A brief peep inside Adam's head...
All my life I've been interested in what people do, what we can do, and why we do and don't do such things. In the navy I learnt more about what I could do, and why. It was actually on the rifle range at HMAS Cerberus (kind of appropriate that it was at a base with such a name) that I realised precisely how easy it is to kill. I had a moment of revelation, you might say. I considered security procedures, rifle ranges, close work with pistols and knives, bombs, the works. And I considered all the important people in the world, and how stupid they are to make themselves so vulnerable. I realised then that there was not one single person in the world beyond my reach. It really is a shock, to grow up as I did, then realise one day that not only was the navy training me to be able to do such things, but that I was naturally good at it. (The very first magazine I ever fired, from an L1A1, I scored over 80% accuracy at all ranges.) While in the navy I continued to think about it, and after the navy I spent several years doing very little else but thinking about such things. As I've mentioned before, it seemed to me that we can, with a very simple act, reduce everyone to absolute equality. And that all politics, religion, sexual preference debates, abortion debates, and every other thing you can think of like that, were all basically luxuries those stupid people out there (at such times I considered everyone "them", as opposed to me and others like me) squabbled over as though they mattered, when in fact such things didn't matter at all because I could end all such debates, dreams, and hopes for anyone at any time, with absolute equality, reducing all of it to one thing. To be honest that scared the hell out of me. I did not like the idea, the realisation. Even now, when I see/hear people arguing and debating, I do feel somewhat separate from it all, and participation is somewhat going through the motions. Not just participation in discussions, but participation in general human activity. This is what the military helped do to me, and I'm not at all happy about it.
I stewed in that mess for several years, trying to figure things out. I held, and still hold, a deep resentment toward the military. Even so, for years I've felt that life would be so much easier and simpler if someone would just recall me to active service and tell me to go shoot people or blow things up. It's so easy. There's no politics. You just find a legitimate target and destroy it. And I'm good at it.
Eventually I realised the solution to all this. Everyone is absolutely equal in death. So what makes anyone special at all? What's the point to any of us? Those very opinions whch could be reduced to nothing. The politics, ethics, morals, dreams, hopes, fears, all those things which could so easily mean nothing, they were the very things which made anyone and everyone worth something. Any person on this planet could be reponsible for the birth, in a thousand years or moe, of someone who might give us faster-than-light travel, global piece and wisdom, free energy, another Hitler, or something else. Any death prior to procreation alters that possibility. I realise I've digressed a bit here into some of my reasons why I dislike killing.
Anyway, so I figured out why we are all special, and why killing isn't necessarily so good even if it's easy. Destroying people and objects really is easy work. Living, however, is difficult in comparison. Realising what we are, or what we can be, and mastering it or at least learning to live with it, is a real bitch in comparison to simply being what we can be.
So I am in control. Even if I still sometimes watch the news and wait for the presenter to say "We are at war", and maybe wait for a phone call, and I wonder if I can still shoot as well as I used to, I do not at all crave these things. These things are the abyss of which Neitzche spoke.
You might say I have an absolute, black-and-white reason for requiring of myself, at least, civilised behaviour. There is an entire world of difference between civilisation and that abyss. It still scares the hell out of me. (You may recall in a thread about fear, I refused to name the one thing that scares me. Well, this is it.)
So, I well understand the notions of the inner animal and controlling it or co-existing with it, or the animal and human sides becoming one.
PS: Yes, I saw a shrink, and the shrink didn't get it. The only people who have ever truly understood were a couple of other military people who felt the exact same things.
