sinister fish update: contact - Part Two "The two of them were sitting in Heather's living room, staring at each other..."

Akaxo update: New Page - 29/06/09 Act I, Scene I.

Akaxo has updated with a new page. sinister fish has updated with part two of the story 'Contact' - which has murders, people! Or a murder. So far. ---o0o--- A CALL FOR GUEST ART. Click the link for details, but the short version is I'd love it if you could send me a Kaspall guest page that I can put up in emergencies over the next four months. In return, I'll be happy to send you an A5 sketch of the character of your choice. The Secret Knots

28/06/09

I was watching 'Life' a couple of nights ago (another step in my mission to watch at least one episode of maybe every detective show ever). And they had that depressing psychology experiment with the prison set-up - which is number two in my list of 'Most Depressing Psychology Experiments', number one being that one where they get a bunch of people to fake-electrocute a bunch of other people. So depressing.

Of course, it shouldn't be a surprise that during these experiments people tend to act like jerks. Because basically what they do is artificially recreate situations in which we know people have previously acted like jerks. The only reason the results come as a surprise is that we like to tell ourselves that those people were bad or weird or anyway not like us – when, actually, the reason those specific people acted like jerks under those circumstances, is because people in general tend to act like jerks under those circumstances.

But it got me thinking ... that sometimes we're pretty hard on ourselves. We're so used to saying that 'Humans are jerks', that I think we sometimes forget that it's not quite that simple.

These experiments in which we act horribly towards each other ... so what? I mean that as a genuine question. So what? What does it matter? Who cares?

Well ... we do. We think it matters. We look at the results, and we're upset by them. But why are we? We don't have to be. There isn't anyone watching (okay, so I'm leaving religion out of this – you don't have to believe in God to know right from wrong). People often say that we only do the right thing because we're forced to by laws and by society. But who made that society? Who made the laws? We did. We made them. And on average we stick to them. Nobody is making us do that - if everybody in the world decided tomorrow to just say 'fuck it', and forget all notions of right and wrong, then no one would stop us. It wouldn't matter - except to ourselves.

I'm not saying that one hell of a lot of terrible things don't happen in the world, and that there aren't many, many ways in which we could live as better people. But I am saying that the yard-stick we're measuring ourselves against is one that we invented, and one that we choose to recognise. We choose to see 'doing the right thing' as a 'good' target to aim for. And, sometimes, we even hit it. Isn't that something to be a little proud of?