Electrical chair

Post Reply New Topic

I have read that when some is executted on an electrical chair, if they won't die after the electricity was on for 2 minutes, they will turn it off, wait a while, and if they are still not dead, they will turn it on again. To me, it seems like a sign that they are guilty of killing a person, so they turn it off and see if he dies "natural death". That way, they can lie to themselves that at the end of the day they changed their mind and didn't want him dead any more so they turned it off, and "unfortunately" he still died because it was too late. At the same time, they are not completely sincere since they didn't change their mind until there was a good chance for him to die on his own, and if he won't die they will turn it on again.

But still, even though they are not completely sincere, they are still sincere to a large extend. During my last year of a relationship with Jennifer I thought I hated that relationship and wanted a breakup. But since she was sick and vulnerable I didn't want to break up myself, so I was trying to do various things to make her dislike me enough so that SHE breaks up with me; but then I would apologize after each of the bad things I did and pretend that I was trying to undo them. I think my apologizing and trying to make her feel better is similar to them trying to turn off electricity; and then my doing new bad things when she didn't break up is similar to them turning electricity back on.

Electrical chair and relationships are just two examples of a general trend. Even if you watch animals. A dog would not completely kill a squirrel that came on her territory. Rather, it would bite her badly enough that it would lie there and die on its own. Do you think the dog also feels guilty about ACTUALLY killing a squirrel?

Dogs and cats wound prey in order to play with it - or- to allow their offspring to toy with the poor creatures so they can teach thier offspring or allow themselves to perfect the trade of being a predator. Its more like a med student cuttuing up bodies than the other human behaviors you're comparing it to. So I would image that dogs and cats feel the same lack of guilt that med students do in dissecting labs.

I got kinda lost in your essay. But they do do things like put a random blank bullet into the guns of people who serve on firing squads to assuage the trigger pullers' guilt- they can reassure themselves that "I mightve fired the gun with the blank."