h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Silly me. How right you are Tal. A slow and effective raking style mauling by some not excessively hungry lions would be rather pleasant, washed down with a cheeky little bordeaux red for the females or a few s for the males and Amazonian females

How very nice....

Surely a conscience is largely acquired according to one's upbringing and the society in which one lives.

Small children are naturally self-centred and have to learn to be considerate and co-operate with others. Although they also learn to lie!

Those who act as though they have no conscience have, I suspect, developed a different type of conscience from others, learnt to suppress it, or have some mental disorder that has affected their personality & behaviour.

Morning Effers,

I think Tal got it about right in his post about the differences in some people. I think that there are some born with no conscience at all - just a self gratification drive. You can put upon them whatever label you wish.

I think most of us are born with an innate ability to recognise right from wrong, whatever culture you live in, but mostly , good social behaviour arrives by nuturing this individual trait.

Some people seem to be born inherently 'good', and they should be treasured.

I happen also to believe that we could eliminate a fair percentage of our population, say around 10 to 15 percent, and that the remaining people would be infinitely better off, spiritually and financially.

Quite what the selection criteria would be is up for debate!

My personal bete noir is those who actually have a conscience but ignore it for their own gain. The Smile on the Face of the Tiger types.

LOL

Novo

Hi novo

I'm having one of my usual emotional strops at present. Makes it difficult to be objective. I've been a bit crossly controversial earlier due to e a personal issue.

Seriousl, I know I have a strong sense of conscience and wish to to good to people and feel bad if I hurt people. But I haven't the foggiest where it comes from.

Religion comes into it inasmuch as a naturally occurring conscience/morality is reinforced by religion. Take away all the bells & whistles and the message of all religions is basically a moral one. For early societies, religion might explain why it is preferable to act in an altruistic manner and also provide (made up) penalties for those that ignore conscience.

IMO of course.

ECHO

Novo

Hi Effers

Strop away if it helps

And as for your wish to be kind and not to hurt - I reckon you were born with that trait/conscience

Sending you a
Novo

Thanks Novo


Strangley enough I seem to have this heart of gold. I blame it on my Scottish grandad

Keep it 'polished' lassie

Novo

Apparently psychopaths are a lot more common than you might think. The ones that become serial killers are very much in the minority - the rest may have no conscience but can still have a healthy respect for avoiding jail.

I worked with this bloke once for several years. He was 100% competitive, could not anything good about anyone else's work and always promoted his own, despite his own work being a bit shabby, and was utterly incapable of team work. After a while I realised that this went way beyond simple arrogance; he really sincerely believed he was better than everyone else, could not judge his own performance objectively, and was incapable of seeing any worth in other humans beings or their work. I believe he was actually psychopathic, though not in a violent way. Strangely enough, this bloke had a wife and kids.

The trouble with simply getting rid of them, is you also have to get rid of all the ones that haven't done anything yet, and then it all gets a bit fraught.

The troupble with trying to understand people is that they are sometimes bloody complex things.

Id hate to be summed up by a one word "diagnosis" and condemned for it.

Who's to say that sociopaths arent any use to us?

Could they be better than us emotionally empathic people who worry about othres people's *feelings* where efficienty ought to be the model of behaviour sought above all others.

I want a hospital matron who encourages staff to rip plasters off quick, get rid of fluffy gonks and not give a fig for cultural preferences but more than anything puts the fear of God into them over keeping *her* (or his obviously) as the cleanest in the whole hospital. I dont want nice in some aspects of life I want the job done.




I think the best way to understand humans better is to look at groups with simpler lifestyles and primitive cultures or even at animals who have no culture or language to get in the way of genetic behaviour.

OH and first work out what good and bad are (but that's a much tougher question).

Consider the male lion.

Grows up with a firm attachment to its mother aunts, siblings, father and other lions in the pride. Little Lenny, lets call him grows up with a love of doing all things leonine, scratching tress, roaring haning out on the savannah, that sort of thing.

This most would see as a good thing.

Unless you happen to be some sort of prey animal in which case you're hoping me might grow up hating all other lions so much so that he kills and eats them all and then commits suicide in a fit of self loathing.

He does grow up to be ejected from he the pride by the family who he, as close at it gets for lions, loves. Being a natural pack animal he falls in with a gang of "teenage" lions who give vent to their sexual urges the only way available to animals with very sharp teeth and no thumbs. Yeah, a bit of bum love. Some would say that what Lenny is doing is wrong but obviously it feels right to him and certainly his behaviour has never been influenced by reading discarded back editions South African of ID magazine or its local equivalent and as such its safe to call it natural.

