I explain why some men kill others (they kill men, women, and children) in the initial post of a thread named “Ethical Truths.” ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=195687
They either have a form of brain damage, or they have been brainwashed by someone [perhaps a Rupert M.-type] who wouldn’t mind being a cult leader. A couple of guys who succeeded in gaining cult-followers are Jim Jones and Donald T.
That thread points out that these killers, known as predators, are a very tiny minority of the Earth’s population. Others become killers because they give in to social pressure: their character is not developed enough so that they can resist this pressure. Most all killers are ignorant of what is in their own best self-interest. They might have gone into the military - instead of becoming a conscientious objector - to eventually volunteer for the M.A.S.H. unit, as the best way to adapt.
An armed “enemy” youth, fighting to safeguard his home territory that has been invaded, suddenly appears in front of this this U.S. Army recruit. He then fires his pistol at they frightened youth, not out of malice, but of some primitive survival sense of what he has been trained to think of as “self-defense.” He kills that citizen of the country that was invaded by us. Who made the decision to invade it? The old men of power and influence in the U.S. empire. {At the moment that empire is in decline, and another one elsewhere is rising.}
Actually, I do not agree that it is “nicer” that humans more commonly wage economic war rather than military war. That is rather like saying that psychological warfare is better than physical warfare. In fact, that the theatre of war has moved into the mental world (economic war is fought on the psychological front) indicates that people have become worse, have degenerated, because it makes it easier for those who practice this type of warfare to cover their tracks and to hide what they are really doing. When warfare is physical, it is much harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes as to what is really going on.
As to why men (and women) like to kill each other, the reason is that they do so because they have become corrupt. Because they have become corrupt, people’s behaviour has become dysfunctional. One aspect of this dysfunctional behaviour is that people have become addicted to killing each other. They kill each other because they enjoy being cruel.
And you are right. If things do not change, then humanity will bring about its own extinction.
I agree also that fighting to the death is not a natural state for humans. PTSD stats are clear evidence that we are not made to fight to the death.
I don’t think I agree with your views on economic war though.
Trump, not so long ago, put up some tariffs on Chinese goods. An economic shot across the bow, so to speak.
Do you think it would have been better to put a shell into one of China’s war ships in the disputed South China sea?
Not likely.
What about Regan and Gorbachove when they used Glasnost to warm up the cold war, got rid of the Berlin wall and increased trade instead of fighting or the possibility of fighting?
Could you please tell us more about what you mean when you use the word “corrupt.”
Dictionaries define the concept in the following manner, but a more-philosophically sophisticated understanding of it would be helpful to the study of Ethics:
CORRUPT is defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as:
a : morally degenerate and perverted : depraved
b : characterized by improper conduct (such as bribery or the selling of favors) Example: corrupt judges
dictionary.com defines “corrupt” this way:
debased in perverted; wicked; evil character; depraved; Example : a corrupt society.
Will you be so kind as to explicate the term, telling us in what sense you meant it in the above quote.
And do you hold, as I do, that U.S. lawmakers should be pressured to make corruption a crime punishable by jail-time?
One reason is not everybody agrees we are killing the Earth. Another is that while we may be destroying the environment collectively, no one individual is singularly responsible. You participate in this when you drive your car. Ask yourself why you drive your car when you know it polutes the atmosphere.
Are you that sure we all just love war? Sometimes I get angry and wish I could kill someone. Sometimes I become depressed and wish the world would just die. But other times I feel good about being kind to others, and get a charge out of making other people happy. I know no soldier who ever came back from war and said “I just loved that!” Most come back with PTSD.
I think what would happen before we wipe ourselves out by war is we will decrease in number until there are too few of us to have war. There will only be a small smattering of soldiers who see that there are no more structures, no more institutions, to fight for–all their commanders, all their government wiped out–and they will wake up, suddenly realizing there is no need to fight anymore. They will look at the other soldier across the enemy lines and recognize him as a mere stranger, another poor sap who no longer has any reason to fight… and then maybe we’ll all go home. There will be enough human beings left to start reproducing over again, and the human race will simply begin again from an earlier point.
The counter-example to this is nuclear war. If the enemy has the bomb (or we do) and is willing to use it, he could wipe out the entire planet in one foul swoop.
We had 20,000 years of peace under the goddesses. The Bronze age gave us the male war gods and weapons that could kill men more efficiently.
That was when we started fortifying our city states. Oligarchs have ruled us all from that time on through the last 5,000 years of war.
Thanks oligarch a holes.
The corruption of humans killing humans must be taken care of before the corruption of our oligarchs ruling without being elected can be looked at to bring our oligarchs to heel.
To your last.
Corruption is almost impossible to prove when they can protect and hide their bribes within the systems they have created.
Fraud is easier to prove, but your full systems are so antiquated that the U.S. might fail as a stated quite soon.
You are a nation of laws but you have more than one system of law.
Cormac McCarthy is probably my favorite living author. That said, the Judge is a character in a novel. So, he’s a character, not the narrator and the narrator ‘himself’ is not even the author, and the author is a fiction writer. That’s a lot of layers down to be taken as evidence. There are facets of war that some people love. It is also natural to hate war, fear it, avoid it. I think the myth that it is simply a part of our nature plays into it’s continuation. We could learn not to have it, to get the lies about it - that it offers the only way to achieve certain kinds of nobility for example.
Possibly. Better than all out nuclear war and the like, certainly. But the potential deaths and suffering from economic war are certainly greater than those in any previous war we have had.
War and killing and everything on the verge of it, all makes a man more aware of what existence is.
It is however almost impossible to have this knowledge and not lose its meaning. Because it is very hard to justify a kill to the self, and when it cant be done, the life of the killer becomes a farce. He will be reborn as a whipping slave or some such to help him back into a basic awareness of existence.
The act of killing when it is profoundly felt to be just, which is what war is for, brings the killer to the knowledge of the value of his own life, because he has pierced the veil between reason and will to power, or rather, stripped the will to power naked and beholds it as himself.