Suicide: Maybe Not As Wrong As You Think

Suicide: Maybe Not As Wrong As You Think

[Warning: People who are easily offended should not read this essay. Some find this subject sensitive.]

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he

resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. 

- Archibald MacLeish, American poet and librarian (1892-1982)

Heaven forbid that anyone dares to resign himself from the belief set of the herd and think for himself. He becomes a pariah, a self appointed renegade, perhaps worse. Especially so if the person decides to end his own life. What right does he have to do that?

What right does he lack to be denied that choice?

One of the most widely held beliefs across cultures holds that suicide is wrong. Yet when you ask why of anyone who believes suicide is wrong, most replies are lame, at best, totally lacking in logic and, at worst, a violation of the principle of freedom of choice we claim to value so highly.

This essay brings a personal perspective to the topic and is not intended to advocate either way as to the ethics or wisdom of suicide. Except to say that suicide is the ultimate personal choice, though a selfish one as a person prepared to end his life considers no one but himself. I am not feeling suicidal, though I confess to having thoughts of dying during periods of depression in the past.

We claim, at least in Western countries with which I am familiar, that freedom of choice is a value we hold dear. A woman or man can choose to be a parent or not by taking birth control measures during sex. If she becomes pregnant, the woman (in most Western countries, most jurisdictions) has the choice to abort or to carry the child full term. These are critically important life choices we can make. Each makes, ends or prevents a life. Laws support these choices, even when religions may oppose those laws and their practices.

Surely the choice to end one's life is the ultimate indicator of freedom. If we consider thoughts of suicide to be the work of an insane brain, let's remember that insanity is not illegal.

Our governments do not hesitate to send young men and women in the military or police service into violent situations, even into war zones. Whether decisions to do so are made by a governing party, the head of state, a mayor or chief of police, one human chooses whether another human will be sent into situations where the latter's life could end. In effect, we allow one person to send another to death, should it come to that. We claim that we don't want death and provide protective devices to the person at risk, but isn't that like providing free condoms to prostitutes?

In many parts of the world, the militaries of dictators receive orders to shoot to kill at unarmed demonstrators who give no indication they plan to riot. These situations often precipitate riots, in reaction. The leaders who gave the orders never present themselves for trial for murder, most find safe haven in other countries even if they lose their battle for control. Do the countries that provide safe haven not effectively condone the murder of innocent, unarmed people who disagree with the regime? The safe haven countries always consider themselves to be upstanding and righteous democracies, protectors of human rights.

Paramilitaries, little more than armed gangs who want a change of leadership in their respective countries, sometimes kill innocent people who have nothing to do with the cause they fight, simply as indicators of their strength against the heads of state. As I write this, nearly 1000 innocent and unarmed civilians died in Ivory Coast for exactly that reason, to persuade President Laurent Gbagbo (who lost power in a democratic election) to step down.

So far as we know, Adolf Hitler took his own life in his final stand in a bunker in Germany. We know that many Germans and some people in several other countries grieved. Do most of us care about those who grieved? Many would regret that Hitler took his own life simply because they wanted him to stand trial and to be executed under more formal and official circumstances.

During the same war, Japan committed far more atrocities (and more detestable ones) than Germany. Japan's emperor was not held to account. He admitted that he would no longer claim to be infallible, but suffered no further consequences. Rich people in other Western countries rushed to invest in both Japan and Germany after the war, making them the economic power houses they are today. Neither Germany nor Japan were made to suffer shame as a result of what their leaders and their militaries did to destroy lives and to severely harm the lives of many millions of people who almost died but managed to survive. For Western democratic governments, the self interest of their corporations trumped any feelings of loss in so many countries.

In the pre-historic past when the human component of the world was comprised of many tribes, most of which battled with neighbouring tribes at least once each generation, losing a member of the tribe to suicide would have been a physical loss of one fighter, but also the damage to morale of the rest of the fighters. In tribes, suicide was forbidden, except in some cases in some places where suicide was a form of retribution for loss of honour. Modern day taboos against suicide merely extend the moral dictates against suicide though the original reasons for the censure vanished over time.

