“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”
- Mark Twain, “Pudd'nhead Wilson”
It is something that you should have learned in your teenage years, if not before. You can be kind, and thoughtful, go out of your way, even sacrifice for the good of others, and eventually, in almost every case, those others will viciously turn on you. They will bite to the bone, then blame you for bleeding.
Maybe you didn't learn that. If you didn't, it's because you chose not to. You came up with excuses for them; maybe you didn't try hard enough. Maybe they “have a lot going on.” Maybe they have a “diagnosis.” Perhaps this was a one-off, a unique set of circumstances. Maybe you “should have seen this coming.”
You can blame yourself all you care to. It won't help, but it might protect you from the knowledge that people are often vicious for no reason at all. In these decadent times, sensation is everything, duty is nothing. Wounding a friend is a powerful sensation. It feels like a sickness. To those who betrayed you, it feels like power. They may be meaningless in the world, but they have the power to hurt deeply.
You are to blame, to a degree, for your own injury, but only in this – you believed that goodness was innate. You believed that humanity has an instinct for justice and compassion. You thought that if you were good to them, they would return good to you. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
But neither justice nor compassion are instinctive. They are learned behaviors. And most people don't learn them well. Especially now, when everything is cheap, shallow and disposable.
In my time as a lawyer – which I refer to as “The Babylonian Captivity,” I learned what the death of a family looks like. I have been involved in divorces, the distribution of estates, and custody battles where the mind and heart of the child being viciously fought over ends up looking like the streets of Stalingrad. I have seen “good families” descend to animal viciousness over a used car, a crumbling house, a few hundred dollars. It always starts with “I want to be fair,” and ends with wild-eyed lust to hurt, to take without regard for justice or compassion.
Only suckers believe, right? What's important, in the end, is getting what you want.
Right?
But it doesn't take something to be fought over for people to fight. The most vicious bloodlettings often occur over nothing at all.
There is no such thing as “human nature.” We have only three inborn traits at birth – a fear of falling, the ability to learn language, and a dislike for loud noises. We can find a nipple, and we know what to do with it. That's it. It's a pretty sparse tool kit to start with. But it gets better, fast.
The reason that humanity has been successful as a species is that we consciously adapt to our environment. The slow, messy process of natural selection is not how we evolve. We do not have fur to protect us from the cold, so we learn to skin pelts, to tan hides, to weave cloth. We are in a desert, we learn to irrigate. We teach, we remember, we learn.
As humans, we adapt by teaching and learning, and by preserving and advancing what we know. We change our environment to suit us. Our coats get warmer, water flows in places that nature never intended. In turn, we change. We become farmers, builders, engineers, and heating and air conditioning technicians.
And when we build a society that rewards viciousness, we become vicious. When selfishness is lauded, we celebrate the most selfish, and ape their selfishness.
The most well-compensated people in our culture are those who have, and maintain, vast amounts of personal wealth. In a society where many, many people have very little wealth, and less power, the wealthy have the power to take even more from those who already have less. They can take, and they do. At every opportunity to take, they take. At every chance to give, they refuse unless it benefits them directly in some way.
That's why they're wealthy.
Obviously, this way of relating to society requires selfishness, greed, and opportunism. This is the only real “talent” most of them possess; cunning ruthlessness and callousness toward those who are less wealthy. If it will gain them a few cents on a stock price, they will not hesitate to put tens of thousands of people out of work. If it makes them a few dollars more, they will not hesitate to lobby legislatures to remove safety regulations, knowing that there will be deaths and injuries as a result. In order to get a massive tax cut on top of their already obscene privileges and exemptions, they will manipulate government to take health care away from millions of people, leading to deaths, misery and blighted lives.
They tell themselves, “That's just business,” or “That's how the game is played.” Think about that for a moment. What they are saying is that their “game” requires them to disregard all concern for the lives of those they affect. They are saying that the rules of their “game” require a lack of moral and social concern for what they do.
In short, the game rules require that the players at the highest level are psychopaths.
Contrary to what the paid intellectual quacks from their sophistry factories (known, hilariously, as “think tanks”) will tell you, the money from the many windfalls the rich are granted never trickles down. Time and time again this has been demonstrated. They know its a lie. That simply doesn't matter. It gives an intellectual veneer to selfishness, and it will do for that purpose.
While the money doesn't trickle down, the psychopathy does. People see the behavior of those “at the top,” and they mimic it in their personal lives. They learn that this is what is required for success. If you want something, this is how you get it. And you have no obligation to share it, if the other people involved have no means of forcing you to do so. Lie. Cheat. Oppress. That's what “successful” people do.
While it may get you what you want, being a psychopath, or acting like one, does not lead to a fulfilling, socially integrated life. And living in a culture that rewards such behavior is dangerous, discouraging and isolating if you would maintain some measure of your mental health.
Healthy humans want to live in a mutually supportive, cooperative society where no one lives in want. Now, as you read that, what did you feel? How have you been trained to react when someone says that honest cooperation is far healthier than cutthroat competition – which on reflection, is so obvious as to need no further defense? Unless you're a go-getting psychopath piling up more money than you could spend in ten lifetimes, or someone working to legitimatize their selfishness, in which case, no defense of taking the interests of others into account will do. Kindness and cooperation are “inefficient,” you see. And they don't show on a balance sheet.
Any life other than that of the oppressor or the oppressed is “impractical,” or “idealistic.” You will notice that labeling something “impractical” is not an argument, it is a confession that the speaker simply can't see any way of living other than the one in which they currently live, where their privileges are unquestionable. Facts of life. The order of the universe, which can only exist with their golden bootheel on your neck.
Escaping this exploitative worldview is not easy. You will be punished for attempting it. If being free were easy, everyone would do it, and the oligarchs would be forced to build robots to serve them. And they're busily working on that, aren't they?