What are you afraid of?
My friend tells me a story. This is a guy who works out in a gym, takes personal defense classes, and he is a very driven and fearless person, focused to the point of obsession. And he has a lot of anger in him. A mugger accosts him at night with a knife - he breaks the mugger's elbow and knee then calls the police. Then he comes back, and tells me some things which I cannot repeat here, and then asks whether I think he is insane.
I have been mugged before. I will admit that I only pretended to put up a fight. It was three of them against me. In retrospect, I would be just as afraid of hurting them, as of being hurt myself. If I had injured any of them, I would be forever afraid that his gang will take revenge on me, and I would walk with that fear every night for a very long time. You never know how long a person's determination can last, even if he has to let it burn throughout his time in prison. This relates very well to the philosophy in Enders game : you never commit to a fight, unless you know you can win so completely that your enemy will never be able to take vengeance on you. Which usually means killing them. And all their friends. And all their friend's friends.
Violence is clearly the action of last resort, no matter how justified you are. It took me many years to understand this. We always cheer for the vigilantes, the ones who fight back, those to beat the odds, give the bad guys what they deserve. Remember the case, where a mugger beat up a woman and broke several bones in her face, then took her possessions and got into his car. She struggled to her feet, walked up to the car and pulled out her gun and shot him dead before he could drive off. It's cold blooded murder, but her actions don't shock the majority of us, and in fact you will find most of us silently nodding our heads and agreeing, yes, he got what he deserved, good on her.
Well, I can walk past the spot I was mugged now, without any traces of fear or panic. It's just a few hundred meters away from where I live right now.
3 comments:
Hardly cold blooded murder.
Murder maybe, but not *cold blooded* murder.
Vengeance is the world's way of punishing the few evil people in the world who will never learn any other way. Those that are so devoid of morals that they will only behave because of fear of punishment.
When I take revenge I do it anonymously in ways in which the person will never be able to complain to their friends or the police about what I have done.
Hmmm?
I think it was rather cold blooded murder. In the sense that there really was no way he was going to defend himself and the shots were to kill.
A crime of passion yes but cold blooded all the same.
Is violence not the answer? My mom talked to me about it once. We like to see some form of physical retribution to criminals. I'm not sure. I think that there is some kind of mental i not karmatic retribution upon these people. My mom still prefers if we castrated rapists....
Post a Comment