Religions, whose primary function has always been control of behaviour of their followers, picked up on the suicide taboo. Restrictive rules of behaviour help to unify followers of a religion and to help members distinguish themselves from the "others." In general, the stronger the rules of a religion, the more devoted and committed its followers are to its survival and its spread to others as yet uninitiated. When one member of a religious community ends his life, the rest close ranks to either support and protect those family members who are left or to isolate and ostracize them from the community. Either way, the unity of the group gains strength.

Religions, by their nature, dictate morals. Yet other than for reasons of self interest, a religion has no valid reason to oppose suicide among its members. Indeed, more than one cult in recent decades has ended when the leader announced that its members would all "go to Glory" together. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. Jewish rebels at Masada ended their own lives in 73 CE rather than submit to execution by the Romans, according to Jewish/Roman historian Josephus.

In recent years, where we have more people living longer, thus more people suffering the pain and devastation of disease for more years rather than dying sooner without drugs and other medical interventions, we have more people wanting to end their lives rather than endure the final stages of terminal illness. Our societies insist that these people must suffer as long as medical science can keep them alive. A doctor or nurse who fails to keep to that standard may be accused of assisting in suicide, which could result in loss of licence and criminal charges.

A mother or father who simple can't bear seeing their child suffer in great pain and devastating emotional stress as a result of a terminal illness will be imprisoned for taking that final step. Euthanizing a dying pet dog or cat is considered merciful, but euthanizing a person warrants criminal prosecution and penalty.

What is the reason for the taboo against suicide? Set aside all the propaganda we have been taught, all the preachings from religions, all the self interested (self protection) from doctors for a moment. What is a real and valid reason to oppose suicide?

We know that for most suicides someone or a few people will suffer. Do they suffer guilt that they did not offer help when a depressed loved one wanted to end his life? Do they suffer the loss of someone they cared about, more than if the person had died of natural causes (in other words, death is inevitable, it's a matter of date). Or do they suffer because of the shame of having had someone with "that curse" or someone who was "overcome by the devil" in the family?

Thankfully, suicide bombings by Palestinians have been fewer in recent years. I vividly recall recorded interviews with the families--especially  the mothers--of Palestinian suicide bombers in the past. They claimed their sons were heroes, martyrs, role models for others of their families. They were happy that their sons (usually sons) had gone to heaven in Glory and would be welcomed there as heroes by God. Were they mentally ill or did they simply have different ways of thinking from people of other cultures?

Our old ideas about a boy growing to become a man--a man with particular cultural values and beliefs--and about a girl becoming a woman are coming apart. No longer can a mother believe with certainty that a young son will grow up to be a man these days, given surgery for transgendering. Nor can she even know that the lad will not one day join the gay community. If our concepts of life have changed that much, it's not much of a stretch to change our beliefs in the morality of suicide.

Let's also consider the role we play--or don't play--in slow suicide. Smoking tobacco has been proven to cause many diseases, yet it's not illegal to smoke or to sell or buy cigarettes. Tobacco manufacturers put chemicals that are poisonous and harmful to the health in their cigarettes, yet selling them remains legal and governments collect tax revenues happily. In Canada, my home country, 25 percent of adults smoke cigarettes. While the number is dropping for older adults, it's rising among teens. There is a lesson there that is not being taught or learned.

Almost every packaged food has chemical preservatives that manufacturers claim are safe, but testing only takes place over a few years. No tests exist for long term consumption of chemical-laden foods over, say, 40 years, despite the fact that our bodies tend to react and break down under severe stress such as bad food over that number of years. People are said to just die young. Before their time, but was it?

Our governments encourage us to eat fresh foods, garden foods, produce sold fresh in our markets. Yet almost every piece of food on those shelves has multiple applications of chemical fertilizers. And pesticides, whose sole purpose is to kill animal life smaller than us. As I recall from reading murder mysteries, poisons accumulate in the body over time. What will kill an insect today may help to destroy us 40 years from now if we keep eating the same stuff.

[Before reviewing and rewriting this essay, I stopped to wash two windows in a closed storage room in my house. Cluster flies had swarmed into the room, so I put an insecticide strip in there to kill the flies. As I opened the door to the room I saw a dead mouse curled up in the middle of the floor, no flies. As it was obviously too young to have died of old age, the little dude must have died from inhaling the insecticide. This kind of strip used to be placed in hospitals, nursing homes and restaurants in the past, though I believe that practice has stopped now. A mouse is a mammal, albeit a small one, and you are a mammal, albeit an unsuspecting one. Connect the dots.]

