Killing for Pleasure?

This post is a break from the nor­mal sched­ule. It is a corol­lary to the “Philo­sophy Bites?” post a few days ago. I am going to try an answer one of the ques­tions raised by read­ers of that post, in this case my old spar­ring part­ner Tom; who pos­ted the fol­low­ing in the comments:

So, not to dis­agree with you, because I don’t, but merely to add to the argu­ment, not so much in war, but in the scheme of moral judge­ments, where do you stand on killing for pleas­ure? and I don’t mean just for humans…

Note: Any com­plete answer could stretch to the length of a whole book. Ideas are not isol­ated but rather con­joined in a massive net of links com­prised of con­cepts, indeed that is their pur­pose, and I am wary of giv­ing a less than full account of an answer by the neces­sity to keep within a blog post length. Suf­fice to say, that this is a “clip notes” ver­sion. There may be much here that is lightly treated, but that is not (I hope) because it hasn’t been thought through.

Any­way, the short answer is this:

To kill purely for pleas­ure is to kill because one is grasp­ing at desire.

This comes from not being able to “feel” any­more. The per­son is pushed into try­ing any­thing to feel again. To sate desire is the only mod­ern way (or indeed require­ment) to “feel” some­thing. To kill because one desires see­ing the pain of oth­ers is to dwell in extreme dark­ness. How­ever, the new soci­ety; a soci­ety built around know­ing itself, the soci­ety un-judging and filled full of people who know them­selves will not pro­duce people who kill for pleas­ure. This is because they would have too much under­stand­ing and nat­ural respect for life.

Uto­pian?

Con­sider where the “pleas­ure” of these actions really comes from. Is it not from the illi­cit nature of the act? The illeg­al­ity, the act­ing against the laws of the soci­ety brought without? The doing of “wrong” as a source of feel­ing some­thing, any­thing? As the main char­ac­ter in “Nat­ural Born Killers,” said, “…even­tu­ally you just become bad”.

Con­sider the school mas­sacres in the US. Many people, many many people, have mor­al­ised as to why those guys killed their class­mates. Some said it was the lack of prayer. Oth­ers claimed it was the access to fire­arms. Some even blamed the music and games they had. One guy claimed that they were “friend­less” out­siders. As Chris Rock said, “I coun­ted 4 of them, that’s more friends than many have. That’s enough for 2 on 2 in a half court!”

The truth is that these boys had lost them­selves to such an extent that they couldn’t feel any­thing. Wrapped in a cot­ton wool ball of a soci­ety, a life with no mean­ing what­so­ever, a cul­ture of only sat­ur­at­ing desire, where the highest vir­tue is to be on the top of a pile of people with, as Eddie Izzard says, “…enough money to grab it with both hands and jam it in your ears and go blarg!”

When sat­is­fy­ing desires are the only vir­tues, people lose touch with the sense of real­ity. They start to only define them­selves as the “I” in con­trast to the world of “not I”. They can only care about them­selves, this I, this illu­sion they have iden­ti­fied them­selves with.

They are essen­tially Super-Selfish.

Clearly, killing in this men­tally degraded form is not going to fol­low the flow of nat­ural justice. It is a symp­tom of a sick­ness in the mind and soul. Not in the way often ima­gined in court, which claims that they have lost the so called “moral self”, rather in the way that they have for­got­ten about any­one but the “I” that they ima­gine them­selves to be.

But, you asked about the “animal world”.  As I said in the art­icle, I strongly sug­gest that we are not apart from the animal world; rather we are in it in every way. I don’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between human and animal. There­fore it is the same. The Killer Whales throw­ing sea lions to each other may be act­ing in some way other than “pleas­ure killing” (in the way we say of a psy­cho killer), but they may also not be. They may be act­ing from a pure nat­ural instinct or even a soci­etal pres­sure. We have no idea. They may be, as Niet­z­sche said of eagles, act­ing from a noble prin­ciple. A prin­ciple he hoped we would develop. In fact, I am sure we have got it – we just repress it for its bru­tal­ity. They may be suf­fer­ing every false per­spect­ive that we are. I don’t con­tend that “the animal world” is any bet­ter or worse than ours. Basic­ally, because there is only one world and we exist in it in the same way as any other animal.

If I ran a court of law and a case came before me, I would con­sider it dif­fer­ently from one might expect. In the courts of today, a man may claim to have been “deranged” at the time of the crime. They say this as an excuse. It is not. One who kills in the mind of derange­ment would be instantly guilty in my court. Being of “unsound mind” at the time of the crime would garner a harsher treat­ment and pun­ish­ment than not being. Being out of touch with the nat­ural flow of what is right would be no reason for leni­ency; it is a damning thing to say in defence.

This is essen­tially because in the new soci­ety free­dom comes from a sound know­ledge of real­ity. A per­son who is freed from the chains of desire would not kill unjustly. Free­dom, of course, also means the free­dom to com­mit crimes, but – import­antly – it also means know­ing the con­sequences. Killing would garner being killed. Steal­ing would mean being stolen from.

