The Downside to Murder.

And now, a few thoughts on murder:

I pray this victim is a random one.

Murder, I imagine, can be a slippery slope depending on what your underlying motivation is. A soldier, for example, who kills because he or she is either ordered to kill or put into a kill-or-be-killed situation won’t necessarily develop a taste for murder in the same way that someone who murders and reaps a more fulfilling reward.

Scenario one – let’s say you’re extremely uncomfortable in the close proximity of strangers. Let’s say every morning you go for a walk, and every morning this tall lanky doofus walks up behind you and falls in step with you, just a few feet away.

Obviously the first thing that would pop into anyone’s head – your head, my head – is an Official Solicitation for Solution. This is where you simply plug the problem into your brain and ask your brain to work out a solution.

What’s the first, most obvious, easiest solution you can think of? That’s right – cut his f*cking head off and leave him in the gutter. That would be not only the most obvious and easiest solution, it would also guarantee against a recurrence of the situation.

So look what you’ve done – you effectively took action and your world is a better place for it. Right?

Well…yes and no. See, now you’ve gone and taught yourself that MURDER WORKS. So – even though this assface idiot is rotting in hell where he belongs – the world is full of assface idiots. What’s going to happen when you come across another one?

Scenario two – several weeks after your introduction to murder as outlined above, you’re out for your walk and you notice something unusual – a lady whom you recognize as a person who comes out and jogs on her breaks is actually walking. She’s walking. She speeds up when she hears or sees a car approach and her walk breaks into a jog, but then once the car passes she drops back into a slow, slovenly gait.

Obviously this kind of behavior is difficult to tolerate: a woman who wants the world to think she’s jogging when she’s really only walking. Would you grin and bear it if you’d never murdered anyone before? Probably. But what if you’d been successful in not only your first attempt at murder (as outlined above) but also reaped a massive reward for your undertaking?

Spoiler alert: you’re going to chop this bitch’s fucking head off too and leave her in the gutter. NO ONE wants to be out trying to relax and get fresh air and be exposed to someone outright lying to the world. F that.

But now what? You’re practically hooked! You’ve got no reason not to be hooked! You have made multiple dramatic improvements in your life by taking action! Now you’ll never have that goofy bastard (oh, he wears a visor, too – forgot to mention that) walking anywhere near you AND you’ll never have the lying jogging whore dirtying up your sightline.

So what do you do when you’re grocery shopping and someone pushes their cart up behind you and you think they’re maybe a little too close? Maybe you’ll let it slide the first time, but the second time? Let’s face it, you’re gonna pull one of your socks off, you’re gonna take a can of Campbell’s soup, you’re gonna drop said can into said sock, and you’re going to beat that idiot until their skull is shattered into safety glass.

See what happens? Murder causes you to lose the ability to tolerate others, which – in today’s world – is a trait we desperately need to preserve at all costs. People range from irritating shit bags at best to complete failures who are nothing more than a drain on society. There is ALWAYS a reason to off someone, in other words. You need to focus on the reasons to not kill.

Why, you say? Take the above instance. Six months have elapsed since the first murder, so naturally our protagonist has gone further down the rabbit hole that is murder and guess what? Now the entire population of the world is gone and all that remains consists of a) our protagonist, and b) one other dude way over in Kentucky.

Uh oh! Can you say “end of the human race?” Unless Mr. Kentucky is a fertility expert who specializes in growing test tube babies and he’s got a full sack of human eggs, it’s game over.

Further – I would argue that it would take less than a week for Mr. Kentucky to do something that doesn’t sit right with our protagonist.

You ever pulled into a parking lot and even though it’s completely empty, you park at a good distance from the store because you don’t want people around your car? And then as you park, you see another person pull into the lot. That person stays on the complete opposite side of the parking lot and is doing the exact same thing you are: parking away from the front of the store in order to protect his car.

Here is what goes through your head:

[if the car isn’t as nice as yours] “OH GET OFF IT, ASSHOLE, no one wants to park next to your piece of shit Prius. No one’s going to give that hunk of shit a door ding. I’d be more worried about someone keying the whole door off, you hippie piece of shit.”

[if the car is nicer than yours] “OH, OK, RICHIE RICH, way to protect your precious assets, wouldn’t be where you are today if you weren’t always focused on the BOTTOM FUCKING LINE. FUCK YOU, I should slash your tires and teach you there’s more to life than material possessions.”

[regardless of the variety of his car, this is what goes through your head next] “ARRGH why ME, why all these FUCKING PEOPLE have to FLOCK to me like I’m a fucking ASSHOLE MAGNET. Can’t you just fucking STAY AWAY and LEAVE ME IN PEACE??” [at this point you lay your head on the steering wheel and start sobbing.]

So – as illustrated above – even if you’re only being exposed to one person, and even if that person is only guilty of doing that which you are already doing yourself, and even if they’re keeping as far from you as humanly possible – they will still infuriate you.

And there you have it – how murdering a single person can and will lead to the fall of the human race if done in a selfish attempt to make the murderer’s world a better place.

However, just to be clear, I haven’t yet come up with a way to establish with any remote certainty that murder for any of the following reasons will have such an adverse affect on life as we know it:

Money
Food
Revenge
The search to find yourself
Fun
Boredom
Trying to get someone to stop voting just to cancel out your vote
Pure temper tantrum
The punch line to a joke
Population control
Art
Making a political statement
Trying to see if you’re a serial killer
Checking police response times
Wanting to see if Batman is real and if so, would he be for or against what you’re about to do
You have a new poison or weapon you want to try out
You got too pumped listening to heavy metal
Language differences
Road rage
Get out of a test or exam

There's probably loads of other reasons to murder that wouldn't be detrimental to society as a whole.

D.H.