Some sports, such as American style football and boxing, depend heavily on banging of heads. Research has shown the each concussion brings a person closer to death or irreversible brain damage. Yet we not only play these sports as children, we watch them avidly and encourage more hitting among professionals in our own adulthood. Are the participants in these sports really not risking death, meaning gearing themselves to die, which is a personal choice of potential suicide?

Do millions of people watch car races, downhill skiing and snowboarding events at least partly because they believe they may witness the death of one participant? Is participating in such events suicide (though we prefer to sanitize it by calling it sport)? Did the inexperienced luger from Georgia die during the Vancouver Olympics due to suicide, in effect, because he wasn't up to the challenges involved with an Olympic level event? How many times did you watch video reviews of his head hitting that post? It was sad, but nothing in the rules of Olympic luging changed to prevent it from happening again. Nothing will stop television networks from replaying the video until viewer no longer want to watch instant death.

Slow suicide, such as by engaging in harmful behaviours, or faster suicide, such as by participating in risky sports, hold established places in the lives of millions of people. They are called sport, not suicide, because there is money to be made from them. In a sense, suicide (or at least life-risking behaviour) is accepted by society in many forms. Why not the one where it's a simple, straightforward choice?

We should also consider the one factor that overrides all others in the minds of many people regarding suicide: its irreversibility. A depressed person who wants to end his life, but is prevented in some way from doing so, will likely "recover" and be glad he did not die. Not being allowed to die at the time of his choice does not take away from his suffering when he wants to die. Life is full of "IFs". It's not realistic to live your life based on all possible IFs. Terminal cancer and terminal stages of other diseases are not reversible either. We want to change that because people in those conditions do not necessarily want to die. But what if they do want to die?

Murder is irreversible. That means ending the life of another person, not your own, but it's still legal if a government does it in war and illegal if you make your own individual decision to do it. Murder in any form is, ultimately, a personal choice to end a life. The commission of any crime is, in a sense, irreversible in that a criminal record follows the convicted person who does something uncharacteristic and rash in a moment of ill-considered action. It affects every day of that person's life. Psychological damage from a brutal childhood, a bad marriage, rape or even from financial bankruptcy are irreversible. Yet as a society we do little or nothing about preventing them, or even reversing them if that is possible.

Irreversibility as an argument against suicide works only if it is used in isolation, forgetting that most important decisions in life are effectively irreversible. Many people live in abusive marriages because they believe they have no viable way out. If murdering the partner is not an option and you can't afford to live on your own and you don't have the skills to survive on your own, living with the constant threat of abuse becomes irreversible in the mind of that person. Irreversibility is not, on its own, a valid argument against suicide.

Suicide is the ultimate example of personal free choice. If we lack that choice, we are not truly free. However, when someone wants to make the choice of suicide, in many cases it means that society has allowed the conditions of that person's life to degrade to the point where he no longer wants it to continue. Pointing the finger of blame means little if no one knows for certain how to avoid the problem.

Is this life choice confusing? Of course. Then why not let the individual sort it out himself and make his own decision? The alternatives are to provide coping strategies for people with severe problems and intervention strategies for people who can't cope. But that means society must change to support the individual, including poor and broken people as well as the rich and powerful. That isn't happening now in any country in the world.

Could we actually get to the point of encouraging, or at least accepting with equanimity, suicide for some people? That would mean that we would actually have to put into practice the lip service we pay to the value of life. That would mean that we would have to actually physically and emotionally care for others that we only give a passing nod to now. That would mean that we would have to provide each child with the tools he or she would need in life to be able to cope with life's stressors and downturns. That would mean that we would have to provide support for those who need it, when they need it, and how they need it. And that support would have to be unstinting and offered with confidence and assurance rather than with shame.

That would make the world a very different place.

Here's a suggestion that the author of the quote at the beginning of this essay claims would make me a dissenter: Let's make those changes anyway.

If the world is really going to improve on our watch, let's not just act like politicians and talk about improvement while doing nothing to implement it. Let's actually do it. When you look at the changes suggested three paragraphs above this one, none would be costly, none would be hard to do, none would take long to implement. Let's get started.

That would make the world a very different place indeed. In your lifetime and mine.

Bill Allin wrote Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents, which also includes a simple, effective and shockingly cheap methodology to implement the kinds of changes recommended above.

