Lyrics Extreme Human Behavior - George Carlin

Extreme Human Behavior

Humans do some really interesting things. Like besides killing ourselves, we also kill each other. Murder. And we’re the only ones who do that, by the way. We’re the only species on earth that deliberately kills members of our own species for personal gain or pleasure, sometimes it’s just fun. We’re also the only species that deliberately kills members of another species for personal gain or pleasure. That’s what hunters do. They kill for pleasure. That’s us. Human beings. Interesting folks. Murderers. Here’s an interesting form of murder we’ve come up with. Assassination. You know what’s interesting about assassination? Well, not only does it change those popularity polls in a big fucking hurry but it is also interesting to notice who it is we assassinate. Did you ever notice who it is? Stop to think who it is we kill? It’s always people who’ve told us to live together in harmony and try to love one another. Jesus, Gandhi, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, John Lennon. They all said, try to live together peacefully. BAM! Right in the fucking head. Apparently, we’re not ready for that. Yeah, that’s difficult behavior for us. We’re too busy sitting around trying to think up ways to kill each other. Here’s one we came up with, it’s efficient, too. Genocide. You know, killing large numbers of people simply because they don’t look like you, they don’t talk like you and they don’t have the same kind of hats you do. You ever notice that at any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they’re wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that. It might be important.
But any time there’s genocide, there are always mass graves. Right? Every time we kill some dictator and go marching through his country, we always find mass graves. Thousands and thousands of dead bodies of people the dictator killed. And everybody over here gets horrified. “Oh, mass graves, mass graves oh.” Well shit, what’s the guy suppose to do with a couple thousand people he just killed? Dig separate holes? Fuck that shit. It’s labor intensive. Get real. The whole idea of killing a large number of people at one time and one place is convenience. Efficiency. Thrown ’em in the fucking hole. Look at it this way, at least the dictator had the decency to throw a little dirt on them. Give the guy some credit. The dictator’s a busy man. He’s got a lot on his mind. Like trying to figure out who’s planning to kill *him*. So he can pick them up, put them in prison and *torture* them. There’s another one of our interesting, heart-warming behaviors we come up with somewhere along the way- TORTURING each other.
You want to hear a really cool torture that the Romans invented? They also used it as a form of capital punishment. It’s *really* creative. They would take the guy in question, stuff him in a burlap sack, seal the sack up real tight and throw it in the river. But, and here’s the creative part, inside the sack with the guy, they would put a dog, a monkey and a snake. Okay? A dog, a monkey and a snake. That’s fucking creative. Imagine being inside a burlap sack under water, in the dark, sitting next to a drowning monkey. Think he’d be moving around a little bit? The dog would be going ape shit. We know that. And the snake? Well, he’d probably be getting curious about what all the activity was inside the sack. He might do anything. Whatever he did, it would probably involve venom and his teeth. You know what you’d be doing? You’d be praying to God that the snake bit the monkey and the dog ate the snake. Praying.
Yeah, then… Then it would be just you and the dog, man and his best friend drowning together. Maybe before you die, you can teach him a few tricks. Roll over and play dead wouldn’t be too difficult, would it? Just a thought, just a playful thought.
By the way, I assume you’re noticing that all these activities I’m mentioning, murder, torture, genocide, these are all things human beings do. Not animals, those creatures we feel superior to. This is us.
Here’s another one of our spiritually uplifting activities. We don’t do this one much anymore, but it use to be really big. Human sacrifice. I miss that. The Aztecs loved human sacrifice and they were good at it. Well, they got a lot of practice. For instance, right around the year 1500, the Aztecs sacrificed 80,000 people in one ceremony. Okay? 80,000 people in one ceremony. You know what the occasion was? They were opening a new temple. Nothing like religion for a little entertainment, huh? Especially that old time religion. You know how the Aztecs went about their sacrificing? Here’s how they did it. They would do it right out in public. Right in front of everybody. Big town. Beautiful city square. 20, 30,000 people looking on. They would take the guy, lay him on an alter, cut his chest open, pull his heart out, hold it up in the air while it was still beating. Got that? Cut his chest open, pull his heart out and hold it up in the air while it was still beating. You know what you call that? Theater. That is fucking theater. And although the procedure may have been a little too crude to be considered the first bypass surgery, it could easily be seen as an early form of organ donor program. The Aztecs, human beings just like us. Not too long ago, 500 years. Columbus had already landed. This is just south of here. Mexico. And by the way, those hearts didn’t go to waste. Did not go to waste. Because right after the ceremonies, the royal family, naturally, would enjoy another one of our amusing activities, cannibalism. Imagine that. Chowing down on another human being. You got to be all out of beef jerky, man. You got to be really fucking hungry. But it happens, doesn’t it? It still happens to this day. A bunch of people stranded in the wilderness, run out of Pop-Tarts, you got to eat something. Might as well be Steve. And how do you decide who to eat first? How do you decide who’s first on the barbecue rack? Do you pick on the little guy because he’s skinny and he can’t fight back? Or do you all gang up on the body builder because he’s got a lot of steaks and chops on him? These are things human beings have to consider.
