side of history, it is a chance occurrence, and it is not me but a (lucky) determination of thirty five years to be more and more aware of history and current affairs. I did not create the predilection within me, but in all candor, my intention not to be inferior to others motivated me. And the want not to be inferior is not virtue!
(1) National Institute of Mental Health (www.nimh.nih.gov)