Learn more at http://billallin.com/   

Stuff You Probably Didn't Want To Know About The US Surgeon General

Stuff You Probably Didn't Want To Know About The US Surgeon General

Created in 1871, the post of Surgeon General of the United States was the top position in the Marine Hospital Service. The SG's job was to stop the spread of diseases carried to US shores by merchant marines.

John Maynard Woodworth, the first to hold the post, developed a mobile group of doctors called the Commissioned Corps. Until 1971, the Surgeon General served in the Commissioned Corps. Since then the SG's only commitment has been to agree with everything the US president says.
The Commissioned Corps remains today as one of only seven services of the United States government that completes its work in uniform (not including postal carriers).

During the First World War, SG Rupert Blue included cigarettes as part of the basic field rations kit issued to men fighting in the US military.

It wasn't until 1964 that Surgeon General Luther Terry published a report accusing tobacco smoke as one of the prime causes of cancer. This triggered both the Cigarette Labelling and Advertising Act and an enormous campaign by Big Tobacco to deny, bribe, obfuscate studies and intimidate politicians in the position of passing legislation that would limit the profits of tobacco companies.

President George H.W. Bush's Surgeon General, Antonia Novello, continued the assault on Big Tobacco. Her brother-in-law, Don Novello, played the role of chain-smoking priest Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live and at other comedy venues.

Back in 1930, then Surgeon General Hugh Cumming initiated the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Its purpose was to study the effects of untreated syphilis in African American men. Again, that's cases of syphilis among African American men who received absolutely no treatment. The program continued under the next six Surgeons General.

The Tuskegee study was stopped only in 1973 was it was declared unethical, the judgment being that it's not healthy to leave syphilis untreated, no matter what skin colour a victim has. Fortunately, as syphilis (the treponema pallidum spirochete) can be transmitted through placenta, the study was not carried out with African American women.

In 1981, President Reagan's Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, gained notoriety by writing candidly about the risks of AIDS. In a brochure he had mailed to every house in the United States, he wrote about sexuality and the dangers of unprotected sex.

Though he withstood the uproar his little publication aroused for bringing the subject of sex to public notice, the first black Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, didn't fare so well. She wanted sex education to be taught in schools so that kids would grow up knowing how to protect themselves from AIDS when they became sexually active. She was fired after only 15 months, the shortest term of any SG.

At a United Nations conference on AIDS, Elders was asked about masturbation as an alternative to sexual intercourse. She supported the idea. Alas, the morality police (once they recovered from swallowing their tongues in shock that anyone would even say the word masturbation out loud) went to work and made short work of her career. No audio or video tapes of that question and reply exist today, so her exact words remain unknown except to a few who were there in person.

Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, under President George W. Bush, was asked to censor his reports on embryonic stem cell research, contraception and his opinions about abstinence-only as a method of contraception studied in sex education classes. Bush also asked Carmona to sprinkle Bush's name at least three times on each page of every speech he gave.

Draconian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, subsequently executed, was also known to insist that scientists include the name of their revered president in their speeches and writings.

SG Carmona was at one time a high school dropout. However, he received the Gold-Headed Cane award for his outstanding service with the Vietnam Special Forces. He also served as a paramedic and nurse. He went on to be a top graduate at the University of California Medical school.

President Dubya's nomination for Surgeon General of James W. Holsinger received great resistance because of Holsinger's reputation as anti-gay. In writing for the United Methodist Church, in 1991, he claimed that homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy. Subsequently, studies have shown that homosexuals have a few notable physiological differences from heterosexuals, not the least being a considerable difference in the size of one part of their brain. No one knows why that is, yet.

Acting Surgeon General Robert A. Whitney, who served as SG between Novello and Elders, was a veterinarian. Despite jokes to the contrary, the US health infrastructure did not go to the dogs on Whitney's watch.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, when and what to teach children so they know enough to live healthy lives as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Primary resource: Discover, October 2007

The Violent Proselytizers Are Winning

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
- William Hazlitt

That quote is not true, strictly speaking, for these emotions are known to be expressed by other primates. But the point is well taken.

For the sake of discussion, let's divide everyone into two groups. There would be those who, as Hazlitt said, see the great differences between what things are and what they ought to be. And there would be those who know exactly how things should be and concern themselves at some length to see that what they believe should become what is.

