A young school teacher who is a pupil of a friend asked "Oh, what do you write?" I did not introduce myself as a writer but was "outed" by another well-meaning friend.
I answered crime as in murder and deceit and lies and betrayal. I like the aftermath of these things and how they change people.
She stared. "Why write about such horrible things?"
"It's in our nature to harm one another - part of the human condition. As a species, its what we're best at: harm."
Her response? "I believe in non-violence."
It was a social encounter. I let it go.
There is nothing a human cannot be made to do to another human. Now, to make them like it I have to start young. Nevertheless, their actions to harm can be compelled with the proper motivation.
Sometimes, it takes no external motivation at all. Steak knife in the aorta killed a husband in Detroit just last weekend. Asked his wife where she had been, and she stabbed him. Probably didn't mean for him to bleed out on the kitchen floor - at least not so fast. Nobody put a gun to her head. Nobody held her baby over a boiling pot of water. She did it of her own accord. Married 19 years.
WW I. It's my favorite war largely because of the terms on which it was fought. Alexander and Caesar and Charlemagne would have recognized the direct close combat for the ritual barbarity it was. They might have been better at it than Foch.
The bar for the justification of harm is very flexible. It moves.
Imagine what someone who actually understands how to motivate individuals to harm can do. Imagine. No Queen's Regulations here.
Write something. Lock the doors, and write something, little ones. We're out there in the dark with out yellow night eyes. Yes. We. Are.
Every one of us.
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