Giving Back

I am apparently becoming a curmudgeon; I have all the symptoms. Discussing life itself with an old friend’s son elicited some interesting verbal behavior from me that I often suppress - because I am talking with other older people who get depressed when you do an executive summary of what it has meant “to be” over a long period of time.

For most people, life and people and psychology and the world in general are a complex subject that is highly variable – and, the variability is beyond any root-cause analysis model to which they have access. I, on the other hand, believe that the complexity expressed in the behavior of others is easily patterned if you begin with the proper etiology.

If you agree with natural selection and the selfish gene, and you recognize that your verbal and non-verbal behavior is encouraged or discouraged by the way people respond to it, then there is a lot of clarity that can be derived from informal observations of the world around us.

As wandering individuals, we hopped down out of the trees and did things that led to food and procreation. When we began to group together to maximize those outcomes, our lives became more complex because we had to coordinate our behavior with others. Our territoriality and aggression (required characteristics when food and procreation are desired) was repressed and sublimated to minimize conflicts with members of our groups.

So we sublimated our libido, our aggression into more stealthy, socially acceptable methods for obtaining power and subsequently sex. Power, and money, and sex; look at today’s society and evaluate the behavior of politicians, celebrities, and business leaders. Do you see any commonalities with our behavior 2 million years ago?

Confusion about humans is bred in the refusal by many to accept that we are animals; once that fact is accepted, then our animal behavior – which has been consistent over the millenniums - is more understandable. Our emotional behavior is more complex due to its origins in the endocrine system, genetics, structural cerebral anomalies, biochemical variations among individuals, and highly unique learning and development histories – that is, widely varying contexts for pairing our personal feelings with other people’s verbal behavior and other environmental phenomena.

Politicians are people who want sex, power, and money – and, they will do all manner of things to get it. Your welfare is a straw man for camouflaging their real motives and rationalizing their lust for power.

Part of my discussion with my old friend’s son elicited a few comments about a common theme that is a core pedestal on the footstool of political correctness that has brain-washed our population into moronic automatons who have cast out all common sense in the service of social acceptance. That common theme is about “giving back.”

Most Americans don’t know who our first President was much less any history of our governments’ behavior toward – “the people;” you know, the voters who put these power-hungry sociopaths into office. We pay taxes to the government and they support the people that we vote for with services that we pay for.

The military-industrial complex and wealthy corporations stack the deck so that the naïve public who believes all the rhetoric (to them politics is like soap operas; dramatic acting) they hear because they can’t think for themselves and pretty much follow the pack. They love all the noble words because if they become cynical then they lose hope and have to accept the fact that our lives are manipulated by the wealthy and special interests that represent the wealthy. They own our ass.

Who the hell are you “giving back” to? The government that is populated with sociopathic politicians and brain-dead bureaucrats? People have forgotten that there was once this thing called “The Draft;” government enforced slavery that required that young men either go into the military or go to jail. If you refused to go into the military then you face social ostracism, shunning, and jail time.

A bunch of bilious old men and women ran the draft and they had few tracks in their heart for students, final exams, and the details of your life. If you go to Washington, D.C. and see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, please remember that about 95% of the men whose names you are reading, the men who died horrible deaths in the jungle far away from home and family – had no desire to either be in the military or to fight in Viet Nam.

The government and our society forced 53,000 young men to die against their will; 500,000 were mutilated or disabled. The war that college kids rebelled against for which the cops and National Guard beat and jailed them was not something anyone with intelligence supported. The brain-dead, uneducated, and thought-deprived ruralites and city dwellers are always supportive of anything an authority figure espouses because they are the type people who would rally around Hitler.

Do you think the 52,000 dead men would want to “give back?” I can understand the desire to give back to someone who has helped you during a time of need or to a friend who has inconvenienced themselves in many ways to help you in the past. But who the hell are all these people giving back to. Are they helping poor disadvantaged people because they themselves were born into affluent families, or got expensive scholarships because they were smart?

You may think I’m being smart-assed or cynical or ungrateful; I’m being sincere. I grew up in projects and worked my way through school and missed exams because the draft board wanted to give physicals and watched friends go to Viet Nam against their will and die at 19 years old. To whom am I supposed to be grateful and want to give back?

A bigger question is, to what degree has religion – the sub-culture of authority and mind-control that is supposed to be looking out for the welfare of people - helped. They supported slavery and racial prejudice and the draft. Doesn’t any of that create any cognitive dissonance in the goose-stepping younkers who bully our society to read prayers or be shunned?

Man, the animal, has a long way to go before the morality and ethics of humanism infiltrates our social conscience. We are not yet human – with the capacity to think apart from authority and the massive mind-control inherent in our politics and educational system. Let old men send the young to die while their parents praise the felonious sociopaths who have been elected to power; while they praise the authorities who wash their brains clean of common sense and the courage to say they will not allow their sons to die in some shit-hole in the Middle East because some business relationship between the Bushes and the royal families of Saudi Arabia can be furthered.

If you want to “give back,” force the felons and narcissist and arrogant liars that have been elected to do something for someone other than the rich contributors who manipulate them.