Screams Unheard

Everywhere I go these days, I hear people screaming in pain. You do too, but, perhaps, being sane(er) than me, can ignore the sounds.

I am speaking of children, of course. Here is a challenge - go to a super-market and spend five minutes at the cash registers. You will hear it too. The screams of human beings. Now juxtapose these cries with those of adults - surely, even a single short cry of an adult would sent chills of uneasiness down your spine. But not those of children.

Is it the high pitch? The short stature of the source? Or is it the psychopathic negligence of our brains at recognizing the screams of infants as a sign of suffering?

The very first thing an infant does after birth is let out a frightening scream that only a maniacally callous torturer could take with a delighted smile. When did we become so bludgeoned as to ignore this fact? Somewhere in the politically correct postmodern communication the obvious meaning of screaming became lost and nowadays remains only the retarded husk of wisdom for lactating mothers - crying is the only way for a baby to communicate and have it's needs met. Oh, phew, I was thinking for a second that they actually feel pain and misery but it turns out that they prefer to communicate by screaming. Of course, it would be painfully obvious to everyone that an adult who is capable of communicating only by crying out must have been brought to the brink of madness by sublime agony. The similarity escapes most everyone.

Somehow, ethics had become subverted to allow for the usual doublethink. We know that consciousness develops in babies at around the age of 18 months (in step with the maturing of medial temporal lobes^1,2). This knowledge has allowed a wicked double standard - arguing for the sanctity of human life where necessary, but once this sacred life has become a bawling poop-generating lump, resigning all responsibility for proper care on the grounds that the baby will only be conscious in a year-and-a-half and will remember nothing beforehand anyway. 

While true that most individuals have no episodic memory of them being miserable and utterly dependent on incompetent parents before the age of 18 months or so, emotional memory and conditioning more than make up for this amnesia. The suffering, even never to be consciously recalled, leaves permanent traces on the individual's personality. And I want to make it clear - every single infant on the planet cries hundreds, if not thousands, of times before becoming conscious of the suffering. And then the true horror begins.

This sad state can be explained with the Darwinian method, of course. We are the sort of primate that finds our offspring to elicit caring and their cries, while unsettling, call not for alarm, but an optimistic: "Oh, look, the little one needs me (silly smile)". And this is the most likely picture we were to see. Think about it. Had our ancestors been of the type to recognize that their off spring were, in fact, in agony from day one and had put them out of their misery, we would not bee here! So here we see another example of how fitness and survivability are in direct opposition to what we humans can and should value - the quality of life, free of suffering.

Somehow we wade through life, not hearing the cries of the young ones, for they do not yet count; and take the learned silence of adults as a sure sign of absence of suffering, while it is simply a matter of learned behavior - we know that screams fall on deaf ears. 


1. http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/4/335.full
2. http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/7/5/244.full