YOU NAME IT

"A PORTAL INTO SELFISHNESS"

There are many ways to describe one of the most vicious manslaughters in history.

The great war, the war to end all wars, the war without any bad guys, the war which inspired your favorite video game (Add me on bf1 :D), or the one that banned gas attacks from warfare. (I wish I was good at fart jokes...) But no matter how you describe it, we all get the same picture more or less.

World war 1

Considered by many to be one of the ugliest and one of the most depressing wars in history.

Many and many died, and illness plagued the trenches like never before. More died to infectious diseases than they did to bullets. It also gave birth to one of the deadliest diseases in the history of mankind.

And it is really, really interesting to know how it started. One thing led to another, without anyone realizing what consequences their action bore. A chain of events turned the death of a man to the death of millions, like the butterfly effect.

So, rewind the tape of history a 100 and some years back. The Austrian-Hungarian empire ruled over the eastern regions of Europe, and some weren't particularly okay with how they went about ruling things. One of them was this wrongheaded young guy from Serbia with his group of friends. They decided they don't like the monarchy anymore and planned to assassinate the prince of Austria, Franz Ferdinand. (I don't have time explaining how the whole thing went down, go watch a YouTube video or documentary or something.) On June 28th of 1914, Gavrilo Princip mortally wounded the prince and his wife, Sophie.

That pissed the Austrians so much that they declared war on Serbia, (Why?!) which got countered by The Russian empire, (Why???!!!) that made The German Empire enter the war, which later on dragged The British Empire and the Cowboys into the war as well. (WHY?!?!?!?!??!?!)

Many lives, not only in Europe, were wasted due to an action someone they had never met had done. Kind of a really crappy way to die. (I mean all deaths are crappy, at least in how the public perceives death. But you know what I mean.)

After he did the naughty and killed the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, they sentenced him to solitary confinement. Which is also a crappy way to die. But he died before the end of the war, from Tuberculosis so it was a less crappy way to die than dying on the western front, or in no man's land. (I hope you die while reading this book cause that's the best way to die in my opinion.)

But here's where the monotony of this chapter ends. If he didn't really get to see the results of his action firsthand, and it didn't really affect him in anyway other than him dying in prison, was it really wrong?

If he wasn't around to get hurt by the blast, and died in a fairly good way, was it wrong?

He thought his action would improve his life.

What if all that matters are the benefits that an action delivers to yourself and in a sense "Fuck all the others"?

Do we ever really make any decisions in our lives without thinking about ourselves? Are we ever really selfless? Would you love my mom or do you only love yours cause she's related to you and once breastfed you? If you catch a bullet for someone and sacrifice your life, would you really do that without the thought of the praise you'd get or the heaven you'll go to after the portal? Imagine the most humane, noble thing you've ever done, was it helping an elderly? Rescuing a poor scared animal? Donating to charity? Not letting someone jump off a building to commit suicide? (You spared him from the sweet release of death. How righteous of you.)

What did you do it for? You probably did what you did because of one of the many reasons that would ultimately improve the quality of your life. Be it creating a better world for you to live in, a more comfortable consciousness for you to exist in, a better society for your kids to have children in, or a better internet connection for you to download free porn from.

What is common among all I mentioned is the fact that no matter how much your deed affects other people, or how little or how much it helps them, you wouldn't do it if "You" weren't involved in it. If it didn't bring "You" joy, or the satisfaction of having a whiter career of a lifetime of working as a featherless biped, aka human. So maybe all the difference between "The good guys" and "The assholes" is that their self interest lies somewhere conventionally better, somewhere more accepted. While the bad guys are actually the unfortunately misunderstood who just like the things we deem to be wrong. (Damn that was a hard sentence to write, It drained all my grammatical power. So I sorry am to all of you which have to read that part.)

We all know it would've been a whole lot better if he had gone to the bar the night before and had blacked out, to forget all about the oppression the Austrians had brought onto him. To distract himself from the undeniable doom that was his life.

It's all about distraction baby.

(TO BE CONTINUED)