On one side we have people (the vast majority, I believe) who know what should be but do little or nothing to see that it comes about. On the other we have people who are driven to make something happen.

Why are the latter group so driven, managing to carry on with their message when the rest of us would be exhausted? The message they carry is not thier own. They were waffling around with their lives, wondering what the truth about life could be, wondering why we are here at all, wondering where they could fit into a grand scheme. Then someone came along with an answer.

The answer sounded good. Sounded wonderful, in fact. It sounded as if heaven itself was about to open up and take in all that believed in it. All they had to do was to believe.

Spread the word, these people were told, as were those before them who had told them. They did, and they do. They take the message to anyone and everyone, whether their message is wanted or appreciated. Whether they can teach it to willing listeners or must wage war to use force to convince the others to accept their own set of beliefs.

Those who are prepared to go to war for their beliefs (whether in reality or figuratively) are most convinced that their cause is right. The more resistance they find, the more convinced that they are right and that their message must get through to the ignorant and unwashed multitudes.

They never stop to question whether their way might be right. They never doubt that the others may not want to share their beliefs or that they are happy with their own beliefs. They never hesitate about whether their beliefs are correct, accurate or beneficial over the long term, to themselves, their people or the world. They need to win.

It has been said that those who are most aggressive about spreading their beliefs to others have grave doubts. They want others to join them so that they can believe with greater confidence that their way is correct. By their reckoning, numbers are important. They want allies, not necessarily friends.

Those who are uncertain about many things in life remain quiet, for they have little to teach to others. When and if they do find a path they can believe in, they tend to remain quiet about it because doing otherwise would place them in conflict with the other group, who is already known to be prepared to go to war for their beliefs.

If the quiet ones remain quiet, never joining with others who have also found their way, never wanting to impose anything on anyone else, very little changes. Or so they believe. Eventually, those who have the strong beliefs and are aggressive about spreading them convince enough people to join them that they gain political and military power as well as the psychological power they have from the strength of their beliefs.

Hitler tapped into that in Germany with his National Socialists (who followed a path that was anything but socialist). Mussolini used it in Italy. The power brokers of the Japanese military also found ways to take over their country and subsequently much of Asia, with the three countries forming what became known as the Axis Powers. The Serbian leaders of the former Yugoslavia pumped up their Serbian culture mates to kill the Muslims. The emerging leaders among the Hutus of Rwanda filled the heads of their fellow tribesmen with it, using radio broadcasts, so that nearly a million Tutsis were slashed to death with machetes. Saddam used his abilities to convince the minority Sunnis that they should totally dominate the majority Shias as well as the Kurds in Iraq.

In each case the silent ones remained silent because they did not feel it their place to tell others how to run their countries. It wasn't their business. They were prepared to allow millions of slaughtered victims be burned or buried, but they assuaged their consciences by prosecuting the perpetrators who survived when the slaughter was over.

At least the leaders died too, they believed. They vowed to remember each event so that it would never happen again.

These movements all began with a few zealous individuals who had power in mind for themselves and a set of beliefs with which to convince their future supporters. It didn't matter whether their teachings and beliefs were correct, were acceptable or would be approved by the majority because they planned to take control of the majority.

The uncertain ones remained silent in every case. The aggressive ones never do.

The aggressive ones always have that message they want to reach so many others. The doubtful ones and those who have found the path to peace remain silent.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make the motives of the power seekers plain before they take too much control over too many people and too much history.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Is Media Reported Cruelty Realistic?

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)

Not only do some nations seem to believe that they must be cruel to be tough, many individuals have adopted this belief as if it will either assure them of success in business or at least protect them from those who want to take away their power.

The United States military is tough. Many American citizens have joined with millions of people elsewhere in the world to make everyone aware of the atrocities at Abu Graib prison, the murder of innocent Iraqis, the slaughter of several troops of their allies (four Canadians at one shot) in incidents of friendly fire and more events that suggest the US military is cruel. By association, people come to believe that the United States must be a cruel country.

This is not true. Seldom are the many good deeds that the US military does in Iraq or Afghanistan daily reported in mainstream media. They aren't as interesting as people dying. The humanitarian and rebuilding efforts, the assistance with setting up government systems and training security forces so that the people of these countries can tend to their own problems go almost unnoticed. To people who have come to believe that oppression and restrictions are how life should be, teaching them the concept of freedom is a big job.

