There’s a Psych101 example that just about everybody who experiences college in America would find familiar, the Lifeboat Question. Setup for it is, you’re on a lifeboat, with absolutely no hope of rescue, You have passengers on board whose needs exceed the supply of fresh water and food. You have a baby, an elderly professor, a laborer, … that kind of thing.
Then you’re told to group up and discuss who you would kill. Drown, Toss from the lifeboat.
The discussions get long and involved but somehow a few basic facts never get mentioned.
Like:
The one person who NOBODY tosses off the boat is himself.
If there’s no hope of rescue or landfall with the extra person on board, there’s not really any chance without him either.
If you’re in a lifeboat then you’re in a shipping lane, unless every vessel on the sea suddenly vanished, you’re very likely to have one come near.
If every ship on the ocean has vanished, then so, apparently, has civilization.
You and the fellow lifeboaters would be, as far as you know, the only living humans left.
It would be up to you to restore any semblance of civilized behavior.
Yet to do it, according to the TRICK question, you would first have to make a human sacrifice.
What kind of a sick society can you build on that foundation?
Hint: it’s all around us.
Right now the debate in Budget Committees, especially those in the House and thus, top heavy with so-called “conservatives”, is centered on who to toss out of the lifeboat first.
I say “first” because that sort of thing is damnably hard to stop once it gets started.
Their figures and calculations all pointedly leave in THEIR source of income, the Military Industrial complex which is the only driving force left for Capitalism. They’re not tossing themselves out of the lifeboat.
It’s more like get in the canoes and take grandma out, put her on an ice-floe and smear her all over with seal meat to draw the polar bears.
Then row away with all the villagers chanting traditional Leave-grandma-to-die songs.
