[Newspoetry] What kind of killer are you?

[Donald L Emerick]

Extension of Remarks:

The two killing exceptions that you mention, defense of self and defense of state, are really only extreme variants of one another, on dimensions of specificness-abstractness, enfolding itself as a defense of (helpless) others, where one may treat one's future self as also being one of those others who is threatened.  That is, you would most likely defend your mother, spouse, child, other close relatives, and, perhaps, immediate friends and other acquaintances from the same dangerous kinds of perils as you would save yourself.  You might even think that self defense includes, in that regard, defense of members of various groups of people who may be in such perils -- for instance, to defend Jews from Nazis, or Palestinians from militaristic Israelis, and Israelites from militaristic Palestinians.  And, in general, you might think to self defend the members of any collectivity against such aggressive perils from others.

On this dimension I find three kinds of claims about some action that is to be offered as warranted and justifiable under the general perilous circumstances of emergency.

The three kinds of claims are (1) there are those whose life (lives) are valued in just the kind of way that one may see one's own future existence is at stake; (2) there is that which is to be taken as a dire danger; and (3) there may be some idea of what is to be done to prevent the potentiality of harm from becoming a painful actuality.

In the absence of the latter, I might, ideally, have an unthinking moment of pure reaction, just as I might involuntarily blink when something rushes at my eye.  It is the vain privilege of thinking that it might, with adequate foresight, turn any unplanned, autonomic response into a planned, controlled, and regulated response.  But, then, such thinking's vanity may be too willing to ignore the extent of those instances in which, regardless of the abstract desirability of intermediation between stimulating circumstances and self directing responsive action, one (re)acts unthinkingly, as if these were major and minor keys to a harmony.

Self defense, in short, tends toward the justifying circumstances of unthinkingness -- or toward the question of just how much thinking is possible, in the circumstances.  Self defense already presumes that some defense against deadly force, as wielded by some others, is perfectly "normal" (not insane) -- but it does not usually prejudge those who have planned otherwise, to accuse them of being "insane" for not desiring to kill others, even in self defense.

The thing which is a dire danger is interesting to us, after we eliminate the materiality of threats, in the guise of weapons.  For, the thing that interests us is the intent question, that one person would choose to kill another person, or would be recklessly indifferent as to whether some other person might die, as a natural and probable consequence of that first person's own actions.  A dire danger, thus, is always a person who possesses an intent to kill others.

In this regard, we might make something of the difference in intent between the self-defender and other (kinds of) intent that move any other killer.  Namely, the self defender points to the limit, to the limiting contingency that bounds the self defender.  the self defender will be a conditional killer, a potential killer who has decided the conditions under which he will kill (or not).  The other kind(s) of killer honors no conditions except those of convenience and pleasure, while the self defender thinks that he acts only when pain may happen, to avert pain.

Now, psychologically speaking, and not speaking as a professional who would steal the power to speak of psychology from others, in a voice that is often, today, trivialized as pointless moralizing or academic theorizing or unending philosophizing, I would also remark that not only are the second kind(s) of killer also people who are avoiding some kinds of pain, but also that, among the first kind(s) of killers, there is also some pleasure seeking in the fact of killing conditionally.  For instance, the idea that the future of self should be protected most seems to be supported by the idea of that future self will have some pleasurable existence.

Supporters of euthanasia and of the right to suicide, for instance, may become accustomed to the idea that, under some conditions, death would be preferable to infinite and unmitigated suffering.

There would be a time when death is a fitting end of existence.  However, for most us, we do not live by thinking in such a way as to reach the thought of how such a time may come to pass when a proper end to life may happen, as a thing of beauty.  instead, we tend to absolutize our thinking, to say that death is always wrong.  Moronically, we say that death could never a proper ending of life -- and we thereby establish moral genealogy, and make possible the many falsehoods of many delusional religions.  For all religion, in some sense, may be a denial of death, a fictive disguise for the basic truth of any existence.  The essence of religion is not faith in some god but the denial of death, the avoidance of the truth in the contrived names of some pretentious fictions.  Faith in god is fully equivalent to what its mirrors imagine.

I keep skating around the question of the (re)action that is proper, by claiming that there is no such thing, that everything might be (either) conditioned or conditionable.  My idea of the proper would be fully relational, as in the idea of proportions, or as in the idea of functions -- for F(x) yields what is proper to the Function, neither more nor less than what F may ever give, when stimulated by some x.  Too much or too little would equally wrongfully overthrow the law of the proper, the law of the function.

So, then, self defense itself may be proper or improper, according to the self functions that appear to us in the circumstantial guises of singular events.  In a sense, you might suspect, I am begging the question of the proper by introducing the specter of the Function, as if it were something that could be said.  In my lighter and darker moments, I think that it can be said and written -- and that is, indeed, when I write and speak of it, as I do now.  But, in all honesty, I have to admit to the possibility of some mysticism, of some generality that denies specificity, denies even death, as if this thought could go on toward eternity, even if it has to find another mind to think, or yet another life to live it out.  (This is rather like the idea that memes live, opportunistically, for ever, essentially -- because their lives are so much vaster than our own.)

And, thus, finally, man faces himself, as killer and destroyer, rather like one aspect of god in some Indian religion.  The trick of being a god is to be able to say, not that things are perfect and ideal, but that they are good, when taken as a whole.

Hence, this faithful sanity of death denial rejects the insanity of every aggression and retreats to the defense of some aggression, as today's socially acceptable alternatives, by posing itself as ever lesser harms, and converges, as if it were a function, to its own limits.

And, I now may have reached that limit, perhaps even exceeded it in your view.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

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