Afghanistan, still the laregest producer of opium poppies in the world, all of it under the control of rogue warlords, receives a contant supply of aid from the US to convert its agriculture base to something the rest of the world will respect and appreciate. If the small poppy farmer sees little help from the US, it's because the US can't put its experts in the field on a one-to-one basis to help everyone. They need to trust someone and sometimes they trust the wrong people.

In Iraq, the US challenge is not to subdue the Sunnis or the Shi'ites, but to keep the two factions from trying to annihilate each other in their struggle for dominance. The "Iraq War" is a US led mission to prevent the entire Middle East from turning into a bloodbath as the two flavours of Islam defy the most fundamental rules of the Prophet Muhammed by killing other Muslims, including unarmed and non-aggressive women and children.

US troops who could face death from a sniper or suicide bomber at any moment of any day receive full press coverage when one of them goes berserk from fear or stress overload and kills someone who wasn't a threat after all. The offence is reported, the stress seldom receives any attention.

The patina of cruelty by the US in Iraq or Afghanistan consists of nothing more than Hollywood style trash reporting by the media with little or no attention given to balance or depth.

Television, especially the reality shows, are trending toward cruelty among individuals in their attempts to outdo each other in the ratings, which are all about advertising dollars. Does the world really want to know which contestant on The Apprentice will be hired by the Trump Empire, or does the audience want to see what creative ways The Donald can devise each show to lead up to "You're fired!"?

Soap opera style incidents enlivened the competition on programs such as Survivor in the easly series, but dirty tricks get the attention today. Someone has to suffer if the show is to retain its popularity. People eagerly watch on television behaviour they would be ashamed to have happen in their own families.

That's not real life. In real life, Americans are helping Americans every day. And they contribute to charities and NGOs that help people around the world, every day. These events seldom make the news. During and after the Katrina disaster, did we hear about the good work that was done by thousands of volunteers from many parts of the country and from other countries daily or did we hear about those who suffered because someone didn't get to them soon enough?

The media have a right to choose what they print and broadcast. We have no right to interfere unless they break a law. However, we have the right to boycott the advertisers who pay for programs that twist the truth until it sounds like lies. And we have the right to turn our favours to programs and publications that produce more balanced reporting.

We don't need to be concerned about people who know the difference between propaganda and truth, between slanted reporting and balance. We need to be concerned about people who can't tell the difference. That includes young people who are just beginning to take an interest in world affairs but have not been taught to recognize propaganda and editorials masquerading as news. They are vulnerable. They are potential victims, our sons and daughters.

We need to teach those who don't know so that they don't reproduce more people who don't know.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put it all into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

War And Politics: Social Twins

"War is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means."
- Carl von Clausewitz, 19th century Prussian military thinker

Some may argue that "by other means" disqualifies or devalues the whole message of the quote.
Others may say that war is but a continuation of business by other means. Those countries that begin wars or that support insurgents or revolutionaries in another country always have their own financial interests at heart somewhere along the way.

War is life. It's the way life is in all forms of biological existence that we know, be they plant or animal. What is different about the human form of war is not just that we kill for reasons other than for food (a few other animals do that), but that we do so in highly organized and socially powerful groups with detailed planning. Socially powerful meaning in ways that influence human enemies most effectively.

However, war is our way of showing that we have not progressed far beyond what our prehuman ancestors, the way our genetically close primate relatives are today. It is the most primitive way of conducting the affairs of large societies.

War is our way of demonstrating that we have failed to advance as civilizations. We have the potential to make advancements beyond the primitive, but we keep falling back to the ways of our forebears. Our prehuman, small-brained ancestors.

Why do we allow this to happen to us? Because we pay most attention to those who claim that "others" are a great threat to us and least attention to those who want to adopt friendships with the others to trade and socialize for our mutual benefit. In most cases, the claim that the others are threatening us is false.

We are still, most of us, simple creatures whose natural tendency is to look to others for instruction and for protection. Like the apes. We follow the apparently most powerful and the loudest among us.

We will know when we have risen above our natural instincts when we see war and violence as activites of simpler, more primitive animals. We have the brain to do it. We need to use that brain to demonstrate that we are more advanced than apes.

You can do your part. Pass the word.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to help us advance the process of civilization one small step at a time.
Learn more at http://billallin.com