Today’s blog entry was inspired by this brutally revealing GQ article. It does not make for light and pleasant reading, but I ask you to read it anyway, because it is only by understanding and acknowledging that things like this can and do happen that we can find the way and the will to stop them.

The gist is that men get raped in the military too. And unsurprisingly, men are far, far less likely to report it than women, and women aren’t exactly eager to do so either. Men are ganged up on, brutally raped, told that they will be killed if they speak a word of it to anyone, and if they do try to report it, they are met with a system that is perfectly willing to slap them with a mental illness label and give them a dishonorable discharge, thus wrecking the victim’s lives forever. And because their discharge is a dishonorable one, they cannot even get help from the VA. It is a most perfect hell.

This saddens me but does not surprise me. Absolutely anywhere there is unchecked power and insufficient scrutiny, especially in a highly charged, testosterone laden atmopshere, the darkness within men’s souls will rise and corruption of the worst possible kid will creep in, take hold, then take over.

And it is always the same kinds of evils. When power can use its power to protect itself from accountability, you always get the same evils of power, sex, and greed – the reptile takes over from the monkey.

But it not just the people with power who do these evil deeds that are to blame. They are merely the active component of a system far bigger than their little spiderwebs, and that system protects them not because it approves of their actions, but because people prefer to believe that these things do not happen.

Here’s how that works :

Suppose you are a child psychologist in the 1970’s. A very troubled patient of yours, an eight year old girl, has just tearfully told you that her father routinely and brutally sexually abuses her. What do you do?

From the point of view of the here and now, this is an easy question. You counsel the girl, report her father to Social Services and local police, Dad goes to jail, end of story.

But from the point of view of that child psychologist, the world has just split in two and he has a choice to face.

He could accept that what the girl is saying is true, and have his entire world view shattered. He would have to accept that this sort of thing really does happen and that would change everything he thought he knew about love, family, innocence, and the nature of evil. He would have to live the rest of his life in a much harsher, colder, crueler world, and sacrifice his entire sense of security and safety.

Or, he could call her a liar, get her out of his office, and go back to the world he lived in before that awful little girl opened her mouth and said those awful things. The steel shutters of total denial go down in his mind, he tells himself “it can’t be true. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen.”, and goes back to his life, never thinking about it again and going back to his more “normal” clients, of whom he has plenty.

We know which of those choices is right. But we also know which one is easier, and therefore which one he is most likely to choose. He’s only human, after all.

And that’s how evil grows.

If you want to get away with evil, simply do the unthinkable. Commit crimes so unspeakable that people do not want to think that kind of thing happens at all. If you do this, you will enlist a powerful ally called denial. Good, decent, wholesome people who are kind and benevolent and good citizens will commit profound crimes of negligence and heartlessness by turning away your victims, or even attack your victim themselves, simply because they want to preserve their candy-colored world view, where such things simply don’t happen.

That is why the world will always need those of us who are willing to go directly into the very heart of darkness in order to learn what is there and how to stop it. It needs those of us who are willing to give up all our illusions of comfort and safety in order to find the evil that lurks within the heart of humanity, and by exposure, destroy it.

People like myself, who are willing to think and ask questions like… exactly how does a rape gang organize itself? It’s not something you can advertise. Somehow, like-minded people find each other, and somehow the first time they find a victim and do the deed happens, and after that, they can do it again and again without ever mentioning it out loud. They just know what to expect will happen when they get together.

And in the case of men raping men, how much of a role does internalized homophobia play? It is clearly not about the sex. If the perpetrators were just looking for gay sex, they could have sex with one another.

But if they did that, there would be no way to deny to themselves that they are gay. Only by making the sex as violent, brutal, and most importantly dominating as possible can they reassure themselves that they are, as it were, the man in the relationship, and therefore not gay at all.

That would be at least a partial explanation of why, time and time again, when men have unchecked power over other men, the Abu Ghraib scenario repeats itself over and over and things always get more and more sexual.

If you want to know the true heart of darkness, that is it : the darkness in the hearts of humanity coupled will power using power to prevent accountability, and the public’s desire to maintain a happier worldview than reality will allow.

Now you understand why I am pro-surveillance.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

By and large, the easy way out… sucks.

But being addicted to it, to the pint where you can’t imagine taking any other route, is even worse.

