so our fundamental state of being here in the body is to use force to kill other living things so we can eat them and keep ourselves alive. somewhere out there someone is thinking about how to expensively grow meat in a vat so that we don't have to kill something, the dream of tissue without consciousness but that is not a solution to the basic situation, we avert our eyes from the cells as they rupture, we have killed it, now we are eating it, it is delicious.
somewhere along the line we developed an idea that making distinctions between what we killed and why is important to the killer, the killee officially no longer cares. the killer knows what it has done, it just can't help itself. it is hungry, everyone knows what that is. some degree of sentiment in the lives of the vertebrates. they notice things, they form opinions, their grownups are smarter than their children. reflective conscience, tip of the grateful hat to the nutritious dead. a quick dispatch, a reverent prayer. delicious.
licit & illicit violence then. there have been times & places where if you captured someone in a raid you could do anything you wanted with it, your own business, the neighbors would not interfere, cut them up & hang the parts from a tree, your business, feed them to your dogs (like the Spanish in Cuba, 16th century). we, with our culture, apply manners to violence, obscure sense of guilt. we can't acknowledge that guilt though because we would have to stop eating then we ("we") would die. so we avert our eyes & agree not to comment. if challenged we bluster & display to cover our fear. we know how it is. what can we do?
violence. guilt. aversion. justification. moving right along.
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