Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

(Glitch was a stray who moved in with me in 1999. He died in July 2007. I wrote the following during the time he lived with me.)

I appear to have encountered yet another turning point as an unsuspecting participant in an on-going experiment in applied cat psychology.

I've noticed a disturbing dynamic occurring with increasing regularity on Top1, Intertel's general interest email discussion list. The disturbing dynamics appearing on Top1 have strong parallels with patterns appearing within the social dynamics of what remains of the free world.

The hallmark of Western Industrial Civilization has been its unprecedented embrace of individual liberty and free market capitalism. As a direct result, it has experienced a far greater degree of technological progress, and has provided a higher quality of life to its participants than any preceding civilization. However, our unique grand experiment in individualism is not immune to the same failure patterns that have accompanied the declines and ultimate collapses of previous attempts at civilization.

It has become popular to point to incidents where "normal" humans, subjected to extraordinary situations, degenerate into what appears from the outside to be gratuitous violence - and at times depravity - as evidence of the innate brutishness of our species. The apparent causes of human conflicts often defy reason, and appear to give further credence to the idea that humans are motivated more out of a lust for violence than any desire to achieve rational objectives.

We like to think that humans are purposeful creatures. We seek to find purpose within ourselves, and in the world around us. We obsess over finding purpose where there is no reason for it to exist. Most of all, we seek a purpose for our lives, and to live purposefully.

One of the most profound differences between people has always been whether the purpose they seek is internal or external, individual or collective. The nature of the purpose we seek will have a profound influence on our individual world views, and the nature of the societies we form.

The mass media has once again turned its spotlight of approval on the symbols of freedom. Hoping to sell a few more copies and commercials before this latest assault on reason loses the bright sparkly newness that has momentarily attracted the public's attention, the media has sought to move as much "patriotic product" as possible while public interest in the fad lasts.

Power isn't yours unless you can abuse it. Those who use the power with which they have been entrusted, to accomplish the purposes of those who entrusted that power to them, make themselves the servants of the powerful. Only when an individual abuses power does the exercise of power become an extension of the individual. Only the powerful can abuse their power, and only by abusing their power can the powerful prove that they are powerful.

One of the ironies of our age is that even as we begin to untangle the incredible complexity of our own biology, and learn to repair our bodies at the level of individual genes, we become increasingly accepting that the complex systems we've created to run our artificial world are beyond our understanding.

Some among us seek to explore evil, to know it intimately. We willingly explore the dark depths of human nature, wanting to know every minute aspect, wanting to know everything possible about how evil happens. There are others who believe that any knowledge of evil taints the possessor of that knowledge, that the slightest knowledge of evil will create an irresistible attraction that must eventually draw the possessor into the clutches of the dark side. They seek to portray even the willingness to discuss topics like war, slavery and mass murder as advocacy of such practices.

Most of the attention paid to authoritarian societies has been on their external impacts on neighboring populations. The armies of authoritarian societies have earned a well deserved reputation for violence and depravity committed while attempting to conquer resisting nations, but this tendency to murder is an external manifestation. There is a deeper more fundamental aspect that must be accomplished in order to make authoritarian systems possible in the first place.