Nature and Nurture

Ponder a dog fight, or a bear baiting, or a football game, or a cockfight.

Sure, the participants could very well do exactly the same in nature. Dogs in a world without rings, in a world without Michael Vicks and baying hicks and betting and breeding and dying for sport, will very well fight to the death. I'm not one of those dumb fucks who thinks that lawlessness and wilds will result in some Jehovah's Witness pamphlet, hazily drawn lion sitting next to Hallmark-ready lamb.

But maybe they'll do something else, too. At least, I think, they'll have the option.

See, bears and hounds without torture and enforced starvation may very well leave each other alone. They could even exist amicably. Sure, nature ain't a Disney flick, but strange bedfellows are hardly exclusively human. But in the coercion of the ring, they have only so many options. The incentives are rigged, the outcomes fixed. They don't even have the comfort of the prisoner's dilemma. I imagine that, were dogs capable of going on strike, they'd be drowned, as all strikers are drowned when their owners wield ultimate power.

Anyway, ponder the difference between simulation and reality. How much difference in options can be found between the two? Where has humanity improved upon nature? Surely, there are examples. And surely, there are examples in which we have codified the worst, and the forced nature of our entertainments--particularly where we lust for the dangerous and unpredictable--is where I find my deepest loathing for my species. We are a race that has managed to fuck up even rough sex and violence.