A Conversation With A Chameleon On Murder

By Basil Fernando –January 8, 2014 

Basil Fernando

Now, I want to talk with you about another matter on which I cannot find any human being interested to talk to. It is about a peculiarity of us human beings which I think your species has no experience of which is the capacity, as well as some kind of willingness, to kill. Killing one’s own species is one aspect of human uniqueness. I know that in your species you also sometimes, quarrel. I have seen that in my early days of youth, how some of you have a small quarrel,on a  branch of a tree or sometimes continuing to quarrel from tree to tree.  However, that kind of fight is often to expel another from one’s territory, and it does not go beyond to the extent of killing another.

There have been times when human beings tried to create abhorrence, a moral disgust, against killing and such a killing would lead to a moral outrage. But what I have observed in the recent times is that this  sense of moral outrage against killing, seems to have been subdued or virtually lost – has simply disappered. It may well be that people privately are against the killing of one person by another but, these days, they do not try to publicly demonstrate that disapproval. There is some kind of incapacity that has developed among human beings to express disapproval even of such things as murder. Instead, what seems to have developed is an increase in taking precautions, to try to avoid becoming the victim of a killing, a victim of some evil thing that everyone knows is quite widespread now. We human beings have become the sort of creatures whose success in survival seems to depend on the extent of precautions that we take for our survival. The precaution does not take the form, as perhaps it did at one time, of being armed or being prepared to defend oneself from being  attacked by another. So, each person intimidates the other and thereby prevents the other from attacking.

Nowadays, what happens is that people withdraw from society as much as possible, so that they do not become the target of a killing. People find that disassociation from other human beings brings greater protection than association and cooperation. People fear each other so much that  the idea of cooperation is less and less relied upon. Perhaps associated with this is the idea that the distrust of others is a better attitude to have than trust.

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