Question for the ages

There was a dialogue in “SPYder” the last movie that I saw recently. It goes something like -If you kill a deer it’s a crime but not a goat. Maybe because their numbers are more. With so many humans abound, makes all the more sense to kill more of them – is the analogy with which the villain operates. With recent Vegas shooting makes one wonder on the psyche behind these psychos. That guy had made such elaborate setup to carry out his attack, it doesn’t look the act of an demented mind but more of determined to destruct. Had the killer been of a different colour and nationality, god only knows how many more countries would’ve been bombed to oblivion by now and how many hundreds of civilians would’ve paid the price with their lives and how many thousands displaced. As a race, we are in a race of our own to make a society of immigrants. Pretty soon those without a state for themselves would far outweigh those within secure borders.
Be whatever the ideology, its nauseating and scary to think of people with such thought processes and the many more that they tend to ignite with their actions and consequences. Does animal kingdom has this concept of assassins and organized crime? Does insect world take out expeditions and raids on its own clan and kind? Does any other organism, starve its own kind just to make a select few prosperous? For that matter, does any other being has laws and regulations to survive as a society? Humans are probably the most insensitive of the entire lot when it comes to settling their side of  deal in a symbiotic relation with nature. With increasing number of For every good Samaritan there are thousands of such borderline senile who makes one wonder what the future holds in store for us as a society. Interestingly, when I was pondering on this where we are heading as a society, I ended up with Dan Brown’s latest novel “Origin” which tries to find answer for this very question – where we came from and where we are heading. Hope to get the answer and post a review of it soon.

Comments

Ramesh said…
Mmmm. Very thoughtful post.

Completely agree with the first part of your post but not the second !!

The animal kingdom is capable of worse horrors than humans. Warfare, cruelty, extermination, cannibalism, .. they are all alive and well amongst animals. Its a natural extension of the survival of the fittest concept, which is what has been a feature of all life right from the beginning.

Human are the first life form where we are trying to develop values away from the grain of survival of the fittest. That's why it is so hard and we have made only a little progress.

But for every psycho like that Las Vegas nutcase, there are human beings like Mahatma Gandhi who show us what it means to be human.

gils said…
most of the time the question of what sets us apart goes without an answer for any trait that is considered uniquely human is often found not to be so

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