It’s not hard to see how the easy way out becomes addictive. Laziness is an instinct, despite what some gym teacher types might think. We would be inefficient creatures indeed if we did not have an instinct for conserving effort.

This instinct makes avoiding effort inherently pleasurable. We get a nice buzz of electricity in the reward center of our brains when we successfully avoid “unnecessary” effort.

Throw in an element of feeling clever and smart that you came up with an easier way to do something (or avoid doing), and you have a recipe for addiction right there. Two kinds of reward means twice as addictive.

Then add in a third reward : relief of fear or panic. If the effort involved, even in something extremely minor, is also something which causes panic in you, then escaping the situation will make you feel like you just escaped a predator.

And our wonderfully plastic minds are perfectly capable of increasing our tendency to panic in order to get those three rewards. There you are, feeling efficient, smart, and relieved, and even proud of yourself, when all you have really done is reinforced the behaviour pattern that is ruining your life.

When you always, compulsively, take the easiest way out of a situation, you become a very weak and fearful person. Your list of options in life gets smaller and smaller with every easy way out you take, and soon you are effectively almost immobile because your addiction has hollowed you our and made you blind both to the damage you are doing to yourself and the possibilities that lie outside your proscribed low-panic area of comfort.

The easy way out of the situation is rarely ever the best choice. It precludes you actually dealing with situations, only escaping them, and so your problems only get worse over time and, of course, the worse they get, the more you want to escape them and the worse you get at actually dealing with them.

And you have to ask yourself : why am I looking for a way out all the time anyhow? What’s wrong with staying in? Surely there has got to be things out there that are worth staying in for. Only a fool would think that they can somehow know enough about the world to say that there is nothing worth sticking around for.

The truth is that it is the addiction that tells you that nothing is worth the cost of avoiding or even just delaying taking that easy way out exit. As long as you believe that, the addiction remains in your control. You are its prisoner. And if you dare to start looking outside those prison walls, it will enforce its will via fear.

But think about it. What is so bad about staying in? It’s not like you are trapped. The easy way out is still there. You could stay in the situation just to see if maybe it gets better. Maybe it won’t seem so scary if you just hang around. Maybe you will start to get curious. Maybe you will find your motivation to go forward.

And could it really be true that no situation is worth the cost? Not even extremely wonderful ones? Winning a million bucks? Meeting your favorite celebrity? Having the exact kind of sex that you have always wanted? Nothing?

Would you really turn down situations if they involved staying in an uncomfortable or scary situation for longer than you would like when there is an easy way to escape the whole thing?

No, right? So we have found that some things really are worth the cost of sticking around. It’s just a matter of degree.

Now think of those wonderful things, and imagine them happening. You’re in no danger… you are perfectly safe. It is just an exercise of the imagination.

Imagine them happening in as much detail as you can. It will help you to feel like it is a real possibility. Imagine them, then treasure the memory of that experience.

You will begin to get curious about the world. It doesn’t matter how probable the thing you imagined is, all that matters is believing that it is possible. That will provide you with the motivation to explore your life as it is now, and find possibilities that your addiction did not let you see before now.

Even finding one little thing that makes your life a little happier will do wonders for your outlook. You will begin to believe that there really IS happiness out there for you to find, and that if you just keep looking for it, you will find it.

And when the addiction senses it is dying and fights back with the fear and panic that has served it so well in the past, do not fight the fear. Fighting it only makes it stronger.

Instead, let the fear pass through you. Offer it absolutely no resistance. Let it pass through you like a crowd through the sky. And when it has passed through you, it will be gone… and you will still be there.

You can kill your addiction to the easy way out. It won’t be easy, but once you have the tools, victory is inevitable. Every time you hang in there and survive the panic without taking the easy way out, you will grow stronger and the addiction will grow weaker. Do this, and you can murder that evil addiction.

Soon, you will be able to look upon your addiction with amused pity. Oh, there’s that silly old addiction again, trying to scare me. What was once a mighty demon is now no more than a cranky kitten. You can keep it as a pet.

Don’t get trapped by the easy way out. Believe that there are things out there that make fighting the addiction worthwhile.

And someday, you will be able to leave the proscribed life behind.

I will talk to all of you nice folks again tomorrow.

Basically, it’s because we don’t know shit about probabilities and it makes us superstitious.

