As I mentioned in my previous post, society wants to judge us, determine our fate, and carry out that fate by their own hands.  One of the reasons for their fanaticism, I believe, is due to their repulsion of that which goes against their very, arbitrary, measure of of decency.  Society, has created forced and arbitrary values and concepts that must be adhered to.  I’m not just referring to their championing of empathy and conscience, but of everything they hold high.  Heteronormativity.  Cisgendered people.  Even the languages we speak and write are given scrutiny at the highest order for no apparent reason except for conformity and false feelings of superiority.  This mindset truly reaches fanaticism.

The whole mechanism reminds me greatly of this study.  Monkeys were given a reward if they climbed a pole.  However, every time a monkey would try to climb the pole, that monkey, and all others present, were sprayed with ice-cold water.  Gradually, monkeys were rotated out while the experiment continued and, by the end, no monkeys that tried to climb the pole originally remained.  However, the monkeys left would prevent any of the others from climbing the pole even though they themselves never felt the ice-cold water.  This beautifully portrayed a similar dynamic in society.  We abhor certain behaviors automatically because those that came before us did so.  We have no idea why we are doing it, other than we feel compelled to do so.

This mentality, along with a primal disgust toward people that are unlike them, causes persecution of the highest order.  Liberals often want to speak of the brainwashing of the masses by religion, but I really suspect that even in its absence, the mechanism would still be there.  Maybe there would be hope for an intellectualism to take root that would override the primal tendency to abhor the ‘different’, but that primal reaction would still be there.  Society would still feel disgust toward the disabled, the homosexual, the transgendered, the blind, the mute, and so on, but maybe their own empathy would override their latent desire to excommunicate these people from ‘functional’ society.  But would their empathy extend to those without empathy?  I don’t think so.

Society is conditioned to perpetuate a cycle of elevation for some groups and disdain for others.  Society, and most individuals, are also conditioned to segregate themselves from those unlike them.  Those left behind might as well be monsters.  Even in the absence of “bad behavior”, the psychopath will still be shunned and feared.  The non-psychopath has empathy so engrained into their existence that they feel no other option.  We are patchwork and grotesque pieces of inhumanity in their eyes.  To be otherwise would take a great effort of other human beings to fight their primal instincts and the rules dictated by the larger mass as a whole. When will their empathy extend to those that have none?  When they stop seeing us as monsters and start seeing us as fellow, but different, human beings.