On altruïsm reversed
Kay, let’s say a random person murders a kitten or mistreats a child or beats up what-ever, naturally we—or most people—would beat that person up if we had the chance, or at least severely punch him in the face to make sure he does not carry out his intentions or threat to empty a can of liquid on the poor cat and drop an object warmer than said liquid’s ignition temperature on the cute critter.
Now, some would call this altruïsm or a desire to protect the cat or what-ever victim at stake here, can’t say I’m absolutely sure of that. I don’t mean the clichéd story of feeling better for yourself. I mean another facet to it, because people are simply too selfish to care that much about cats or even children or even their best friends.hat’s in any such of this cases always strangely præsent is that the people that are out to protect these people put a lot more focus on the aggressor than they do on the victim.
In fact—people seem to completely stop caring if there’s only a victim, but not a tangible aggressor, and seem to care a lot if there’s an aggressor, but not tangible victim, the so called ‘victimless crimes’ that exist in various jurisdictions that some (a few) people find stupid and should be repelled.
In the case that a certain person has some suffering going on but there’s no tangible aggressor, as in, it happened by pure accident or it was even due to downright bad luck, people tend to have a lot less of an emotional response. For instance, take these two examples.
- A woman by sheer accident without any one really being at fault has nude pictures of herself thrown on the internet.
- That very same woman is photographed in the shower and uploaded to the internet.
Now, in both cases the victim is humiliated, ashamed, a victim, but in the latter case, there is an aggressor, some-one whom we can blame for this thing. The latter always provokes fierce responses from most parties getting notice of it, often a desire for retribution, the first will merely provoke either a small dose of sympathy, fake sympathy, or simply laughing at that woman.
When I was quite young, seven years old I think, I saw a couple of people capturing frogs and bullying them. So knight in the shining armour that I was, I raced to there, liberated the frogs, and got beat up for that by the guys. A mate that was there with me wanted to follow them to beat them up, I was more like ‘You might call an ambulance first?’, he didn’t even think of that, he didn’t care for my suffering, he cared for making the person that caused it pay, not to help me who was lying pretty battered there.
However, looking back in retrospect, I also have to conclude another thing of myself: I would not have stopped to rescue those frogs if they got trapped on their own, and as hell not risked several injuries for that. Only the fact that there were some aggressors into play galvanized my desire to free those frogs, I wasn’t trying to help the frogs, I was trying to at some way compromise the action of the aggressors if I look deep down inside, and I think that almost all people would do the same.
Same with animal rights activist group, all their actions have one thing in common, the suffering is always due to human influence, due to some-one they can place blame on. They (read: we, I pay for that too and chain myself to fences) are not out to help animals they are out to compromise the efforts of people that are trying to hurt them, a completely different thing. Yet we (they) tell ourselves that we want to help animals, in reality we just want to make people pay we don’t like, don’t like for for instance doing cruel shit to animals. It’s also the same in every trial, in every news report about it, the news isn’t about that some person has greatly suffered, the news is about that some person has caused great suffer to another.
Almost never is there a report about suffer in the news if it’s not done by some crime or some goof-up of some-one. The only exception I can think of to this rule are reports about mass natural disasters, and it makes you think why we all still remember 9/11, but have forgotten about natural disasters that caused so much more destruction hmm? There’s never news about some old grandmother sitting at home feeling like shit, but if she got into that position by some human error like the wrong drug præscribed oh as hell it would have come into the papers. We don’t care about suffering, we care about the people that cause it.
Then of course comes the even more interesting situation of an aggressor, but no victim. How can there be an aggressor but no victim? Let’s say you have this stereotypical really sweet girl that likes to help people, she cleans up for her boyfriend, makes him sandwiches, the whole she-bang, well, she doesn’t mind to that, it probably gives her a nice feeling, maybe she likes to cook, who knows? But still a lot of people will target their criticism at the boyfriend for ‘taking advantage of her’, regardless of her not minding. I’m not saying that he should take advantage of her, or that people shouldn’t target complaints, I’m just saying that they don’t target it to help the girl, the so-called victim, but to punish the guy, the so-called aggressor. It’s not about some-one getting hurt, it’s about some-one doing a thing people don’t like. They will most likely try to make the girl realize that she shouldn’t do that and should mind, now assuming they succeed in doing that, from an utilitarian perspective they’ve greatly failed then; the girl has lost one fun activity to do, and the guy get’s less sandwiches, no one-wins, every-body loses.