(no subject)
Mar. 13th, 2014 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueTaking another time-wastey "what [blank] are you" quiz (I go through binges of doing this every couple of years, and now is the time!) was brought up short by a question: Pick a murder weapon. The choices are roughly those in the Clue Master Detective set - rope and pipe and revolver, poison, wrench, knife, etc. (Incidentally, I have played a lot of Clue in my time. It is probably some of where I got my aptitude for if-then statements.)
And I had to close the quiz, because I felt complete revulsion. I imagine intentionally killing even a fictional evil stranger, and it's vivid. I think about how it feels for a knife to go into something or how it looks when blood comes out; I think about how long it takes to strangle somebody with a rope, I think about how unpredictable poisons are and how they are not clean deaths, not at all.
It's very strange; I can separate truth from fiction, but it's hard for me to take violent death lightly anymore. I've stopped playing most video games; realistic violence agaist human-like figures makes me physically sick, as though I went through Clockwork Orange conditioning. But there's no obvious inciting incident it lines up with.
My instinct is that it has something to do with physics engines and aesthetic trends in media rather than something internal, but who knows. Mostly, it draws my attention to how much humans killing humans is something that requires imposed intellectual distance, once you get down to the physical reality of making someone die while you're watching. I think (for reasons that have to do with bravado, posturing, and wanting to look like a coral snake so people leave you alone) there's an impulse to say (and believe) that you could be the baddest stone cold and kill without mercy if somebody pushed you too hard (or there was enough gain in it, or it was just, or whatever else), but who are we really fooling.
I can sympathize with murderers by thinking about their motivations, and I wind up feeling sorry for them because something has clearly gone very wrong. But the actual wanting to kill somebody part . . . it's a bit like saying "yes, I can see why you'd want to chew your own leg off." And although as a society it makes sense we'd pretend otherwise (see above king/coral snake reference; see also "an armed society is a polite society") I'd like to see more acknowledgement that we are just pretending. Even in a situation where somebody's attacking me or a friend of mine, I'm trying to flee or incapacitate so I can flee. Not because I'm particularly noble, but because death is horrifying.
And I had to close the quiz, because I felt complete revulsion. I imagine intentionally killing even a fictional evil stranger, and it's vivid. I think about how it feels for a knife to go into something or how it looks when blood comes out; I think about how long it takes to strangle somebody with a rope, I think about how unpredictable poisons are and how they are not clean deaths, not at all.
It's very strange; I can separate truth from fiction, but it's hard for me to take violent death lightly anymore. I've stopped playing most video games; realistic violence agaist human-like figures makes me physically sick, as though I went through Clockwork Orange conditioning. But there's no obvious inciting incident it lines up with.
My instinct is that it has something to do with physics engines and aesthetic trends in media rather than something internal, but who knows. Mostly, it draws my attention to how much humans killing humans is something that requires imposed intellectual distance, once you get down to the physical reality of making someone die while you're watching. I think (for reasons that have to do with bravado, posturing, and wanting to look like a coral snake so people leave you alone) there's an impulse to say (and believe) that you could be the baddest stone cold and kill without mercy if somebody pushed you too hard (or there was enough gain in it, or it was just, or whatever else), but who are we really fooling.
I can sympathize with murderers by thinking about their motivations, and I wind up feeling sorry for them because something has clearly gone very wrong. But the actual wanting to kill somebody part . . . it's a bit like saying "yes, I can see why you'd want to chew your own leg off." And although as a society it makes sense we'd pretend otherwise (see above king/coral snake reference; see also "an armed society is a polite society") I'd like to see more acknowledgement that we are just pretending. Even in a situation where somebody's attacking me or a friend of mine, I'm trying to flee or incapacitate so I can flee. Not because I'm particularly noble, but because death is horrifying.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-26 11:18 pm (UTC)I believe in your point of view. I do. But I find myself increasingly disappointed by humanity, and occasionally wishing some-albeit almost always people I've never met, mass murderers and people who hurt children that I hear about on newscasts-would just disappear off the face of the earth. I think I've lost the faith that everyone is redeemable, which makes me sad. And I find myself sadly subject to the parental fear so many people have, where I think: if someone tried to hurt her, I really would kill them.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-27 03:40 pm (UTC)But guy who beats his girlfriend to death - horrifying, obviously. Can you picture doing that to someone you love, who trusts you? I can't. Which means that guy's brain is different than mine, which means (from my point of view) that there's something wrong with it (because my brain is ideal, one understands immediately). If I say, ok, he had brain damage from amateur boxing, and he had some lead poisoning when he was a kid, and he did some steroids . . . it starts to seem very sad.
Ciro and I have both obviously spent time around relatives with brain damage and hallucinations and who have been in and out of institutions. Not violent people, but clearly not-right people. And all of them had tragedies and pain in their childhoods. Horrible, horrible things that happened. Not everyone who has horrible things happen turns out horrible - look at Ciro. But we've both gotten to the point where we look at adults and see them as little kids, and we really want to be able to go back in time and protect them, which of course you can't do.
I get angry, but I get angry at whole systems. Any time I look at an individual, it starts to break down. Particularly because you start being able to see craziness in someone's face, like posession. The nervous system has Gone Wrong. Ciro was startled a few years ago to see a picture of Charles Manson and be able to see the crazy on top of the real face (I don't know a better way to explain it), and to be able to mentally subtract it out and see what he would have looked like, and then what he would have looked like as a baby. At some point, everybody was this tiny helpless thing that had to trust it was going to be loved enough.
And not all of them were. And not all of them could have been, because their genes said so. But whether it was nature or nurture that went wrong, I don't know how much I can believe in free will anymore.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-27 03:43 pm (UTC)AH. Certainly that I'm there on. I agree more and more I see people as a result of their associations, upbringing, and socioeconomic level. We're made of what we're made of, and sometimes people had terrible starts.
I'm very lucky.