Hiya...
Thank you for posting this. I think it is an important documentation of the experiences faced.
I only have one "rebuttal"-- and that sounds like the wrong word here. Perhaps observation of a different perspective is a better term.
He also says that the guys who surrounded him live in a different world. We relate to each other in a civil manner. They are not civilized. They are animals. I agree.
I disagree with the notion that they live in a "different world."
The world is what it is. And we all share it. Some see civility as the "normal" state of man while others see savagery as the "normal" state of man.
Indeed, this was a prevailing question among philosophers and artists throughout the Elizabethian and Victorian eras. In these periods, the notion of the "Savage Garden" was born. Shakespeare's Othello utilized it as a theme.
Why is this an important question?
Well, the question was whether the nature of man was savagery and civillization was an artificial construct imposed on our nature. Or was civillization the nature progression of our instincts and savagery a sometimes necessary fuction of man when extrordinary situations required it.
I don't know that this question was ever conclusively answered, but somewhere down the line, we just stopped asking the question.
So why am I even mentioning this?
Well, as I see it, savagery IS part of mankind's nature. So is society. But not society on large scale. As anthropologists have observed in primates and paleotologists have discovered about early man, our societies function more fluidly in smaller groups. In Cro-Magon society, rarely did a "tribe" exceed 30 members in a single living arrangement.
As our societies have gotten larger, we see more and more "fringe" or disaffected elements. We see more who seek to assert some power over thier environment in a society where they may perhaps feel little "control." This is when societal elements collide.
Really, society on scale is a novel concept in our world today. Civility is often disingenuous and used as a tool of personal gain. Civilization-- in the form of government-- in our world is more often in the form of a tyranny than it is a democracy or republic. By this, we can see MANY current examples of where the entire notion of society is a fuction of one person or a small group of persons gaining a disproportionate level of control over others and the wealth and freedom that goes along with it.
We, in the USA-- and in other "civilized" nations-- are largely unaware of the nature of the majority of the world unless we make an attempt to make ourselves aware. Really, countries like the US become pinnacles of movements towards Order and civility. They are "bubbles" in a stream. Even so, those "bubbles" are not without thier grease spots.
Even more ordered societies are really only ideals to live up to that are experiencing at the moment a certain degree of success. And success is a fragile thing when the tendancy towards chaos always pulls against it.
My point to all of this?
Those people do not live in another world. They live in our world. Globally speaking -- and sometimes locally-- we live in The Savage Garden. But even the Savage Garden has its flowers as well as its briars.
-- John
