Last Saturday, October 7th, 600 people – and still counting – died in a Hamas breakout from Gaza. And on the same morning, 2000 people – and still counting – died in an earthquake in Afghanistan. The breakout dominated the front page. Still does. The earthquake made a brief appearance on page three.
Those visitors from outer space – those who’ve been hovering over the planet for a few centuries now – find this deeply puzzling. They’ve read their Marx. According to dialectical materialism, the laws of human nature are as regular and predictable as the laws of physics. So why the surprise? And more puzzling yet, why the outrage? A lion sneaks into the village at night and mauls a child? Do we shake our fist at it? Of course not. We understand it’s doing what it’s its nature to do. Why then are we outraged when people fight? Or when they fight back?
The answer, the Alpha Centaurians have conjectured, is that in addition to their material world, humans live in a symbolic world. So the Hamas breakout symbolises something that the earthquake does not. Both the breakout and the earthquake symbolise danger, though the latter more than the former. But the breakout symbolises the anger of the Other, and we’re far more sensitive to the Other’s anger – even to the Other’s feckless anger – than we are to the far more violent movement of tectonic plates.
Needless to say this sensitivity has been naturally selected for, and so it too is ultimately reducible to our material conditions. But one would think – or at least the Alpha Centaurians were wont to think – that we’d have been naturally selected to take our human predators in stride just as we have our feline predators. But apparently not.
Had last Saturday been a slower news day, Afghanistan might have made it to page two. The aliens have come to understand that. But they’re trying to imagine what that day was like for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That afternoon he watched the Gerald Ford with the M-16s that would have saved his country heading to the eastern Mediterranean instead to disincentivise Iran. If the aliens had known a little bit more about the symbolic world of the humans – for example that Zelenskyy is also Jewish – they might have learned something about just how complicated living in a symbolic world can be.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
Yes, the surprise pikachu reactions to a blood feud being a blood feud are grating and simple-minded at best. But what exactly is so “natural” about slashing pensioners in their homes, defiling corpses, and filming it all on an iPhone? Is that really “tak(ing) our human predators in stride”?
Full disclosure, I am a woman, so I recognize I am naturally selected to be a baby about this sort of thing.
-An admirer
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Anonymous asks “what exactly is so natural about …?” Well, since she asks, I suppose I’d better answer. Terrorising the enemy is perfectly natural. It’s issuing a clear statement that there’s no limit to the effects of one’s anger. So if you don’t like what you’re seeing, don’t make him that angry.
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I’m not sure if anonymous is being tongue-in-cheek about the following:
“Full disclosure, I am a woman, so I recognize I am naturally selected to be a baby about this sort of thing.”
Here’s a cursory look at women’s naturally selected tendency to be a baby about this sort of thing.
Palestine:
This article is a bit dated (2011): “Women fighters willing to die for Gaza,” http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/01/03/gaza.women.fighters/index.html
Israel:
“Women’s Service in the IDF: Between a ‘People’s Army’ and Gender Equality,” https://en.idi.org.il/articles/24554#:~:text=As%20of%20February%202022%2C%20approximately,clerical%20positions%20(Graph%202)
I wonder, and I am sincerely wondering, whether the desire of these women is not naturally selected for? What other explanation is available for their desire? Is this fighting the social justice reflex writ large?
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Well of course I WAS being tongue-in-cheek, but now I have to earnestly defend the statement because you earnestly replied with “But the wammin can do violence too!” Can’t a girl make a misogynistic joke, or is all that fun exclusively reserved for men? The inequality! Finally, I understand what these feminists are always yapping on about.
The IDF’s “Gender Equality” branding sure makes me chuckle. Especially when I remember all the pictures and videos that swarm any IDF social media space of breathtakingly beautiful female soldiers, taunting us with their glowing olive skin and perfect physiques. “We let the girls fight and they sure look sexy doing it!” Some say propaganda, others say Israeli chicks just happen to be hotter, I say both. So, Israel, one point for you! Even the worst of enemies can agree on loving beautiful women. They may SAY they disagree, and one side might be more “respectful” about their admiration, but all men get swollen in the same place when a pretty girl bats her eyelashes. (Unless of course you’re one of those lucky gays, the ultimate alpha state!)
Now, the gender equality thing. Israel tries to use it to play up their whole “Only feminist country in the Middle East” grift. To be fair, as a woman, I would likely rather live in Israel than any other country in the Middle East. I’m not down for Sharia and am certainly too pretty to wear a burka! But I also do not find Israel’s conscription of women to be noble. I utterly detest it. Should they have the option to enlist? Sure, I won’t stop them. But there are some lines you don’t cross. It’s not that I think women lack the bravery, discipline, loyalty, and selfless commitment to be fierce soldiers. They do not. It’s that – I think any country mandatorily calling its women to fight their battles on the field or in the office is warped. Godless in the Nietzchean sense! Ensuring within reasonable control that the fairer sex is not forcefully exposed to the brutalities of men is of utmost importance to the soul of a society. Why? Because, despite my previous tongue-in-cheek statement, the soul of a society relies on women’s naturally selected tendency to be babies about this sort of thing. And that naturally selected tendency should be cherished and nurtured at all costs because the last thing the world needs is women trying to act like men.
As for the female fighters of Gaza – well, there are always abnormalities. I would hypothesize that way fewer women than men feel a strong urge to strap into a suicide vest. But a few of them have the zeal. The explanation for their desire? Probably exactly what they say it is: life and freedom for their families. I’m 99% sure there were no female Hamas fighters on the front lines this past weekend. I guess since I awarded Israel for their hot chicks, I must also give Hamas one point for not letting the women duke it out. Unfortunately, I will not look to them for further women’s rights advice anytime soon.
Well, I hope this made you laugh. If not, and you instead found it completely null and dimwitted (who is this bimbo trying to get Paul’s attention!?), just blame the fact that I’m a woman and do NOT personally fault me for it.
-A super nice pretty girl
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Yup. It is natural.
Charlotte Christensen, Andrew N Radford, Dear enemies or nasty neighbors? Causes and consequences of variation in the responses of group-living species to territorial intrusions, Behavioral Ecology, Volume 29, Issue 5, September/October 2018, Pages 1004–1013, https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/ary010
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Good observation about humanity living in the material world as well as the symbolic world. The Afghanistan earthquake is tragic, and tragedy can easily grab people’s attention, but evil (or perceived evil) is even better at this partly because evil can persist indefinitely into the future. An earthquake can usually be measured in minutes.
But lets not kid ourselves into thinking that the Alpha Centaurians would be puzzled by this phenomenon. Anyone who has been observing humanity for even just one century could understand that the only thing that sells better than sex is war.
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May I ask why it is that you suppose we treat our feline predators differently than those of our fellow man?
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If we are going to operate with this framing, the question must be asked: If this is how the lion acts when he is out of his cage, why would you ever let him have freedom again?
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