Why KILLING BEAUTY Makes SENSE

The Dark Side of humanity makes sense. As long as this terrible truth is covered up, it will fester, promoting the deepest infections, as it does. The Dark is not just obscure, vicious, cruel: ignoring it prevents the Enlightenment to proceed further.

Thanks to taxpayer money, a giant Ariane V rocket launched the Rosetta Mission to a comet, more than ten years ago. In France plutocrats pay taxes at several times the rate of the (lightly taxed plutocrats of the) USA. Taxes make a mission such as Rosetta and its lander Philae, possible (French experiments are also at the core of the present and future NASA Mars landers).

Science feeds the Enlightenment, with hard facts, so does history. History, inasmuch as the part of it consisting of hard facts, is part of science, and also feeds the Enlightenment.

Hunting, torturing & killing Give Many Of Us Meaning

[Assyrian Lion Experiencing Severe Technical Difficulties, 27 Centuries Ago.]

Now the lander Philae, busy in a hole somewhere on the complicated ground of the comet, where it gets sun occasionally, feeding its batteries, has found complex organic materials on the surface. Such complex compounds eventually turned into living organisms here on Earth. Philae found that they must have existed in much of the early solar system. This raises new hopes of finding life beyond our planet. Indeed, several planetary bodies (Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, etc.) harbor liquid water. It seems that Europa’s ocean is more massive than Earth’s. Ganymede’s ocean seems to be most of the Solar System’s water (with a depth of 800 kms). The recent discovery of fishes (!) 850 kilometers from the open sea (and the sun!) under an Antarctica iceshelf, below the freezing point of sweet water, indicates that Earth’s life could be adapted to Jupiter’s satellites.

After philosophers on some obscure site, censored me for allegedly veering off a comment presenting a story hinging on a story about stories, and a Malaysian Airlines jet debris was found at the (French) Reunion Island, having also severely veered off course, being at Reunion, 180 degrees from its original destination China, comic relief is in order.

Is amusement provided by plutocrats who shower themselves in public, to advertise that they give what’s for them pennies for research on Charcot’s disease (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis)? Is it funny that plutocrats believe we are so dumb that clowning around will enable them to disguise themselves into the innocuous clowns whom they are the exact opposite of? Who wants to heavily tax innocuous clowns? Bill Gates and Mr. Z from Facebook correctly believe no one will. So they monkey around, hoping we will do the same. It deeply evil to depict the Gates of Hell as fun and games.

What we need to do with plutocrats is to eliminate them all together, with harrowing taxation. Until they succumb, and disappear as a species. Then research in ALS, biology and medicine, could be funded appropriately. Only then. Moreover, we will also have enough money to send missions searching for life to Europa and Enceladus (the technology exists: a probe flying through an Enceladus geyser, or the attending ring, would find proof of life readily). With a tiny part of the money we will have left, we can go watch real circuses.

Giant money makes for one gigantically nasty world. Big money is simply insufferable.

Money is power, power on other people, giant money is giant power on other people. Giant power on other people is intrinsically inhuman (it’s not anticipated by ten million years of evolving human ethology).

Giant power by people on other people is intrinsically diabolical. Diabolical, in the divine sense. Giant power on other people, such as Bill Gates imposing on us his pseudo-clownish behavior, provides the Dark Side with an aspect which evolution itself did not anticipate, so that there is a super-stitious character to it: something which stands above reality, as anticipated by evolution, since before there was T-Rex, and it tore its prey in half.

The Dark Side reaches all over. Including “care”.

Big money brought us Obamacare. Obamacare was going to be the way the “free” market buys and sells us to perfect health care, through “consumers’ choices”. Obamacare was enthusiastically promoted by the likes of Paul Krugman. In the latest news, health care in the USA became 5.5% more expensive in 2014 (whereas incomes did not perk up). Obamacare was not what it seemed. Lies everywhere, not just to manipulate power, but as the fluttering flags, representing the rule of that power, for all to see.

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I KILL, THEREFORE I AM:

So this rich American dentist went to Africa, offered the natives $50,000, and killed the most famous lion in the local national park. Excuse me, we are Americans, and we believe in drone philosophy: we kill whoever, whatever we want, because we can. Anything can be bought, remember? Just as Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mr. Z keep their taxes low, by taking showers in public.  All over, things are not what they look.

