[Part I] Existential Crisis: Defending the Hate-filled

I am fortunate that I don't suffer from chronic major depression.

This doesn't mean that I never get depressed.

For example, I once had a pet cat that was very dear to me. You know, people get attached to pets, this isn't news. But even as a long-time girlfriend was dumping me and I was losing all of my friends because of an ugly breakup and me falling to pieces in the emotional wreckage of aftermath, the cat was there, and my animal companion didn't care about who allegedly did what to whom or he-said-she-said. The cat still demanded cat food and a lap to sleep on after dinner, and even as I learned to harden my heart, I still had to clean the cat box, and to remember to praise the cat for her frequent gifts of dead mice.

I got into a situation where I couldn't really care for her properly, and the neighbors took her on. Yet anytime I was at home, here would come kitty, looking to talk a little cat talk and get the inside of her ears cleaned.

One night I made it home after a bout of major partying and I was sitting around outside trying to recover, and wondering why I hadn't seen the cat. The neighbor pops over and says, more or less, "...and oh by the way, your cat died."

Now that made me pretty depressed. It wasn't totally a shock, the cat had some sort of heart problem that was pretty well fixed but we all knew that she probably wasn't going to live a full span. Still... it took maybe a month to sink in that the cat would never come strolling over to meow and flop over on her back to get her belly rubbed. And for a few minutes I was really sad and tears came and went and as the tears dried I decided that I should be happy that she was in kitty heaven, so to speak.

Letting go of bereavement -- hey, even after I dumped the cat, so to speak, she still liked me and came calling, so of course I felt bad -- is an essential stage in emotional recovery. Bereavement isn't depression, though they have the same symptoms and feeling. Bereavement is something from which people usually recover. Yet, you are depressed as hell, and rightly so. You lost something near and dear, and you will never get it back.

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I suppose I am a victim of instincts.

Dogs, in general, have an instinct to bark. Cats, in general, have an instinct to pounce on things that move in a certain way. These instincts are useful to people and so we have adopted these species; they live among us, as members of the family in most cases. Yet it isn't all the simple pragmatism -- the calculus of expense and benefit -- that causes us to herd sheep or cattle.

Some cats have special instincts for which they were bred. Siamese cats, for example, have been bred for thousands of years to be extremely aggressive to strangers and to like to sit in high places. In the temples where they were bred, they spent much of their day crouched in niches carved over the doorways, and if anyone they didn't know were to pass unescorted through that doorway, the cats would reach down and hook the strangers' eyes out. In the modern day, the American breed of siamese cat is bred to be less aggressive, yet they're still very "talkative". And they still expect you to talk back; when they ask "who goes there", they expect a response. The American Siamese Cat differs from the traditional Thai Temple Cat in that it isn't bred and trained to go clawingly ballistic when it hears the wrong password.

My last name is an Americanization of a German "craft name". Much in the same way that the English "Smith" is a family name deriving from the trade a family followed for generations -- the trade of blacksmith -- a Hardtmann was someone in the family tradition of making hardware, things such as hinges or hasps. Usually this hardware was very useful stuff and it could make the difference between eating and being clothed, or starving naked. We made traps.

As a family, we did it well enough to make a good living, for generations. As naturally as it comes to a Siamese to sit in a high place and demand that you identify yourself, it comes naturally to me to make things that block unauthorized access, or catch anything that tries it.

Hence, I have a patent for software that does both.

It can sit in high places, like a Siamese cat, to metaphorically compare a cyberspace creation's operation to a real-world animal. And if you don't answer it correctly, it will hook your eyes out, and howl like a demon as it does it.

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But for whom, exactly, did I create a high-security toolkit?

The main crew that has much use for it is the military-industrial complex... and as the natural world evidences a traditional natural enmity between dogs and cats, the human social world evidences a traditional natural enmity between jocks and nerds. We despise them because they like to beat us up, and they despise us because when we get tired of that, we outsmart them with traps.

This has had some unfortunate Darwininian consequences.

Rather than breeding a more peaceful and tolerant jock, this has only bred a smarter and more paranoid jock.

The repercussions of that have also tended to breed a stronger and more aggressive nerd.

Now imagine the strange offspring of the unholy unions of those two clans.

And those last, my friends, are my customers.

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The modern US is a culture which historically depended on having a rather large military. Yet with the end of the Second World War, the role of infantry and even cavalry has faded to insignificance when compared to the role of technology. For many years, the overwhelming power that could be brought to bear in conflicts between nation-states was a strong deterrent to militarism, and militarism traditionally has expressed itself in the form of a large standing army and military logistical and armament systems. Yet in an age where large depots and large armies only make appealingly large targets for intercontinental ballistic missiles, the forms of militarism have had to evolve. Thus, even in the midst of a rapidly changing war which has thus far lasted about twice as long as the Second World war, we have one of the lowest percentages of population under arms of any large nation.

In past times, it was necessary to have a very large percentage of the population be "jocks", or physically fit males characterized by innate aggressive tendencies and strong peer-bonding instincts. Now, that population has very little to do in terms of the physicalities for which they evolved, and the culture of peer-bonding in large groups seeking aggression against similar groups is either changing to challenge these instincts and capabilities in other ways, or we tend to call them "gangs". Fortunately most such persons are fairly easily distracted into athletics, whether by active participation, or vicariously through the media.

Indeed, we have become a society to oriented to the technological, and frequently to the invididually studious. The ability to create something new -- in a society already chock-full of, and built upon, good ideas -- is usually well-rewarded. Culture has changed a bit, though not much. Does Bill Gates get respect for being Bill Gates? No. Bill Gates gets respect because he's filthy rich and can pay people to make sure that he gets respect... from most people. We nerds respect him for his technical accomplishments, but moreso we respect him for promoting an industry that keeps us working, and working for and with our own kind.

Yet I'd like to see how much respect he'd get if he walked, incognito, into some jock-filled "sports bar".

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This is the sort of respect I get, which is to say, scant at best, every time I walk out of my house. My life is lived as if I were Bill Gates in a jock bar, outnumbered by aggressive physically-fit individuals who operate as a group, with their group positions and rankings constantly being tested and adjusted by the human social equivalent of a pack of wolves biting each other in the ass until they can figure out who is "alpha". Woe to the poor housecat tossed into such a scene, and woe is me.

Yet it would be even more woeful if I could not understand the language, and if the pack of jocks was armed and invading in the uniform of another country, so when I make traps for jocks I am basically stuck selling them to "my" jocks to use against "their" jocks.

The absurdity of this strikes me to the core: Why do I bother?

Because it's my instinct?

It's not because I think they'll maybe accept me in their sports bar. I may be having an existential crisis but I'm not going to actually delude myself.