As he gets older though Lenny leaves his gang of delinquent homo mates behind and becomes the archetypal male Lion. Yes, he bullies an older man into submission, cuckolds him and either shags or eats the childen of the male he has displaced. This sounds bad but it is his only a way of helping deliver a successful future for his own children. What a loving and attentive (well in lion terms) father Lenny has become.

Hooray for innate feelings!




My point if I have one that I can remember after this long post is that coscience is nothing more than natural urges which fit in with the needs of the whole group. Moral behaviour is simply supressing or at the very least keeping off the radar behaviours and traits that other people would frown on or shoot you for. Hi Fanny



Sociopaths and psychopaths at least the ones we identify as such, are to my mind, at an extreme end on a scale of empathy compared to the masses. They are mostly without the wit or the self contol to keep it hidden that some amongst who walk amongst us undiagnosed have and who we are all very shocked to find out about. Britains most "successful" serial killer was a trusted family doctor.

one love

I was in a particular emotional heat when I posted here blicky.

Are children sociopaths?

Yeah I seem to remember some doco ages ago where they said that people that go on to be psychopaths/sociopaths commonly show behaviour as children, such as severe and calculated torture of pets and animals.

<>

I think it might be in them to be, but most children are lucky enough to have conscientious parents who are able to socialise the little darlings and teach them to sit on their urges, and have regard to other peoples' needs.

My mother urged us to make sure we had more than one child - she'd grown up as an only child, and was both selfish and lonely, she said.

My youngest son is 10 years younger than his older brother - and in effect, grew up as an only child, and I can see that... I grew up with a house full of sibs, and there's a clear difference. An 'only child' doesn't find it easy to learn to share.

But that doesn't make a child a sociopath. Serious abuse/neglect does that - and in some cases just plain bad luck - when good parents can find themselves landed with a monster they can't even understand.

Not sure its helpful to label children monsters.

Lots of boys in particular experience various types of abuse and in the culture that I grew up in you hide your pain if you're going to be man.

One of the boys who lived up the road and witnessed his fathers brother who had become his step-father raping his two elder sisters. He grew a smelly, antisocial and recidivist theif as a teenager. He's cleaned up himself and his act, he's no longer in trouble with the police. Now he beats his wife.


Knowing stuff like that is what pulls me up short from just punching the crap out of kids who I work with on the excluded programme. A kid with a normal caring home life doesnt try to set fire to the school or try to rape his teacher. They arent doing that kind of stuff just for the heck of it. Any more than when girls starve themselves or cut themselves.

When girls get hurt they tend to blame themselves when the world hurts a boy the hormones, the culture something makes them kick back at the world.

A few years ago this case came to light:http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/apr/21/childrensservices.crime


So much for "a mothers love" eh?



I think we are born for the most part with certain innate "good" characteristics but in such a bewilderingly complex society as has been crafted by benevolent matriarchs and patriarchs, cobbled together by happenstance or in some cases the controlling designers of religions, our goodness like the naturally straight qrowing stalks of bamboo can be turned into all sorts of deranged configurations.

one love

PS mosters appear in horror fiction and myths, children are small people who need love and guidance.

I imagine that morality is inate to the same extent that language is. We have an inate capacity to learn a language, and there may possibly be some form of 'universal grammar', but the precise form (and even modality) that language takes is learned from our parents and our peer group.

TRiG.

I think we are born with an urge to survive, and do what we deem necessary to achieve that.

For some that means adopting the idea of co-operation which involves social interaction. For others they develop a need to put their own benefit ahead of all others.

More and more nowadays we see people in all walks of life and at varying levels who put their personal benefit above all other considerations.

For some reason this is acceptable when you vandalise a speed camera, but not when you steal an old lady's purse.

Effers

Generally, we elect them to become political leaders of countries.

<> McKay

We are also born with quite distinct personalities. We all hear about the lovely 'quiet' baby and also the very 'stroppy' kind, which is considered less lovely.

So it probably starts from there. If you are born with a rather demanding personality you will be shown from almost day one that this is not 'acceptable'. If you have a passive personality and sleep a lot and don't make a fuss then you are a 'perfect baby'.

And it just goes on from there.

I think that having a conscience can only happen once you are able to relate to the other people around you. Before that it's just you-you-you. Basic survival instincts.


az