entity that disregards its consciousness or awareness. In this essay,
we'll explore some of the levels of cruelty: how it happens, how it's
defined, and what we can do to help end cruelty and enhance compassion
in the world. Cruelty exists in three distinct realms: cruelty against
mankind, cruelty against animals, and finally, cruelty against nature.
Let's start with cruelty against mankind, in which one individual may
be cruel to another for a variety of reasons, usually relating to
gaining personal control over resources (food, money, etc.) or other
people. This concept of personal gain is an important factor in
understanding human cruelty, since individuals are usually only cruel
to others because they gain something from it. In fact, this is
designed into our behavior and has been carried through our ancestry
for hundreds of thousands of years. Picture this: two cavemen are
sitting around a fire at the end of the day. One spent hours gathering
berries, and the other has nothing. The caveman with nothing can
attack the caveman with the berries, take his fruit, and be all the
more successful for it, at least in terms of survival and control of
resources.
From an anthropological point of view, there is an incentive for
deceit, theft, and even harming other individuals, as long as it
results in some sort of personal gain. In fact, we see this across
virtually all species, but especially in those that are most closely
related to humans, such as primates.
Today, we see the very same thing happening when one nation attacks
another nation in order to control its resources. Attacking a nation
to take control of its oil supply is essentially the same as beating a
caveman over the head and stealing his berries. It just goes to show
how little we've actually advanced over the years.
This brings us to a salient point: ending cruelty requires moving past
our ancestral roots, and past the behaviors that are programmed into
us because they once helped us succeed in an uncivilized world. Today
we have to recognize that cruelty is not acceptable in the
international community. It is not acceptable to attack and kill other
human beings for any reason, and certainly not to take control of
their resources in order to enrich ourselves.
Likewise, it is not acceptable to exploit poverty-wage labor in
third-world countries in order to enrich corporations and their CEOs
in developed nations. But this is no anti-trade rant: free trade is
essential for lifting poor nations out of poverty, but only when
combined with mechanisms that respect the sanctity of human life such
as safe working conditions, living wages, and a system of recognizing
private property ownership for the poor. Read "The Mystery of Capital"
by Hernando DeSoto, which is among the most important economic books
of the last 100 years, to learn the real reasons why free trade has
failed to provide economic freedoms for underdeveloped nations (and
what we can do to change that).
Beyond war and economics, we also see cruelty in the world of
medicine. Conventional medicine has a long and sordid history of using
human beings for medical experiments, even right here in the United
States. In fact, news recently surfaced about a hospital that had been
using retarded children in radiation experiments.
[link='http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-08,GGLD:en&q=retarded+children+radiation+experiments+hospital']Click
here for a Google search on this topic.[/link]
This and many other medical experiments have been conducted on living,
breathing people right here in the United States. This is one of the
most egregious forms of cruelty, in that it is a harmful action taken
against these people, and that it refuses to recognize the
consciousness, spirit or awareness of these individuals. Just because
someone cannot speak in words that we understand, or communicate with
us in the manner in which we are used to communicating, doesn't mean
that they don't feel pain, fear, pleasure or love. Thus, these medical
experiments are a horrifying form of cruelty, and many continue to
this day (behind closed doors, of course).
Please read more at <a
href="http://www.naturalnews.com/006319_cruelty_to_animals.html">here</a>.
P.S.: Some active links present in this article can be viewed and read
at <a href="http://www.naturalnews.com/006319_cruelty_to_animals.html">read
more</a>.
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