George Carlin - Extreme Human Behavior
Humans do some really interesting things.
Like besides killing ourselves, we also kill eachother – murder. And we're the only ones who do that, by the way. Humans are the only species on earth who deliberately kill members of a species for personal gain. Or pleasure. Sometimes it's just fun. We're also the only species who deliberately kill members of another species for personal gain. Or pleasure – that's what hunters do. They kill for pleasure. That's us, human beings – interesting folks. Murderers.Here's an interesting form of murder we came up with – assassination. You know what's interesting about assassination? Well, not only does it change those popularity polls in a big fucking hurry, but it's also interesting to notice who it is who we assassinate. Do you ever stop to see who it is, who it is we kill? It's always people who have told us to live together in harmony and try to love one another. Jesus, Gandhi, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Malcom X, John Lennon. They all said: try to live together peacefully. BAM! Right in the fucking head. Apparently we're not ready for that. That's difficult behaviour for us. We're too busy thinking around, sitting around, trying to think up ways to kill each other. Here's one we came up with, it's efficient too. Genocide. You know. Kill large numbers of people just because they don't look like you, they don't talk like you and they don't have the same kind of hats you do. You ever notice that any time there's two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they are wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important. But any time there's a genocide there are always mass graves. Every time we kill some dictator and go marching into his country we always find mass graves. Thousands and thousands of dead bodies of people that the dictator killed. And everybody over here gets horrified: Oh, mass graves, mass graves! Well, shit, what's a guy supposed to do with a couple thousand people he just killed? Dig sepparate holes? Fuck that shit. It's labour intensive, get real! The whole idea of killing a large number of people at one time in one place is convenience. The efficiency. Throw them in the fucking hole. Look at it this way. At least the dictator had the decency to throw a little dirt on them. Give the guy some credit. Dictator's a busy man. Got a lot on his mind. Like trying to figure out who's planning to kill *him*. So he can pick them up, put them in prison and *torture* them. Here's another one of our interesting heart-warming behaviours we've come up with somewhere along the way – TORTURING each other. You want to hear a really cool torture that the Romans invented? They also used it as a form of capital punishment, it's *really* creative. They would take the guy in question, stuff him in a burlap sack, seal the sack up real tight and throw it in the river. But, and here's the creative part, inside the sack, with the guy, they would put a dog, a monkey, and a snake. Okay? A dog, a monkey, and a snake. That's fucking creative! Imagine being inside a burlap sack, underwater, in the dark, sitting next to a drowning monkey. Think he'd be moving around a little bit? The dog would be going apeshit, we know that. And the snake? Well, he'd probably be getting curious about what all the activity was inside the sack. He might do anything. Whatever he did would probably involve venom and his teeth. You know what you'd be doing? You'd be praying to God that the snake bit the monkey and the dog ate the snake. Praying. Then it would be just you and the dog, man and his best friend, drowning together. Maybe before you die, you can teach him a few tricks. Roll over and play dead wouldn't be too difficult, would it? Just a thought, just a playful thought. I assume you're noticing that all these activities I'm mentioning: murder, torture, genocide – these are all things human beings do. Not animals, those creatures we feel superior to. This is us. Here's another one of our spiritually uplifting activities. We don't do this one much anymore, but it used to be really big. Human sacrifice. I miss that. The Aztecs loved human sacrifice and they were good at it. Well they got a lot of practice. For instance, around the year 1500 the Aztecs sacrificed 80 000 people in one ceremony. Okay? 80 000 people in one ceremony. You know what the occasion was? They were opening a new temple. Nothing like religion for a little entertainment, huh? Especially that old time religion. Do you know how the Aztechs went about their sacrificing? Here's how they would do it. They would do it right in public, right in front of everybody. Big town, beautiful city square. Twenty-thirty thousand people looking on. They would take the guy, lay him on an altar, cut his chest open, pull his heart out, hold it up in the air while it was still beating. Got that? Cut his chest open, pull his heart out, hold it up in the air while it was still beating. You know what you call that? Theatre. That is fucking theatre. And although the procedure may have been a little too crude to be considered the first by-pass surgery, it could easily be seen as an early form of organ donor program. The Aztecs, human beings, just like us. Not too long ago, five hundred years. Kolumbus had already landed. This was just south of here – Mexico. And by the way those hearts didn't go to waste. Did not go to waste. Because right after the ceremony, the royal family, naturally, would enjoy another one of our amusing acitivities – cannibalism. Imagine that – chowing down on another human being. You have got to be all out of beef jerky. You have got to be really fucking hungry. But it happens, doesn't it. Still happens to this day. Bunch of people, stranded in the wilderness, run out of Pop Tarts, got to eat something. Might as well be Steve. And how do you decide who to eat first? How do you decide who's first on the barbeque rack? Do you pick on the little guy, because he's skinny and he can't fight back or do you all gang up on the body-builder because he's got a lot of steaks and chops on him? These are things human beings have to consider. One more of these charming diversions of ours – necrophilia. Now there's a hobby for you. Fucking a corpse. Takes a special kind of guy, don't you think. But it happens, it happens. More than you might think. It happens among humans, animals don't do that. Animals don't fuck their dead. A rat will do a lot of gross things but it will not fuck a dead rat. It wouldn't even occur to him. Only a human being would *think* to fuck someone who just died. We have got to be the most interesting creatures on the planet. And then we wonder why a UFO doesn't just land and say hello. You know the best thing about necrophilia? You don't have to bring flowers. Ususally they're already there. Isn't that nice? It's nice. It's convenient. Human beings will do anything, anything. I am convinced. That's why, when all those beheadings started in Iraq, it didn't bother me. A lot of people here were horrified, “ Whaaaa, beheadings! ” What, are you fucking surprised? Just one more form of extreme human behaviour. Besides, who cares about some mercenary civilian contractor from Oklahoma who gets his head cut off? Fuck them. Hey Jack, you don't want to get your head cut off? Stay the fuck in Oklahoma. They aren't cutting off heads in Oklahoma, as far as I know. But I do know this: you strap on a gun and go strutting around some other mens' country you'd better be ready for some action, Jack. You'd better be ready for some action. People are touchy about that sort of thing. And let me ask you this while I have you good clean Americans here. This is a moral question, not rhetorical, I am looking for the answer: what is the moral difference between cutting off one guy's head, or two, or three, of five or ten – and dropping a big bomb on a hospital and killing a whole bunch of sick kids? Has anybody in authority given you an explanation of the difference? I have not got an email on this, haven't got a post card, no fucking instant messange, nothing. Now, in case you're wondering why I have a certain interest, or fascination lets call it, with torture and beheadings and all of these things I've mentioned, is because each of these items reminds me in life, every time one of them occurs, reminds me over and over again what beasts we human beings really are. When you get right down to it, when you get right *down* to it, human beings are nothing more than ordinary jungle beasts. Savages. No different from the Cro Magnon people who lived twenty five thousand years ago in the plasticine forests eating crubs off rotten logs. No different. Our DNA hasn't changed substantially in a houndred thousand years. We're still operating out of the lower brain. The reptilian brain. Fight of flight. Kill or be killed. We like to think we've evolved and advanced because we can build a computer, fly an airplane, travel underwater, we can write a sonet, paint a painting, compose an opera. But you know something? We're barely out of the jungle on this planet. Barely out of the fucking jungle. What we are, is semi-civilized beasts, with baseball caps and automatic weapons.