So why did this dentist kill this beautiful lion? Some claim it’s senseless. Senseless makes for a good insult, because it’s polite enough. However, “senseless” is a non sequitur. If one really wants to penetrate the mind of one’s opponent, and his error, one has to find in which sense, he makes sense (to his, or her, self).

It makes no sense to claim there is no sense to what so many people (hunters, warriors, plutocrats) feel makes sense. Figuring out how it makes sense, to them, far from being senseless, aggravates their case. Because it allows us to condemn, not just their acts, but also the systems of thought, moods, and minds, which brought these errors.

The lion was killed because it was beautiful and powerful. And not just that. Cecil the Lion was tortured, so that his power would be debased, over many hours. Shot first with a powerful modern bow, the lion was tracked down for 40 hours, and one can imagine Walter the dentist drinking martinis, chuckling on the lion’s suffering. Because Walter the dentist kills animals, has killed many animals, with bow and arrows. Not just to give animals a chance to survive, but, obviously, to give them a chance, and to give him the chance, to experience torture. Whereas a rifle shot tends to be very incapacitating, be it only from blood loss, old Assyrian, or Persian iconography represents lions full of arrows, and still fierce (see above). In the Wild West white men found themselves so full of arrows they looked like porcupines, and still, they were not dead. That brought more respect to Native Americans. (Although a modern bow can launch an arrow with some much force that it can go through a Polar Bear harassed by dogs, killing it in three seconds… This situation does not apply to a lion, which is much faster and limber, hence a poor target.)

A major motivation for human beings is to kill, maim, torture, oppress and subjugate. Forgetting that major fact, is forgetting human nature. Gates and Facebook’s Mr. Z have that major motivation, nearly all plutocrats have it, and, when he feeds us with lies about Obamacare, Paul Krugman has it, in his own meek, but highly influential way.

A few days ago, I surprised a lynx in the Alps (I know when and where to look for predators). I was very surprised by its color (reddish), and its enormous size. It fled for his life (we were only 3 meters apart). He was really fast, in the forest full of trees, with trunks of all sizes close to each other… And in total silence (differently from any other animal that size). Here I was, putting to flight an animal capable of slashing open the throat of a red deer, three times my weight, and with giant antlers.

Lynxes are known not to attack humans, even when their cubs are approached.

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TERRORISM FOSTERED HUMANITY:

Human beings evolved because not only they could hunt, and eat meat, but because they could terrorize their main opponents, the wild, ferocious predators. Torturing them helped. Bushmen, in South Africa could hunt a large animal, such as a giraffe, with poisoned arrows, chasing it down, once wounded, over an entire week.

Thus, torturing and killing are deep components of the human mind. They were key to survival. I have walked towards a lion pride resting below a tree, in Africa, as a child. Slowly. Just as slowly, the lionesses rose, and walked away. The king and queens of the jungle know well, most of the time, that human beings are like gods: they are better left alone, their parents taught them that, early on.

Now that we know this, that large predators can be instilled respect for human beings, we can take it into account, and reintroduce megafauna. Exerting surveillance for the most dangerous cases.

That lion killing dentist is a coward. Not a real player. Assassinating wildlife with over-powerful weapons  is not getting reacquainted with the human condition. Were it the latter, he would accept not just to hunt, but to be hunted. Let him approach lions with bare hands (I did this more than once, as a child, in the wild). Instead of armed with a hyper-powerful bow with a laser range finder. Hunting the cowardly dentist ought to help him get in touch with full human ethology. So those condemning him all over the Internet are helping him become a real man.

Paying $50,000 to kill a well-known, half-tamed lion equipped with GPS, is not a way to exhibit respect for the biosphere. Yet, one should not forget that wild mega fauna will not survive if it is NOT worth the cost it inflicts, in physical damage and terror.

Lions (and other ferocious beasts: panthers, elephants, hippos, buffaloes, warthogs, etc.) are dangerous, and, themselves exert terror deliberately (when they do not outright kill people). When I lived in Africa, the natives feared and wanted to get rid of leopards (once in India, a particular leopard killed more than 200 people). Equipping leopards with GPS hooked to computers and security is the future. Clearly such systems (already used in Alberta, Canada, with grizzlies) are expensive in equipment and trained rangers.

