My impression is that on eway to solve the pain and confusison to which we are often heirs is to assert self-rightness and other-wrongness based on some really idiosyncratic personal view which noone else could ever have anyway, let alone be better than you at.

This of course leads to smugness, self-superiority, and the wearying assertions of my-group vs your-group which are such a disservice to the specias in toto.

These secret calculations about secret reasons for being better -- which mousethief has really started to expose with his "cat among the pigeons" opener -- are the core of our committment to stupidity and domination, and perhaps ultimately the core cause of human violence in many case -- if we weren't so busy being right and righter we could probably sit and communicate, learn what it is to be human in other shoes than our own, and even transcend our physical limitations to some degree.

Sigh.

A.