Born or Made

The contrarian in me likes to argue for ‘born’; it’s more fun for being more challenging and unsuspected, coming from someone who wrote a fat book that seems to come down heavily on ‘made’. We are all born to kill, but weight times fury is insufficient to add up to murder when we are infants, and eventually most of us are derailed from our natural paths by the socialization process. There is also the matter that we are nine Chinese months old when we are born, and our most formative years and months are stacked toward the beginning. We in no small part are born after we have been made, and birth is such an arbitrary line to be drawing anyway. Erase the line and heredity/environment merge into the single concept of Shit Happens, as opposed to shit that happens before and shit that happens after, since environment informs the heredity of future generations.

I used to think the question legitimate, if idiotic, that idiots could actually believe the type of idiot arguments that typically lead one to conclude on the ‘born’ side. Actually, I know they can. But there’s a higher intelligence at work here that can’t afford to let on at the level of conscious thinking and speech that these arguments are pure B.S.

It’s the same with political partisanship, where 50% of the world are total idiots to the other 50%. While the conservative true believer is feeding line after line in trying to thwart a just cause, a higher intelligence pulling his strings is saying yeah, my arguments may be groundless, but they’re the only ones I’ve got. And my puppet needs to push against this new idea with all his might, as he must push against all new ideas, to help ensure that only good ideas wind up being enacted. To push with all his might, he needs to believe what he’s saying, so I won’t tell him I’m pulling his leg.

The thing about allying with the really true truth, as conventionally argued, that monsters are made more than born, is that with understanding comes forgiveness, and that the more you look into it the better the killer looks in relation to society. In fact, if you delve absolutely, it’s a total vindication for the “Bad” Guys over the “Good”, not just a draw but a win. The ‘made’s are correct, and the attitude is therapeutic, but the problem is that the perspective is, at base, not opposed to murder.

And we can’t have that!

Or can we?

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