As such an activity provides with the basics of hunting, just as fishing and releasing fish, it can satisfy the Dark Side, and make it serve the goodness of a preserved biosphere. But not just this. Exploiting animals is all right, if it allows them to survive as species, and ecosystems.

For dangerous predators, and other ferocious beasts to survive, they have to provide people with some other things dearer to them than life itself. That is why it was a mistake to destroy (as was just done in New York), tons of elephant ivory. Elephants ought to be harvested for ivory: then they will survive, because they will have economic utility (hence pay for their upkeep… in the wild). Same for rhinos: cut their horns, and sell them, under a government mandated program.

Otherwise, keep on contemplating the most massive genocide in 65 million years.

Morality’s essence? Morality is what worked before, in a sustainable fashion. But, as the world quickly mutates, what worked before cannot work any longer. Let’s adapt our morality. Don’t deny that the Dark Side existed. Don’t pretend that the Dark Side can be made to disappear by wishful thinking alone. Instead, ask what the Dark Side can do for us… that nothing else can replace. (To help focus here, contemplate the young dictator of North Korea, who, not only let his family members be eaten by dogs, but has threatened the USA with nuclear strikes, while working feverishly to make that possible, in spite of UN sanctions.)

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HARVEST & HARNESS THE DARK SIDE IF ENLIGHTENMENT YOU SEARCH:

Some will whine that this harnessing of the Dark Side is precisely what the “Free Market Theory“, all too often simply a disguise for blossoming plutocracy, claimed one ought to do, while bankers and plutophiles called it the “Invisible Hand“. However, not so. Plutocracy is a mix of the Dark Side, and the generalized fascism which civilization enables, with the potential of concentrating enormous power in a few hands. It is an enemy of intelligence, as it reduces many minds to just one, or a few.

Thus plutocracy is my enemy, and I put some effort in fighting it, because my Dark Side wants to devour it. Revolutions occur when enough denizens of We The People, want to destroy the plutocrats who rule over them.

Contrarily to what the ill-fated John Lennon hypocritically recommended, Revolutions are good, precisely because they destroy those super-predators known as plutocrats, aristocrats, theocrats, pirates, nobles, mandarins, generals, ayatollahs, bishops and the organizations which foster them, when their rule has become an insufferable imposition of their power, or those they serve.

Mao in 1959, in a secret report, revealed much later: it’s better to let half the population die, so that they other half gets plenty. The Dark Side, fully abominable. However this “Great Leap Forward” worked, as Mao had predicted it. Mao had said that great efforts then would bring “a thousand years of happiness“. And the most troubling part is that Mao’s plan worked: China leaped over India, and spectacularly far out over many other countries. The cleaned slate Mao’s unleashing of the Dark Side created obviously helped.

Just like more usage of the Dark Side helps keep the USA on the straighter and narrower, relative to more placid Europe.

Yet, it’s not just justice, and goodness which judge what is insufferable, but, also, the Dark Side itself. And there is more. Voltaire said that we ought to crush infamy. Yet it’s ultimately anger, which gets us into action, which makes us move, which provides with. Thus, the Dark Side judges, and also motivates.

We are mental landscapes of contrast, we need the Dark, be it just to define the Light. Fighting for the latter, means recognizing the former. Our beautiful species can thrive, as long as it respects the laws, be they only the laws of physics (that is not the case now, with multiple attacks we are visiting on the biosphere). To remind us of that, anything goes. And that cruelty, is a good thing, relative to the alternative.

So hunt lions. But only bad lions. Only with the worst predators can destroyed using all and any means the Dark Side puts at our command. The Dark Side, the useful and friendly Dark Side, feels that better case can be made for the survival of the smallpox virus, than for the blossoming of plutocracy. And stands ready to provide us with the strength we need.

And what about the deliberate killing of beauty, in all this? To overcome beauty is an exciting, and rather amusing challenge, for the Dark Side. If one can learn to enjoy killing beauty, one’s Dark Side is ready to take out much more than that. Its power grows. The more beautiful the lion, the more tempting to kill it, the more instructive, for those who cultivate the parts of the brain most keen, and apt, to handle adversity.

The Dark Side is strong and all-devouring. Beauty, just an appetizer. As Rabelais put it in 1534, in Gargantua (chap.5, line 108): “L’appétit vient en mangeant.”

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Cruelty, Dark Side, Enlightenment, Human Nature, Hunting, Lion Hunting, Plutocrats, Taxation