[Disillusionist]

I eat hamburger. I love hamburger, and most any form of red meat. Dinner should have had a face to satisfy me. All day long, I can claim to be civilized, since I don't walk out my door, go onto the great plains and bring down a buffalo with a spear, afterwards, stripping it of its stuff. Meat, hide, bone.

At times, our civilization masks for us that (and by no means is this restricted to American culture, nor has it ever been) our existence is based on killing and violence, and the nature of the world itself makes violence of some sort necessary to survive. Sure, someone decided to put a big fence around our meat source, so its easier to kill in vast quantities, and someone cuts it up into palatable chunks, flavors it, and packages it so we don't feel like we just went out and slaughtered the thing to eat its living heart, but it takes a great deal of sublimation to ignore that that's done in our name, for our sake, with our tacit approval.

Violence is inherent in our very diet. We may be omnivorous, but to satisfy that meat craving, as it were, we are predators. Part of our social linguistics developed because those specimens which had them made for superior hunters.

In our 'civilization' which I think is a misnomer, violence is masqueraded to the point where its prevalence is more easily deniable, but we even see it in the corporate world, in the language itself. "Dog eat dog." "Higher up on the food chain." Our social structure (in a male-dominated society, anyway) is hierarchical, and that hierarchy is established violently, if not fatally, although sometimes the conflict comes short of actual blows. It's still an attempt to overcome or overwhelm adverse circumstances. I guess I just don't feel guilty about it.

We pay for people to maim, harm and kill for us, too, constantly, even if we live in a country with no standing army. We arm police, and authorize them to do many things of a violent nature, in order to placate our threat response. I don't see myself as above street violence, but only as removed from it with the police as my proxy warriors.

Little surprise to me at all then, when MUDs, rather than having us put on a mask, oftentimes serve the opposite purpose. Historically, our specie is violent, right back to the fratricide of Cain and Abel. If it's in competition with us, we destroy it. If we find it tasty, we kill it and eat it. If we find it otherwise useful, we subjugate and exploit it. With the veneer pulled off, it sounds so very savage and primitive, but in general, it's who we are.

I don't think women are especially immune to violent impulses, but their hardwiring is of course different. Try taking away a mother's child in the supermarket, see how quickly nice and quiet Mrs. Jones becomes Emily Rose on crack. Or see what happens if a woman feels threatened by another woman in her spousal attentions.

NOTE: I do not say that everyone is completely uncivilized, nor that the impulse toward violence is equally strong in everyone. Just that it's there, and has been since our specie's inception.

So when it comes to the 'shoot-n-loot' mentality, I don't feel shame or surprise. I mean, I'm just typing, while IMAGINING violence on a critter or opponent. And I'm enjoying it.

Often, I do it with a hamburger in my hand.