Occasionally I Contemplate Murder

Some of its aspects, I would without hesitation proclaim in the largest and most unassorted of crowds. Others, though, are a bit more delicate.

Still, unexceptionably interesting.

Those lines of thoughts aren't always encouraging. On the other hand, what lines of thoughts are?

When scrutinized carefully, our world seems to have a number of flaws. One wouldn't have too hard a time coming up with ideas for improving it, I guess.

On the other hand, that's not a waterproof reason for condemning it.

There are many aspects of murder. The very first question may be: how can people at all be able to kill each other?

If we're to give the theory of evolution any credibility, we must ponder this some. Why would a species come up with, and seemingly forever keep, the habit of killing among its own? In a world full of dangers, it must be regarded as overdoing things.

I mean - would a parachuter let himself fall as close to the ground as the laws of aerodynamics allow him to, before it's of fatal necessity to pull the string?

Would a diver stay underwater until he has sucked the last breath of oxygen from his tubes, and would a motorcyclist enter a curve of the road with the maximum speed he believes himself able to handle?

Yes, they would.

Darwin must have missed something. If the strongest instinct of any species is to protect itself from extinction, then mankind acts from a malady, which must surely have had all the chances to be deleted by evolution.

It's a paradox, a most disturbing anomaly of Darwinism, that a species would fondle such dangerous habits. Yet, we obviously do.

Darwin himself might have stated that murder is yet another way of the species, however risky, to accomplish the survival of the fittest. Still I wonder, is it really the fittest who holds the knife, and the less fitting who momentarily sheathes its sharp blade in his own flesh?

Indeed, I doubt it - if we're not to regard the murderer as the fittest by virtue of his deed alone.

Well, all the princes of the Renaissance would certainly cheer in accordance with such a system of merit. As Mussolini, a somewhat misplaced member of their community, reasoned:

Whoever gets the power, has thus proven his right to it.

Perchance, he who takes the lives of others thereby proves the right to his own? It's the law of the bully. The supremacy of the savage.

Some of us would certainly be attracted to such a world, and it does definitely make good action cinema.

A savage kingdom could, if nothing else, be sort of sexy.

ouldn't such an order of things start quite a messy rally, around the world!

And one day, there he'd stand, the very prime of mankind. Screaming like a Conan the Barbarian, with bloodstained hands stretching towards the sky, and his feet sunk knee deep into a mount of corpses.

Hail the ultimate man!

How come he hears no praise?

No, it doesn't work like that. Murder's got nothing to do with evolution.

Death, on the other hand, probably does. Death has many roles. But murder - no. Nature didn't invent it, nor did any God. Man did.

Sort of.

How to get the book

At Amazon US:

At Amazon UK:

Now also a Kindle ebook: