Thursday, November 8, 2012

A Hardwired Human Mindset

What's up blogosphere? I'm enjoying my Thursday evening to a great extent now that my Air Force affiliations are complete and my week is winding to a close. I'm about to indulge in some relaxing kava as I tell the world what I've been thinking about recently. But first, I need to feed my fish.

Pretty much as far back as society goes, there's been a great deal of literal sacrifice. As far back as records of the human race indicate, there has been some sort of system where one person is just beat to a pulp for the greater good of the community.

It seems cultish and awfully taboo to a modern western society like us. In the most brutal forms, sacrifice has meant ending ones life to appease the gods. From the moment apes have walked upright to the present day, somewhere on Earth a society exists where they kill each other to feel comfortable. From the Mayans dissecting live women in front of entire capitals for the pleasure of the Rain God Chaac, to medieval criminals being decapitated, to Japanese kamikazes, to mass suicides of contemporary cults; sacrificing your own individuals seems like a pretty popular trend among humans. And needless to say, western culture thinks it's weird as hell.

The first question that comes to mind is "why?". It makes absolutely no sense to waste off your own people, regardless of the reason. In addition, the act is purely heinous! It seems like it should be a monstrous crime to point someone in of a society and tell them their most important contribution is a brutal and gory death in front of everyone.

But western civilization always seems to think they way is the best; we always carry on with life acting like we never do anything wrong or barbaric. This is my favorite part of the blog post; now I get to play devil's advocate. Western culture performs just as many sacrifices, if not many more, and our sacrifices are much worse.

To begin with, "barbarians" I'll call them (indigenous/Japanese people and cultists who still perform legitimate sacrifices) may be a little more animalistic. They kill you, and it's over. The gods are happy. Then they're done. In the West however, we pick a victim and brutally beat the snot out of them on an emotional level. The pain involved is all on the inside, affecting the hardest place to reach in a persons body: the mind. Victims are tortured for YEARS until they have no choice but to leave the society. And in most cases, our reasons are no better than the Mayans'.

I'll throw out the most prevalent example: high school. High school classes perform disgusting sacrifices every semester. They pick a kid, and that kid is doomed from jump street. Whether he's socially awkward, incompetent, ugly, or whatever, he will be sacrificed for the sake of the other students to feeling popular. Sometimes they end in suicides; sometimes they end in school transfers. I've seen it happen first hand and that poor child has no real options but to accept that he's been chosen and he will be miserable. Administrators call it 'bullying' and do all they can to prevent it; but it's a sacrifice, and it's just as barbaric as the Mayans.

I'm getting all the obvious examples out of the way first. What do all of these "humanitarian, non-barbaric, reformed" Western countries all do when a different country's been pissing us off? We strap a gun to an 18 year old and tell him we'll pay for his college. But in reality, if he doesn't get killed in combat, he's left to face a ridiculous 50% chance of homelessness, PTSD, and drug addiction. How is that any more moral than a blue-painted Mayan witch doctor ripping the organs out of a peasant?

Luckily however, I have found myself waist-deep in Air Force ROTC. Believe me, the idea of sacrifice still exists, but it's no longer pointless. It's all for training purposes; it's to make us better people. In my flight, we have a flight commander. This person is in charge of the flight of 12 or so cadets, and it's essentially their show. But there's a double standard that destines the flight commander to fail. If the flight does something good, the flight commander gets no praise, the praise is divided among the 12 cadets. However, if the flight does something bad, all of the blame goes to the flight commander. When the latter scenario is the case, the flight commander gets yelled at...hard.

Let's say one cadet is a minute late to a PT session. The flight commander will get sternly, in-your-face yelled at for a solid two minutes. I've been on the receiving end of it. It sucks, you feel like dropping the program, it affects your night; you are being sacrificed. Because of the way this sacrificial system works, it pretty quickly trains each cadet to not make any mistakes. After a year of it, you have 12 near-perfect individuals. But in order for it to work, just like the Japanese Kamikaze's, sacrifices have to be made. And in this case the sacrifice is getting emotionally destroyed by a senior.

There are certain little odd concepts that I've noticed pop up in the human race from start to finish. If you sit down and think for a while after reading some history books, you'll come up with several. The concept of human sacrifice is certainly one of them. There is something hard-wired into the human mindset that declares across the board that sacrifice is necessary, which I find fascinating.

It's not just that these cultures find sacrifice necessary, it's that they think it works! Every culture that partakes in these sacrifices honestly believes that it improves their culture to a large enough extent that they don't see the brutality in it. Mayans truly believed that these public murders appeased the gods. Monarchs really believed that decapitating clearly innocent people in the town square would deter people from committing crime. Worse of all, high school students honestly don't see the harm in continually harassing the shit out of a kid to his suicide, as long as it makes them look and feel 'popular'.

Then there's me, relaxing in my little culture of ROTC, completely slandering everyone else for performing 'sacrifice' when I even admitted that ROTC is only effective due to it's method of 'sacrificing' the flight commander. But seriously, we only break each other down and yell at each other because it makes us better. I don't see any brutality in it.

Well that about wraps up this blog post. It's just an interesting observation I've made about humanity in general. The theme of my beliefs are all starting to trend towards scientific observations that prove God's existence. I don't go to church because they tell my science doesn't exist, and they clearly need to open their eyes because I think they're wrong. And I don't hang around atheists much because they tell my God doesn't exist, and they clearly need to open their eyes because I think they're wrong. Keeping an open mind and asking questions is all we can do without sounding like a complete jackass to someone. No matter what you blindly believe, there's someone who thinks your an idiot for it.

So I put my ideals on the internet so everyone can think I'm a jackass.

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