One more of these charming diversions of ours, necrophilia. Now there’s a hobby for you. Fucking a corpse. It takes a special kind of guy. Don’t you think? But it happens, it happens. More than you might think. It happens among humans. Animals don’t do that. Animals don’t fuck their dead. A rat will do a lot of gross things, but he will not fuck a dead rat. It wouldn’t even occur to him. Only a human being would think to fuck someone who just died. We got to be the most interesting critters on the planet. And then we wonder why a UFO doesn’t just land and say, hello. You know the best thing about necrophilia? You don’t have to bring flowers. Yeah, usually they’re already there. Isn’t that nice? It’s nice. It’s convenient.
Human beings will do anything. Anything. I am convinced. That’s why when all those beheadings started in Iraq, it didn’t bother me. I took it right in stride. A lot of people here were horrified. “Oh, beheadings, beheadings.” What are you fucking surprised? It’s just one more form of extreme human behavior. Besides, who cares about some mercenary civilian contractor from Oklahoma who gets his head cut off? Fuck him. Fuck him. Hey, Jack, you don’t want to get your head cut off? Stay the fuck in Oklahoma. Stay the fuck in Oklahoma. They ain’t cutting off heads in Oklahoma. As far as I know. But I do know this, you strap on a gun and go strutting around some other man’s country, you better be ready for some action, Jack. You better be ready for some action. People are touchy about that sort of thing. And let me ask you this while I have you good, clean Americans here. This is a moral question, not rhetorical. I’m looking for the answer. What is the moral difference between cutting off one guy’s head or two or three or five or ten and dropping a big bomb on a hospital and killing a whole bunch of sick kids? Has anybody in authority given you an explanation of the difference? I have not gotten an email on this. No one will talk to me. I haven’t gotten a postcard, not a fucking instant message, nothin’. Now, in case you’re wondering why I have a certain interest and fascination, let’s call it, with torture and beheadings and all of these things I’ve mentioned is because each of these items reminds me in life, every time one of them occurs, it reminds me over and over again what beasts we human beings really are, you know? When you get right down to it, when you get right down to it, human beings are nothing more than ordinary jungle beasts. Savages. No different from the Cro-Magnon people who lived 25,000 years ago in the Plasticine Forest eating grubs off of rotten logs. No different. Our DNA hasn’t changed substantially in 100,000 years. We’re still operating out of the lower brain. The reptilian brain. Fight or flight. Kill or be killed. Now, we like to think we’ve evolved and advanced because we can build a computer, fly an airplane, travel underwater. We can write a sonnet, paint a painting, compose an opera. But you know something? We’re barely out of the jungle on this planet. Barely out of the fucking jungle. What we are is semi-civilized beasts with baseball caps and automatic weapons.
And this civilization of ours that we’re so proud of, this civilization with its so-called civilized behavior, you ever stop and realize how fragile all this is? How fragile the whole structure, how easily it can all just break right down, just break right down. It wouldn’t take much. It’ll probably happen in less than two years. It wouldn’t take much to throw us right back into barbaric times. All you’d have to do would be eliminate electricity. That’s all. But completely. Eliminate electricity. So, no electricity, no lights. You’re back to candles and lanterns. Campfires and bonfires. Batteries couldn’t be recharged. Generators couldn’t be refueled because fuel is pumped electrically. So is water, by the way. So no lights, no fuel, no water, no computers. And computers run everything. And among the many things computers run that operate on electricity are all of the security systems in all of our jails and prisons and nut houses. So suddenly without electricity, all across America the gates and cell doors of penitentiaries and mental institutions would fly open and out would come all of our old friends. The ones who’ve been away, at camp. Serial killers, mass murderers, felony rapists, armed robbers, car jackers, home invaders, thieves, burglars, kidnappers, sadists, pedophiles, sexual predators, pimps, pushers, pornographers, speed freaks, crack heads, sick junkies. All the ethnic street gangs. Blacks, Spanish and Asian gangs, Japanese Yakuza, Russian Mafia, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Sicilian hit man, Italian mobsters, Jamaican and Colombian drug gangs. And those are just the ones we caught. Lets not forget their counter-parts still on the outside right now waiting to hook up with their prison buddies so they can start a new organization, The American Federation of Sociopaths. Just what the country needs. Another special interest group. Eight to ten million of them there would be. Counting all the parolees and all the probationers and the ones who’ve never been caught. Eight to ten million bitter, angry, violent, sexually hyperactive alpha males with nothing to do. No hobbies. No medication. No scruples. Just a bunch of bad guys looking for a good time. Maybe dropping by your house. “Hi. Hope we’re not intruding. Got any beer? Oh, good. Well, I got about 1400 really thirsty guys here. How about women? Got any women? Oh, just your wife, huh? Well, I think we can make that work. Now boys, there’s a lady here. So I want you to mind your manners and wait your turn.” Police wouldn’t help you. They’d be gone at the first sign of trouble. They’d be home protecting their own families. So would the Army and the National Guard. You’d be alone. You’d be on your own. You’d be S.O.L. And J.W.F. Shit out of luck and jolly well fucked. Shit out of luck and jolly well fucked. After a couple of years of living like that, beheadings would be the least of your problems. People would be lining up to be beheaded.