This, of course, sounds simplistic. Bour­geoisie. What about steal­ing to pre­vent starvation?

Ah, well, this is where the new soci­ety dif­fers from our own. One would never have to steal to eat or to live. The very concept of the poor is com­pletely tied up with the equally hor­rendous concept of the rich. They are like a val­ley and a moun­tain. In our cur­rent soci­ety is a neces­sity that some “have not”.

Digres­sion: I was once told by a teacher that they “don’t want every­one to pass their exams; someone has to clean the roads”. What a hor­rible concept. In some coun­tries, like for example Japan, they respect all pro­fes­sions and those clean­ing roads do so with pride. It is a strange and hum­bling thing to see for someone brought up in Eng­land, but no doubt slowly being eroded.

It is in the heart of cap­it­al­ism to segreg­ate people into whether they pos­sess “things”, “stuff”, money, “riches”, etc. Soci­ety needs to come to know itself. Com­ing to know that the “I” that we obsess about is by its very nature a tool of grasp­ing desire. It forces us into pat­terned illu­sion. So, we look at the “cul­ture of celebrity” rather than look within, we desire what “they” have. Be it bet­ter bod­ies, money or suc­cess. We are intensely jeal­ous of their suc­cess (usu­ally suc­cess in some shal­low and worth­less realm) because we have been con­di­tioned to believe that fin­an­cial suc­cess and fame is the source of hap­pi­ness. Take Jordan, or Paris Hilton. Both are only fam­ous because people either want to be them or sleep with them. In a sim­ilar way as this look­ing up and wish­ing, we look down on oth­ers too. We look at such things as the TV show “East­enders” to tell ourselves that, no mat­ter how bad it is, we do not “sin” as much as those poor petty fuckers!

It is like the old Peter Cook and Dud­ley Moore sketch, where the three classes all look down on those below and up to those above. Indeed the entire “mor­al­ity” inher­ited from Chris­tian­ity is setup in this way. God sits at the top like a king, his half human son as a prince, the Pope, the Queens, the Lords, the Plebs. Such a struc­ture from above is actu­ally a reflec­tion of our own soci­ety. Jesus’ real mes­sage was actu­ally quite dif­fer­ent and much more mystical.

“I am God’s Son…,” Jesus said. “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 10:36 & John 14:9).

This doesn’t make sense to us in the West if we don’t have a reli­gious hier­archy and thereby make Jesus an immor­tal son of God. If he had been born in India, and said those things in Hinduism, he would have not garnered even a raised eye­brow. From their point of view we are all “God” and the world is an “act” (in the sense of a play or per­form­ance). The spirit of God is “play­ing” at being us. The com­ment, “I am God’s Son,” would have been met with con­grat­u­la­tions for finally work­ing that out, not a stoning!

Our struc­ture of life in the West, that flows from Chris­tian mor­als into its Capitalist/Humanist suc­cessor, is setup to say that “you are not spe­cial”. You are not Jesus. No, you are not even Jordan. You are noth­ing until you climb over the rest, until you get all that you desire – some­thing you can never do, and become “rich” in stuff. It’s an almost worth­less existence.

As Tyler Dur­den said, “Advert­ising has us chas­ing cars and clothes, work­ing jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

All of this is to take our mind off the truth, which is that mod­ern life sucks. It is fun­da­ment­ally, insip­idly and cul­tur­ally bank­rupt, puerile and mean­ing­less under its own rules.

In the past we were told that we should become “rock stars” to be happy. In a very import­ant way I “got this”, as at least “rock stars” cre­ate some­thing; music. But, then this requires effort, tal­ent and know­ing one­self to be cre­at­ive (try cre­at­ing art while under illu­sion, you can’t (and before you men­tion drugs and music, con­sider that drugs often open real­ity not hide it)). In mod­ern times you don’t even need to do any­thing cre­at­ive. You just need to be rich. Rich­ness is its own reward and access to fame. It is quite worse than pathetic.

So, while our soci­ety is ordered in this way and the world is lost in this way (the Cap­it­al­ist way of doing things is truly tak­ing over the world spiralling everything down the plug­hole) then killing can be per­formed for pleas­ure, but it is a form of men­tal sick­ness. A sick­ness of los­ing the con­nec­tion with one­self and there­fore the con­nec­tion with the ulti­mate real­ity; the Dao.

In the new soci­ety killing would not and could not be per­formed for pleas­ure, but it might be per­formed for justice.

There is no calam­ity greater than lav­ish desires.
There is no greater guilt than dis­con­tent­ment.
And there is no greater dis­aster than greed.

Lao-tzu

Basho

Note: Of course, my per­sonal philo­sophy is not pure Daoist. I am the product of my train­ing and upbring­ing, not to men­tion my envir­on­ment, genes and epi-genetics. In this vein, I make no claim to know the true Dao. Any­one who does hasn’t read the book. The very first line makes this clear. I don’t speak the Dao, but some­times I feel it, and for me that is a source of great happiness.

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