We all do it, or at the very least, all of us who do not live in small towns that are smug about how safe they are. We leave the home, we lock the door. To do anything else is simply unthinkable. If we come home to find the door unlocked, we panic. Maybe there’s a burglar in there RIGHT NOW!

This is true even if we clearly remember neglecting to lock the door on the way out. We are convinced that if we do not lock our doors every time, we WILL get robbed.

And if we find that open door and it was someone else who forgot to lock it, we freak out like that person had left a loaded gun in your child’s playpen. You idiot, they could have robbed us blind! And if they forgot to lock it at night, it’s even worse. They could have murdered us in our sleep.

Some people even lock the doors while they are home, and awake. That is how bad this paranoia has gotten.

But what is it we think is going to happen? What are we so afraid of? What exactly is the sequence of events we think will lead to us being burgled if we don’t lock our doors?

First off, how does a potential thief even know your door is unlocked? Unless they were there at the exact moment when you left and watched intently to see if you locked the door or not, the only way to find out that your door is unlocked is to go around checking doors, and that kind of thing tends to attract attention.

And what is the thief doing in your neighborhood anyhow? Despite what we seem to think, there are not gangs of criminals continuously circulating every neighbor like hungry wolves, just waiting for the first sign of weakness so they can strip your home barer than a well picked carcass.

And really, while nobody wants to lose their hard earned stuff, it’s not the end of the world.

Sure, breaking and entering does legit happen. But like all crime, it is extremely rare. You are far more likely to get in an auto accident than be the victim of random crime, and yet we act and think like our homes and our possessions are under constant threat of being violated.

Where does this superstitious belief in personal danger come from? And can we free ourselves of it? Should we?

I think this belief has several sources. The first and most obvious is the media. Crime might not pay, but crime sells. We are constantly bombarded with exaggerated stories of crime. Some of these stories are true, but even they are distorted for maximum impact by a sensationalistic news media.

But the vast majority of them are fictional. And here’s the funny thing about human nature : if you see enough of something, even if you know it’s fictional, you start to believe it is true. Sure, an individual instance of fictional crime has a tiny impact compared to the real thing, but if you multiply that tiny impact by thousands of instances of seeing crime in some form or another in the media, you can see how it can seep into the public consciousness and convince you that crime is rampant.

But why does that world view appeal to us? What is the draw of crime stories? What would cause us to actually prefer the version of reality in which crime threatens everyone constantly?

For one, it’s more exciting than the boring truth that most of us lead extremely safe and secure lives free of and serious danger, and while that is very good and a monumental and unparalleled achievement in human civilization, it can also get pretty boring, and thinking we are surrounded by crime and mayhem livens things up a little.

I think it goes deeper than that, though. I think there is a deep animal need that belief in crime’s prevalence satisfies. We are not programmed for safety. We are programmed to be vigilant, alert, and ready to defend ourselves at a moment’s notice. That is how our predecessors survive. The alert, paranoid, vigilant cave dwellers survived the night, and the ones who let they guard down were tomorrow’s sabertooth shit.

This is so deeply ingrained in us that we cannot handle the idea of actual safety. Part of us, at least, has to believe that there is something out there in the darkness, ready to take us down, or the world simply stops making sense to us. So when the world refuses to provide us with real wolves at the door, we are compelled to invent them.

That is the real force behind our strong cultural belief in crime. The simple act of locking our doors satisfies the part of us that cannot handle the concept of safety. It is also the force behind scapegoating, be it individuals or groups. We simply have to believe that there is a threat out there, one we can confront and control.

We are incapable of believing anything else.

It doesn’t matter that you could probably leave your door unlocked for a decade without anything bad happening. Locking that door is a ritual, not a practical measure. It is a bit of modern magic that makes us feel safe against a danger that lies mostly within our semi-civilized monkey brains.

I claim no exemption from this. I would find it wrenchingly difficult to knowingly walk away from an empty apartment with an unlocked door. I’m the smartass quoting statistics and saying how irrational our attitudes are, and yet I share those exact same attitudes and can’t imagine being otherwise.

And for the record, I am not saying that we should all stop locking our doors. The risk is tiny, but so is the effort. It’s like getting meteor insurance for a dollar a year. Sure, you will probably never us it, but it’s so cheap that you might as well.

I just want people to understand that what they are doing is based on superstition, not reality, and while locking your door at night is one thing, basing your worldview and your politics on these imaginary demons is another.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

Please share this around.