Jerry Monaco wrote:
> So
> really they're making the best of a rather bad situation.___
About 30 or more years ago there was quite a bit written about the habits (vicious) of group called the Ik. I don't know whether the basic description was accurate at all, but even _given_ the facts as they appeared in semi-popular accounts, I thought at the time that "making the best of a rather bad situation" characterized the IK. They found themselves in a situation that was essentially hopeless: so they learned not only to be brutal to each other but to take pleasure in the brutality. E.g., in one anecdote a young boy stole the flask of water from a dying man. Everyone laughed at the good joke -- including the dying man.
If you have an extremely individualist society suddenly reduced to utterly impossible circumstances, what you end up with is the Ik (as described, at least, in semi-popular accounts).
Carrol