The Devil Is Not In The Details; It's In The Intent

Here's another crucial, realistic and sensible essay on what we as a people have let ourselves be manipulated into becoming  since 9-11-2001.

We have been seduced by some of our human brothers and sisters, people whose behavior constitutes the acts of  war criminals, whom we must acknowledge we actually elected, and who have exploited our most basic emotions, those which scientists tell us reside in the evolutionarily oldest parts of our brain; known as the limbic system it's that part of the brain  which we still share with the most fearsome of our earthly ancestors; crocodiles are a particularly useful example.

I believe, as journalists like Eugene Robinson, Chris Hedges and Joe Nocera believe, that we were justified in going after Al Qaeda and their Taliban protectors in Afghanistan.  We won that war in a few short weeks.  We scattered Al Qaeda and sent Osama fleeing into hiding. And I don't apologize for the hunting down of that evil man and killing him as we, yes we, did recently, because both actions were directly tied to the horror of 9/11 which he orchestrated.  He was an  enemy soldier.  I abhor capital punishment, but this is what they call the exception which proves the rule, though I've never understand why that is so.

Over the eons of evolution, human beings, homo sapiens, what we label our species, exist with brains which have evolved to the extent that we who possess them, seem to act in a way which helps us decide if something we encounter is positive or negative, the context always being about the risk of being or not being.

Like Papa Bush who wisely decided not to pursue Saddam back to Baghdad after he ran him out of Kuwait, we should have had the wisdom to stand down after we accomplished our objective in Afghanistan.

But the cabal known as Neocons, comprised by the likes of  Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith and Wolfowitz, had been itching for a war with Saddam for many years, and they saw this horror as the perfect excuse to invade a country which they lied to us as being behind 9-11, realizing that they could strike while the iron was hot, that hot iron being the human instinct for revenge, and which, if excited into a crowd and mob mentality, would provide them with the necessary support to back more reasonable and less warlike politicians into a corner.  To object and God forgive even oppose was to be branded unpatriotic, risking their political careers and marginalized, if not kicked out of office.

The instinct which the war criminals exploited, in its most violent form, always subjugates logic to its
more emotionally violent purposes.

Why do  these people do this?  Because they can.  How is it that they can?  Because they have the money to buy what they want.  The trite aphorisms are: money is the root of all evil, the golden rule is that those with the gold rule, if you don't understand something follow the money. The behavior of people like this is found in their actions which can be reduced to the most cynical of world views. "I got mine, get your own". Even people like George W. Bush, who lives off the money made by his ancestors has the gall to act like this. (He comes by it naturally, at least from his mother, who famously announced during the horrors of Katrina, that those huddled masses in the Superdome were doing well when compared to the lives they had before the storm.

How out of touch, even unconsciously, can one be?

My anger is reserved for those who consciously manipulate people and circumstances for their own personal and like minded group gain.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone, who has the intellect and uses it, to realize  that what the least educated among us, those who are the most vulnerable to  the con of the war criminals, don't, can't see, is that the evil ones who in their selfish intentions actually do evil, and are the devils on earth.

It should be obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it, that human beings have projected both good and evil onto mythical beings, God and Satan, based on behaviors which human beings have observed and encountered in their own personal lives here on earth.

Why, though, do the concepts of good and evil still reside in and are still ascribed to mythical beings, even among the most educated humans?  Denial perhaps?  The realization that each of us has lived as human beings who have come into being through the most basic of instincts, sexual intercourse, used to perpetuate the species, as bequeathed to us over the eons of time so vast as to be incomprehensible to our minds as evolved so far, by the process of evolution.

I realize that I am an advocate for trying to understand how everything works, having given up on the idea that I can understand what everything means.

The question which likely will always go unanswered by those of us who seek to know what everything means or how everything works is,

Why is there anything any way? 


To the extent that I can accept that this is the ultimate unanswerable question which our minds, as stimulated by the current evolved status of our brains, I will strive to continue to do the "To Be" thing.

Leanderthal
Surviving specimen of a Homo Erectus species
long considered to be extinct.