The Last Days of John Allen Chau
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
> Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands’ spell as Maurice Vidal Portman, a minor English aristocrat and amateur anthropologist who was made Royal Navy officer in charge of the islands in 1879 when he was just 19. For two decades, Portman made ceaseless expeditions to find the various Andaman tribes, who he would kidnap and transport to Port Blair. Portman was an enthusiastic practitioner of “race science,” believing that intelligence could be gauged by measuring a subject’s cranium with calipers. Poor science cannot explain Portman’s additional recording of the size of islanders’ penises, breasts, and testicles; his evaluation of their “lustfulness” (which he equated with willfulness); and his photographs of naked tribesmen in classical poses. But his ambivalence about whether his subjects lived or died is explained by the view, common in Europe at the time, that the beings before him were so distantly of his species, they were best categorized as fauna. “They sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents,” Portman wrote of six Sentinelese he took to Port Blair. “This expedition was not a success. ... We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”
I cannot even begin to imagine how terrified those people must have been. To be kidnapped and then poked and prodded by a bunch of instruments you've never seen before by people you can't communicate with or understand. The way they were treated was truly barbaric.
My first thought is how casual 'belief' or 'faith' in moderate Christians is what led JAC down this route. When society believes that not knowing God is a path to eternal damnation, then is it that surprising if someone with empathy and ambition makes it their mission to fix?
Obviously there is also a bit of the 'messiah' complex going on there - probably reinforced by other Christians and IG followers.
I was also thinking about how the dad felt, when he tried to talk his son out of what he was doing, but couldn't argue against the religious beliefs he'd previously taught him? At that point, if I were in his shoes, would I hold my hands up and say my faith had all been a big mistake, it was convenient to getting me where I am, but it doesn't really make sense. Or maybe I'd take the tack of 'don't be so extreme - be more moderate', something that really wasn't going to fly with JAC.
Also, as a father, I can't imagine raising a baby boy, a child, who becomes a young adult and then watching him take this path. The article made me think about how a father is a role-model to their children. His father went through a difficult time with his career and JAC was witness to this. I lead a stressful, busy life, I wonder what affect that will have on my kids outlook?
Why not calling it mental illness at this point...
Almost no one is intentionally evil. Most people somehow or another justify whatever they are doing as right. I'd imagine most low level nazi party members thought they were making a hard decision to do what was right.
He did what he thought was right and luckily he got killed as opposed to surviving to make contact causing serious damage to the tribe.
He is the embodiment of evil to me, not because he wanted to be evil but because he was too stupid or intellectually dishonest to realize that what he thought was right was deeply damaging to other people. In this sense he puts himself in the company of most horrendous people in history.
Between born psychopaths who seemingly can't even empathize with current or future victims https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-about-kids/..., and criminal rational choice theory http://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/criminology/theorie... which posits that even most of a criminal's willful acts are rational given their circumstance and motivations, I don't think there's a tremendous amount of room left for "true evil".
I can't help wondering if history will look back on most of what we see today as "willful evils", instead as "misunderstood tragedies"... see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman whose tower sniping was initiated by... a brain tumor.
The truest evil IMHO is that committed by people who believe they are doing good (but perhaps are "making the tough decision"): see the Nazis.
My argument is that from a utilitarian perspective, people with good intentions doing [bad, evil, unethical, whatever] cause much more human suffering and misery than those people whose intent is evil and yet they so often are given a pass on their actions.
And then either way, you could make this argument like: "why did person x choose to be evil where as person y chose to be good." That seems almost more arbitrary an likely to be biological from a detached perspective. I'd much rather judge people on their ability to deeply introspect and evaluate the world and come to good conclusions.
Although this kind of explanation can and are often used to apologize for bad behavior, it can be valuable to learn the mechanisms by which people are pushed toward those kinds of behavior. Learning what encourages people to commit certain crimes in our own society, for example, can help us reduce the incidence of said crimes.
Instead of just pointing fingers at religious fanatics and blaming them for everything, we could do something more constructive and try to reach out to troubled kids when their dad loses his medical license (which is what happened to this particular guy) so that they don't need to seek refuge in a fantasy project. That's the kind of insight that a detailed post-mortem can bring, both in technology and in the society.
The most fulfilled people in life are probably wired more like JAC than anything else. Like if he applied that level of belief to a startup as he did to his faith I imagine he’d be wildly successful by now.
Once you throw eternal heaven or oblivion/hell into the equation, then no matter how terrible the method, if you convert even a single person, it was worth it.
This always puzzled me - how can good Christians do nothing while (according to Christianity) countless souls are lost?
But, I'm haunted by the parallels of En-mei, who turned out to be no less subject to the stress of finding a mate than those of us in the more modern world. If there is a hidden message there that is trying to say that we are all fanatics like JAC, well, it's an interesting thought.
Along the same lines, the characterization of En-mei as selfish and manipulative seems unfair. His story is a heightened version of a common one: guy grows up in a small town, gets in some trouble, leaves to see a bit of the big world, then goes back home because -- while the big world has some interesting stuff -- the small town makes more sense to him.
Joking aside, we might be fanatic about some things, but if we knew of an incredibly violent group of programmers using notepad, I think I'd pass up attempting to teach them vim.
What I don't understand is the dismay felt by readers for the loss of this ignorant and closed mind man. Most men lives life of quiet desperation. There is no meaning but that which we make and this (to me) foolish man live the life that he wanted.
Hitler also had a dream. Sadly he was not killed fast enough.
So before you die following your dream, you should run a sanity check on it.